Last year, Regan Hunt Crotty, ’03, was named the dean of undergraduate students at Princeton University, bringing to the job thirteen years of experience at the university, in five previous positions.

“I’ve had a thirty-thousand-foot perspective, and I’ve had roles where I have been very up close with the students,” she said. “There are always new challenges in this role, but I feel that my previous experiences have prepared me well.”

Crotty, who graduated from Princeton in 2000, joined Dechert’s Princeton office right after graduating from the Law School, and she and her husband have lived in Princeton since then. They have three sons.

In 2011, she served as Princeton’s first external investigator, a role that included preparing cases for disciplinary hearings and investigating Title IX grievances.

She enjoyed that work, and expressed interest in being considered for a full-time position. She got the thirty-thousand-foot one, an interim planning administration role in the office of the vice president for campus life, and soon after that she got an up-close one, as the director of student life at one of Princeton’s residential colleges.

In 2014, Crotty was appointed as the university’s first Title IX administrator, following the university entering a resolution agreement with the US Department of Education. “A lot of that job was very lawyerly work, making sure that procedures were in line with government regulations and that the procedures were followed,” she said. “At the same time, I was regularly interacting with students whose lives had been profoundly affected, and those interactions were almost always very sad.”

After eight years of those Title IX responsibilities and stresses, she took a job as the firmwide in-house employment counsel at Morgan Lewis, which has more than two thousand lawyers in more than twenty offices. In addition to counseling the firm with respect to employment matters, she supported the firm in fostering diversity and inclusion.

Then, less than two years after she had started at Morgan Lewis, Princeton again got Crotty’s attention when the dean of undergraduate students announced her retirement after nearly forty years, not long after the deputy dean had taken a position at Harvard. “I realized that I would regret it if I didn’t apply,” Crotty said. “I didn’t like the idea of leaving Morgan Lewis so soon after I had joined, but the firm was very supportive.”

With a team of nearly forty people, Crotty’s current responsibilities fall into four primary categories: student support, which includes a broad range of resources for student well-being and crisis situations; community standards, which includes defining and enforcing students’ rights and responsibilities with respect to discipline; student engagement, which includes supporting more than four hundred student organizations, class and university governments, and other student activities; and protest and free expression, which includes setting and enforcing policies for protests and demonstrations.

“A typical day for me is very varied, ranging from policy development to handling a crisis to meeting with student groups,” she said. “I try to make time to interact directly with students in informal settings, both because engaging with our incredible students is the best part of the job, and because it helps put a face on an office that is at times making decisions that some students disagree with.”

Noting that nearly 20 percent of Princeton’s undergraduates are the first in their families to have attended college, and that many are from low-income backgrounds, Crotty said: “It’s important to create a place where all students can feel comfortable and realize that they are the true core of this university. As president [Christopher] Eisgruber [’88] has said, our students should feel that they are at home here rather than being present merely as guests. The more we accomplish that, the better we have done our jobs.”