Dr. Serenity Rose King

Acting Associate Vice President, University of Texas at Dallas

Dr. Serenity Rose King is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at UT System, a role she started part-time in January 2025. Through August 2025, Serenity also remains the Acting Associate Vice President for Institutional Success and Decision Support at UT Dallas, where she has worked for 21 years, including 16 in the Provost’s Office as an assistant and associate provost for program and policy coordination. While at UT Dallas, Serenity saw a gap in intentional training and development for faculty put in administrative roles, which led to her first creating “optional” onboarding sessions for new deans and associate deans and later developed into a dissertation on Succession Planning and Leadership Development in Texas Public Universities.  She then created Lead UTD, a leadership development and administrative training program at UT Dallas that she facilitated from 2019-May 2025, during which 100 deans, associate deans, dept/program heads and other academic leadership participated in Lead UTD.

While at UT Dallas, Serenity served as the THECB and accreditation liaison, the university-wide policy coordinator, the provost’s office representative on multiple strategic planning and enrollment management committees and as an executive council member of the new student engagement board. She also helped co-create the International Center, the student success center, and facilitated a university-wide student success advisory group, in addition to serving on more than two dozen university governing committees. Currently at UT Dallas, Serenity has responsibility for university-wide policy, accreditation, assessment and evaluation, including employee and student climate surveys, data governance, institutional research, institutional data compliance reporting, the data warehouse, a web applications technology team, and the centralized student CRM team.   Serenity, whose doctorate is in Public Affairs, has a passion for being a public servant. In addition to her service to her campus, while at UT Dallas she also served on multiple UT System and state-wide groups concerned with improving transfer student success, and she served as the treasurer, vice president, president, and past president of the Texas Council of Chief Academic Officers.

At UT System, in addition to reviewing requests for faculty promotion and tenure, new degree programs, and changes to admissions policies, Serenity serves as the liaison to the Faculty Advisory Council, the Faculty Success Community of Practice, the Accreditation Liaison Community of Practice, and the Professional and Continuing Education Community of Practice. She also works with other Academic Affairs staff on the Transfer Advisory Group and with the Institutional Research Directors. In addition, she works closely with other offices on legislative analysis and policy review, and she supervises the Texas Credentials for the Future initiative. Serenity, who belongs to both the Pi Alpha Alpha and Phi Kappa Phi national honor societies, is a first-generation professional from the Texas Panhandle and a member of the Chickasaw Nation.