The Daily Texan spoke to professors about the new interim dean in the College of Liberal Arts.
UT announced that Daniel Brinks would replace David Sosa as the college’s interim dean in an Aug. 26 email.
Brinks is set to serve in his new position until August 2027, and William Inboden, executive vice president and provost, said he would launch a search for a permanent dean for the college. A COLA spokesperson declined a request for an interview with the temporary dean.
Brinks has had a long history at COLA. Brinks joined the University as an assistant professor in 2004 and served as a tenured professor of government and law and a chair in the department of government. He has published work on institutional justice in Latin America and the diffusion of democracy between neighboring countries.
Immediately before becoming interim dean, Brinks served as associate dean for academic and faculty affairs. He also holds the H. Malcolm MacDonald Chair in Comparative and Constitutional Law at the Strauss Center and is a senior researcher and global scholar with the Centre on Law and Social Transformation in Bergen, Norway.
As an associate dean, Brinks was chair of the advisory committee formed in October 2025 to oversee the consolidation of ethnic and gender studies programs within COLA. The committee created the new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of European and Eurasian Studies.
H.W. Perry Jr., an associate professor of constitutional and public law and another longtime colleague of Brinks, said he thought Brinks handled the situation as well as he could, and is excited for what he will bring to the table as interim dean.
“He’s wise in the judgments I think that he makes and how he handles situations,” Perry said. “This is not an easy time to be an administrator at any university in the nation. But he’s a very steady hand.”
Jeffrey Tulis, professor emeritus of government, said he helped recruit Brinks to UT from Notre Dame in the 1990s and that they got to know each other as fellow chairs in the department. In his time as a chair, Tulis said Brinks was the best person to hold the position.
“We have a very, very big and diverse department because the political science discipline … contains so many moving parts and differences of opinion that you have to make work,” Tulis said. “It’s a very, very hard thing to do, and he did it extremely well.”
Tulis retired in 2024 and said he has immense respect for Brinks but was surprised to learn that Brinks had replaced Sosa. In the University announcement, Inboden did not name a reason for replacing Sosa, who was appointed interim dean in May 2025. Sosa will return to the Department of Philosophy as a professor.
“I thought that the guy who was interim dean, David Sosa, is also very good,” Tulis said. “They’re both very accomplished scholars, and they’re very accomplished departmental leaders. And there aren’t that many people like that.”
Gary Jacobsohn, professor emeritus in constitutional and comparative law, said he worked alongside Brinks for years in the government department. He said there was no chair who exceeded Brink’s communication skills.
“He was always transparent in the way he dealt with people, effective in carrying out decisions and always accountable for what he did,” Jacobsohn said.