Engaging
Leadership and Service
Throughout my career I have been active in leadership and administrative positions, and in faculty governance at several levels. Far from a distraction, this engagement has opened rewarding projects for scholarship and research, has improved my teaching and pedagogy, and has led to forward-looking curricular innovations. My leadership and service have taken me well beyond my home unit at CU-Boulder, the Program for Writing and Rhetoric:
In the College of Arts and Sciences, I have served on the Arts and Sciences Council, and on the ASC Curriculum Committee.
On the campus level, I have served for many years on the Boulder Faculty Assembly, chairing the Academic Affairs and Instructor-track Faculty Affairs committees, and serving on the BFA Executive Committee. I also serve on the Advisory Board for the Center for Teaching and Learning.
I have been called on to chair several key campus task forces, including two focused on the professional contributions of instructor-rank faculty and how we might support, draw on, and honor their expertise in the classroom.
Writing Program Administration
Throughout my career, I have been deeply involved in Writing Program Administration. I played a key role in the former University Writing Program, and then in its transition (2000-2002) to the current Program for Writing and Rhetoric, establishing many programmatic features that remain in place today.
As associate director, my responsibilities have over the years touched on nearly all facets of writing program administration, from assessment/placement and curricular design to academic technology and the hiring, training, and professional development of our teaching faculty.
A special focus of my work has been writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WID). My engagement has ranged from disciplines in Arts and Sciences to the Leeds School of Business and, most especially, the College of Engineering.
T1 at the R1
First-rate teaching at a premier research institution: that has been my vision for CU-Boulder, and the motto “T1 at the R1” captures much of what has animated my career. I have proceeded from the understanding that CU-Boulder is preeminent as a research institution, as an “R1.” The question then becomes: What kind of teaching faculty does an R1 institution deserve and require to fulfill its mission? My leadership and service have focused on seeing that CU-Boulder become known as an excellent teaching institution—one that is, at the very same time, internationally recognized for its research. We can and should have “T1 at the R1.”
