Symposium Participants

 

Scott Abbott received his doctorate in German Studies from Princeton University in 1979. He taught for most of a decade at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, after which he joined the Department of German and Slavic Languages at Brigham Young University in 1988. With Sam Rushforth, he co-founded a BYU Chapter of the American Association of University Professors to take on academic freedom issues. The Chapter’s activism resulted in a powerful censure of the BYU administration by the AAUP for academic freedom violations. Since 1999, Abbott has been a professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy and Humanities at Utah Valley University, where he co-founded and has led a UVU chapter of the AAUP. 

 

Anne Arendt has a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English, a Masters in Business Administration (M.B.A.) from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, a Master of Science (M.S.) in Educational Change and Technology Innovation from Walden University, and a Doctorate of Education (Ed.D.) from Utah State University with an emphasis in higher education. She also has Six Sigma Black Belt Certification
through the American Society of Quality (ASQ). She is a past President of the UVU Faculty Senate.

 

Brad Asay was elected as the President of AFT Utah in 2013. He currently serves on the Executive Board of the Utah AFL-CIO in addition to serving as the Executive Director of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1004 since their affiliation with AFT Utah in 2019. Under his leadership, AFT Utah & AFSCME 1004 have become strong advocates at the Utah Legislature for higher education, public education, and public employees. Asay was a full time art teacher at Mound Fort Junior High School in the Ogden City School District, employed in the public school system for 24 years. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Masters of Education degree from Weber State University.

 

Sean Crossland is currently an Assistant Professor and program manager for the Master of Higher Education Leadership program at Utah Valley University. Sean's research and scholarship interests focus on the public purpose of higher education. He earned a PhD in Educational Leadership and Policy from the University of Utah, an MA in Community Leadership from Westminster College, and a BA in Psychology from Iowa Wesleyan College.

 

Wioleta Fedeczko immigrated to the United States from Wodzisław Słąski, Poland in 1984. She received a B.A. in English (creative writing) from the University of Idaho in Moscow, an M.S. in English (technical communication) from Towson University in Maryland, and a Ph.D. in English (rhetoric and composition) from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 2010. Her research focuses on rhetorics of citizenship and immigration; she’s currently working on her book, Geographies of the Tongue. She is the current UVU Vice President and President-Elect of the UVU Faculty Senate.

 

Steve Graham is a Senior Consultant for Triangle Associates. He served as Senior Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Missouri System from 2002 to 2021, providing leadership for academic and faculty affairs issues across the multi-campus UM System. Dr. Graham has published papers on academic quality, cultural and organizational changes in higher education, leadership development, and manager coaching. His current research efforts focus on the dramatic changes occurring in higher education and their impact on traditional public universities.

 

Hilary Hungerford is an Associate Professor in the Earth Science department where she teaches classes and works on issues related to human-environment interactions. She currently serves at the Faculty Senate President (July 1st 2021- June 30th 2023) at UVU. Through her service on senate she has learned what shared governance looks like in action, including its successes and pitfalls. Originally from Colorado, she completed her PhD in Geography at the University of Kansas and now lives in Orem with her family.

 

Lydia R. Kerr is a first-generation academic from a Nuyorican family in Queens, NY and Miami, FL. At Utah Valley University, she teaches and studies twentieth and twenty-first century American Literature, Latino/a/e Literature, African American Literature, U.S. cinema, and literary and critical theory. She is also President of UVU's David R. Keller Chapter of the American Federation of Teachers/AAUP. Professor Kerr received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she held an Arthur A. Schomburg Fellowship for historically underrepresented doctoral and professional students.

 

David Knowlton is an anthropologist, professor, poet, and restless son of a gun. He served for more than a decade as the President of the David R. Keller Chapter of the AAUP at UVU.

 

Rick McDonald is a professor in the Department of English & Literature at UVU. He started at UVSC in 1998. He specializes in teaching early British literature, literary theory, and composition classes. He earned his Ph D at the University of South Florida, in 1997. He was a founding officer of the David R. Keller Chapter of the AAUP at UVU.

Irene Mulvey taught mathematics for 37 years at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution in Fairfield, Conn. She retired as a full professor from Fairfield in 2022. Her activism in higher education began at the local level and grew to national prominence over the course of her career. At Fairfield, she served many terms, often as chair, on the committee that negotiates with the administration on faculty salaries and benefits and on Fairfield’s healthcare committee. She also served as general faculty secretary, the highest elected faculty office, for three consecutive three-year terms. Before being elected as the AAUP’s president in 2020, Mulvey served multiple terms on the AAUP’s governing council and on key committees of the AAUP, including Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the Committee on College and University Governance, the Committee on Membership, and the Committee on Organization of the Association.

 

Kris Phillips is an associate professor of philosophy at Southern Utah University whose primary research includes early modern philosophy, specifically the work of Rene Descartes. He is published in several philosophy journals and books in modern philosophy, the philosophy and pedagogy of dance, pre-college philosophy, the philosophy of education and the philosophy of mind. He is Associate Editor of the journal Precollege Philosophy and Public Practice, and is co-editor of the book, Arrested Development & Philosophy, a philosophical analysis of the cult hit television show. He is Acting Co-President of the SUU Chapter of the AFT/AAUP.

 

Lindsey K. Roper is an associate professor of Biology, Southern Utah University and Acting Co-President of the SUU Chapter of the AFT/AAUP. Her areas of expertise are Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology, Neurobiology, Endocrinology. Areas of interest include Medical Ethics and Scientific Illustration. Her 2015 PhD. In Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

Clifton G. Sanders (PhD, University of Utah, BA Hamline University) is the Provost for Academic Affairs at Salt Lake Community College. He has more than 25 years teaching, administrative and leadership experience in higher education. He led the development of several STEM programs and is a collaborator on several local, regional and national initiatives on education, diversity and inclusivity, and workforce development. His scientific work resulted in six patents in biomaterials technology. He is a University of Utah Chemistry Department Distinguished Alumnus, and he coauthored a 2009 paper on music and democracy published in Radical Philosophy Review.

 

Craig Thulin earned his PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Washington followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Vollum Institute for Advanced Biomedical Research. He has published two book chapters and thirty peer-reviewed papers and is the co-inventor on patents for biomarkers of pregnancy complications. He served a three-year term as President of the UVU Faculty Senate.

 

Astrid S. Tuminez became the seventh president of Utah Valley University in 2018. She is the first woman to serve on a full-time basis as UVU president. Raised in the slums of the Philippines, Tuminez rose to become a world leader in the fields of technology and political science, most recently serving as an executive at Microsoft. She is also the former vice dean of research and assistant dean of executive education at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

 

Wayne Vaught joined UVU on June 1, 2019. Prior to joining us, Dr. Vaught had a 21-year career at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he served as a professor and then dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His Ph.D. in Philosophy, with a concentration in Medical Ethics, is from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Dr. Vaught’s primary research is in biomedical ethics, with a focus on ethical issues in pediatrics. He is co-editor of Ethics Across the Professions with Oxford University Press.