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Undergraduate Academic Affairs

Author: Ed Taylor

SHARED NETID Reviewed 9/22

Fall 2018 welcome from Vice Provost and Dean

Written by Ed Taylor
Posted on

Dear Friends of Undergraduate Academic Affairs,

Portrait of Ed TaylorAs a first-generation student at Gonzaga University in Spokane, where I earned my bachelors’ and master’s degrees, and here at the UW where I earned my Ph.D., I found points of connection with faculty and advisers who were truly devoted to the well-being of students and who created a safe, thought-provoking and warm environment for students. My coursework and dissertation work were still hard, challenging and, at times, frustrating. But being able to turn to someone who was unequivocally devoted to my success both as an undergraduate and graduate student meant everything to me.

This year’s entering group of undergraduates is the University of Washington’s largest and most academically-talented group of incoming freshmen and transfer students — 7,050 freshmen and 1,300 transfer students.

These students come to us from all across Washington state, from around the country and the world — they come from small towns and urban settings. Some are returning veterans. Some already know what they want to major in and others want to explore. Many of our students are also the first in their family to attend college. Many are the first Husky in their family, and some come from generations of Huskies. Many receive the UW’s Husky Promise scholarship. In fact, from freshmen to seniors, the UW enrolls more Pell Grant-eligible students than all the Ivy League schools combined, a true testament to our public mission.

Our students came to campus this summer to start their UW journeys through advising and orientation sessions run by UAA’s First Year Programs. First Year Programs’ staff, student orientation leaders and UAA advisers are among new students’ first UW points-of-connection who are devoted to their success.

At orientation, students begin asking questions that will impact their experience here. New students’ questions are often driven by important practicalities of understanding their new home: Where will I study? Where will I live? Will I make friends? Should I get a job? Where do I belong? Will I get the class I need to get into my major? What should I major in?

Many of those questions can be quickly answered, which helps students move on to questions that aren’t so easily answered. Students entering this fall will likely graduate in 2022 or after, and come into their careers beyond the year 2030. As a result, they face a lot of unknowns about work and daily life. To help students focus on their futures, we turn to time-honored, Socratic questions: What does it mean to find a vocation and meaningful work? What does it mean to live a fulfilling life? How will I use my education to make a difference?

In UAA, we are guideposts for students as they connect to, move through and engage in our campus. We encourage students to direct their gaze beyond the study table of today and to their long journey ahead, positioning them to think well about the impact of their choices. We will nudge them toward deeper questions. Questions that will connect them with faculty and graduate students so they can find answers to some of the world’s most pressing problems. We will help them find their academic footing by providing support in their coursework, by connecting with one another, and by inviting them to do research and serve their community.

In the process of connecting to the University community, students connect to a community writ large. Though an individual student’s performance may have enabled them to come to the UW, moving beyond individualism and becoming a community is our utmost aim for students. In her book, “Talking to Strangers,” Danielle Allen describes our democratic ideal as a community, “tied together in a constantly evolving, ever-shifting universe of intricate weave.” That notion of being tied together explains the relationship we, as a public university, have with our community on campus and well beyond the physical boundaries of this place.

First, though, we welcome. We connect. We take the time and journey together toward each student’s success.

Sincerely,

Ed Taylor's Signature

Ed Taylor

Vice Provost and Dean
Undergraduate Academic Affairs

Professor
College of Education

Let MLK week inspire the birth of a new set of values

Written by Ed Taylor
Posted on

One of the few days my mother wept in my presence was April 4, 1968, the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tennessee. Fifty years ago this year. When I think of Dr. King’s life and death, I often think of women like my mother who seemed to hold undisclosed and unnoticed stories of suffering.

Black women of my mother’s time held true to a quest for positive identities, complicated by the overlapping oppression of race, class and gender. They were brave survivors who lived under the shadow of oppression but did not lose their faith or humanity. The memory of their efforts, routinely missing in history, is coming to light now.

In the closing comments of his final book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community,” Dr. King wrote: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. … This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos or community.” According to him, “For its very survival’s sake, America must re-examine old presuppositions and release itself from many things that for centuries have been held sacred. For the evils of racism, poverty and militarism to die, a new set of values must be born.”

Photo of civil rights protestor and police dog.
Police dog attacks a civil rights protester.

I think about some of those key phrases and ideas in a 2018 context: “the fierce urgency of now;” “chaos or community;” a re-examination of our values. Our values and habits relating to women must change. It can start by seeing truth in the overlooked contributions women made to the civil rights movement. Dr. King’s call to moral vision without hubris asks us to see that the historical images of the most dramatic moments of the civil rights movement — protesters blasted by fire hoses and dogs lunging at Black people — are often images of women and girls.

Photo of nine students who integrated Little Rock High School in 1957
Little Rock Nine and Daisy Bates posed in living room. Photo from Library of Congress archives.

The 1957 image of six young Black women who became the Little Rock Nine and who risked their lives to integrate Arkansas high schools shows us truth. To see the 1964 image of Mississippi beautician Vera Pigee styling hair and educating her customers on voter registration is to see a certain truth. The 1963 photo of students, mostly women, at Florida A&M University, a historically Black college, answering court charges for protesting segregated movie theaters shows truth.

