UAA’s Vice Provost and Dean Ed Taylor reflects on the larger meaning of his first meeting with Bill Gates, Sr. in this remembrance and appreciation.
Tag: Ed Taylor
I am breathing, but I’m not OK
Are you OK? People have been asking me, and I’ve been asking others. I appreciate the question and those asking. Please keep asking. The truth of the matter is that things are not OK. As I write this, I’m staying home because of COVID-19, and a citywide curfew resulting from threats of violence throughout our city and county. I am also grieving the death of George Floyd. The simple answer is I am breathing, but I’m not OK. Nothing about the moment is OK.
Welcome to the 2019 academic year
Welcome to the start of another year in which UAA programs come together to advance and deepen undergraduate learning at the UW. This year is a special year for UAA: We are celebrating the 20th anniversary of Mary Gates Hall.
Twenty years ago, the building re-opened, transformed from the old physics hall into a space designated for and dedicated to the academic needs of undergraduates. One could argue that, with tens of thousands of undergraduates, the entire campus is geared toward undergrads. But place matters. While the education of undergraduates happens in classrooms and other spaces across campus, and critical and inspiring work that furthers the undergraduate experience takes place across campus, having a place specifically designated to care for and steward that experience writ large is as significant today as it was 20 years ago.
There is a foundational goodness to public research universities and their dedication to deepening and advancing knowledge for the public good. Our role is to bring that focus, energy and inspiration to the undergraduate academic experience. Not just any undergraduate academic experience, the experience that undergraduates have here, at the University of Washington. This is a special place, a place that matters.
It’s a place that matters to the students who come from across the city, region, state, country and world. This summer, I met entering students from Spokane and was again reminded of the power of holding community when we get stuck. I met a student in front of Suzzallo whose Kermit the Frog backpack and Peppa Pig lunch box stood out. I wanted to know why he chose elementary school gear for the UW. Turns out he’s a veteran and starting school here, the same year his daughter is starting school. She picked out their backpacks and lunchboxes. We started talking about our favorite children’s books. One of mine is Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” I love the joy of dancing with the wild things, the making one’s way and ultimate homecoming in that story.
Throughout the year and coming years, these students will come through Mary Gates Hall to connect with the myriad programs here and learn how they can make the most of their time at the UW.
“I hope you learn to write like you,” wrote the late writing teacher, poet and UW alumnus Richard Hugo in his book about writing called “The Triggering Town.” As we help students discover the opportunities here that will have a lasting impact into their futures, we are helping them learn to write their own story, their own poem, and how to tell it in their own way.
This building, dedicated to being a visual and important physical representation of the University’s commitment to undergraduates, is so appropriately named after Mary Gates. During her time as a regent, she is credited as being the regent most interested in undergraduates and their experiences here. As a result of their work here at the UW, students’ lives should be different, forever changed in a way that it can only be changed at this institution.
Welcome to fall. Let the wild rumpus start.
Sincerely,
Ed Taylor
Vice Provost and Dean
Undergraduate Academic Affairs
Professor
College of Education
Celebrating National First-Generation College Student Day
In honor of National First-Generation College Student Day, we asked a few UAA staff members who were the first in their families to attend and graduate from college how the experience changed their life.
Fall 2018 welcome from Vice Provost and Dean
Dear Friends of Undergraduate Academic Affairs,
As 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
Vice Provost and Dean
Undergraduate Academic Affairs
Professor
College of Education
Let MLK week inspire the birth of a new set of values
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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
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
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.”
The Inaugural True North Awards for Inspired Teaching
The inaugural True North Awards for Inspired Teaching celebrated select teachers who helped UW seniors get to where they are today.
Welcome from the Dean, autumn 2014
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
Vice Provost and Dean
Undergraduate Academic Affairs