A national expert grounded in Maine communities

Why do I think that public universities should be both expert and accessible? 

Because I am, in many ways, an accidental academic and an accidental administrator. In high school, I apprenticed in a skilled trade. The first time I enrolled in college, I tried to drop out. My academic advisor stopped me. Instead of signing the paperwork, she sat with me and helped me design a different plan—one that led me to an academic home, then to a calling centered on student success, and eventually to a way of integrating the two. Along the way, I changed—or attempted to change—my major seven times. I discovered how much larger the world was than it appeared from my hometown and how much I had yet to learn. I did so at a public university twenty minutes from where I grew up, in classrooms that looked little different from those in my high school. Yet that institution transformed my life in ways I am still coming to understand.

Encouragement from faculty and staff propelled me into graduate school—initially at the same institution—where my frame of reference expanded again. I came to see that supporting student success was not only something one could care about, but something one could pursue professionally. Professors urged me to imagine possibilities beyond what I had envisioned for myself, including doctoral study away from home. I applied broadly, uncertain of how competitive my application might be. I was admitted everywhere except the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I would later join the faculty—and serve on the very doctoral admissions committee that once declined me. At the time, I chose my doctoral program not because I understood its national reputation, but because I needed the financial support it offered. Throughout that period, I insisted I did not want to become a professor. The role felt too distant from my background and far outside my comfort zone. Yet at another public university, I was given opportunities for professional development and I accepted them. By the end of my doctoral program, I looked like a faculty member on paper, even if I still struggled to think of myself as one.

In retrospect, what felt accidental to me was anything but. My trajectory was shaped by intentional decisions made by faculty and staff who believed in my potential and structured opportunities accordingly. That recognition has guided my work ever since. As a faculty member, I devoted my scholarship and teaching to making educational pathways more transparent and more navigable for students whose backgrounds may not mirror traditional academic profiles. That commitment eventually drew me into administration because I saw structural barriers to student success and believed I could help redesign systems to address them. My experience is not a universal template, nor do I presume it represents anyone else’s story. But it does compel me to treat it as an ethical responsibility to widen pathways of opportunity. Public higher education, at its best, offers world-class expertise delivered in ways that remain accessible to those who may not yet see themselves reflected within it. My life’s work is rooted in ensuring that as many as possible have access to the vast stores of expertise (and opportunity) that exist in public higher education institutions.