Women served as teachers, civil rights organizers and as lawyers on school segregation lawsuits, and they “played vital roles in the struggle for human rights and justice in the South and the nation,” according to Vivian Malone Jones, the first Black female director of the nonpartisan Voter Education Project. Mildred Bond Roxborough a long-time secretary of the NAACP, discussed the importance of women leaders in local branches: “Well, actually when you think about women’s contributions to the NAACP, without the women we wouldn’t have an NAACP.”

Photo of students in a courtroom in1963.
Some of the 220 African-American students from Florida A&M in a circuit court room to face charges of contempt for demonstrating against segregated movie theaters.

In society, and even within the movement, many Black women experienced discrimination and harassment. Starting in 2009, the Civil Rights History Project interviewed participants in the struggle and included points of pride along with candid assessments about the difficulties women faced within the movement.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and one of three women to serve as field director for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. She noted that gender equality was not a given: “I often had to struggle around issues related to a woman being a project director. … We had to fight … it was a struggle to be taken seriously by the leadership, as well as by your male colleagues.”

I love this statement made by Dorothy Height, an extraordinarily effective leader for civil and women’s rights who — along with so many involved women — most people probably don’t know. Dorothy Height wanted to “be remembered as a woman who used herself and anything she could for justice and freedom. I want to be remembered as one who tried.”

Photo of women marching in March on Washington
Women marching in 1963 March on Washington. Photo from Library of Congress.

How will we try? As individuals and as a community, how will we change our habits, listen with humility, learn to trust women’s stories, and not just bear witness to but march alongside women? It is time to extend the work for justice and equality where Dr. King left off in Memphis the day he died. If we are to learn from this moment, on the 50th anniversary of his death, let’s choose community over chaos and view King’s birthday and his death as a renewed call to action to use ourselves for justice and liberty for all.

Welcome from Vice Provost and Dean Ed Taylor

Written by Ed Taylor
Posted on

Our work within UAA and out across the University is tied together and interdependent. Research, service and scholarship go hand in hand. The first-year experience, and students’ transitions through to declaring a major and graduating into lives outside the University are one and the same. Leadership, service and ethics all serve the same purpose: To become a more thoughtful and compassionate public.

Remembering King: Students’ voices push arc toward justice – and we should listen

Written by Ed Taylor
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Some 48 years after his death, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day will undoubtedly bring protests to college campuses around the country, including here at the University of Washington. The students will march peacefully and forcefully. They will ask how long it will take to create a climate that welcomes every student. They will ask how we, as a university, plan to address “economic colonialism“ and how administrators plan to create a true multiracial campus that will serve as prelude to a “multiracial nation where all groups are dependent on each other.”

Welcome from the Dean, autumn 2014

Written by Ed Taylor
Posted on

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

One of the most commonly-asked questions undergraduates get from family and friends is, “What’s your major?” And it makes sense that people want to know. Choosing a major (or two, or three) is a necessary rite-of-passage in college.

At today’s University of Washington, pursuing a degree is just one part of the experience.

Students find a wide range of opportunities inside and beyond the classroom that help them not just shape their career-focused skills but that lead to a personal understanding of who they are and what they believe in. In Undergraduate Academic Affairs alone, students can find programs that inspire them to a life of service; opportunities to discover answers to some of life’s most perplexing problems; deepen their commitment to study and scholarship; develop their leadership skills and so much more.

Earning a University of Washington degree is an opportunity and privilege that comes with a certain responsibility. That charge includes continuing to learn, understanding and serving the world we live in, responsibility to self (me) and connectedness to others (we). E pluribus unum, meaning “out of many, one,” is a time-honored ideal from the formation of the United States that resonates ever more strongly today.

A commitment to a major is essentially a promise to the community to pursue a world of good, in the student’s own, individual way.

Sincerely,

Ed Taylor's Signature

Ed Taylor
Vice Provost and Dean
Undergraduate Academic Affairs

 

Welcome from the Dean Autumn 2013

Written by Ed Taylor
Posted on

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Fall quarter is always an invigorating time for me. We begin by welcoming our newest students to the academic life of the University of Washington at Freshman Convocation, an event that represents the moment when students fully transition into the UW.

These students join those who are settled and have found their groove here. And many of those returning students actively welcome their new fellow Huskies by being orientation leaders, Freshman Interest Group (FIG) leaders, peer mentors, tutors, and more.

Through programs in Undergraduate Academic Affairs, students—new and returning—find opportunities to connect with the academic communities here; explore the worlds of service and research; achieve excellence as they define it; and benefit from faculty innovations in the classroom.

The undergraduate experience is an indicator of the quality of the UW as a whole. Recently, the UW has received some distinctive rankings including:

  • 16th in the world in a study by the Center for World-Class Universities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. The study ranked universities on quality of education, quality of faculty, research output and per capita performance.
  • Washington Monthly ranked the UW 13th nationally and 9th in “Best Bang for the Buck.” Washington monthly ranks universities based upon social mobility, research production and commitment to service.
  • 16th among public universities for our undergraduate program in America’s Best Colleges by U.S. News & World Report.

What this means for undergraduates is that they can avail themselves of educational opportunities as unique as they are. Students from rural Washington can find research opportunities in rural China. Undergraduates from across the nation and world can learn together and alongside distinguished faculty in a freshman seminar. Returning students and new students alike embrace service and leadership and grow into the leaders our world needs.

Though the trees and squirrels on campus are getting ready for the winter, I’m getting ready for what I think of as the season of renewal and am excited for the year to come and the promise our students hold.

Sincerely,

Ed Taylor's Signature

 

 

 

Ed Taylor
Vice Provost and Dean