Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Mary Baldwin University
Education
- BA, Nyack College, English
- MA, University of Virginia, English Renaissance Literature
- PhD, University of Virginia, English Renaissance Literature
About
Ty Buckman serves as the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Mary Baldwin University. Buckman is interested in assessment as a means of improving individual and institutional effectiveness. Since he is a non-specialist in the field of assessment, he looks for beneficent asymmetries: small, strategic changes that will yield outsized benefits in student learning.
Buckman was drawn to the program after hearing a presentation by Charles Blaich. Buckman states, “In [Charles’s] matter-of-fact style, he questioned the conventional wisdom and some of the tired platitudes that we traffic in as college faculty and administrators, and he used evidence to do it. It was the combination of very sharp critical thinking and critical questioning with a commitment to evidence and the illuminating potential of data that drew me to apply to the program.”
Buckman notes that the Teagle Program has helped his campus, and several others, in two significant ways. First, the scholars themselves receive extensive professional development training and experience in applying evidence-based approaches to improve student learning, and they bring this expertise back to their home campuses. Second, when scholars undertake site visits or assist in workshops at the Center of Inquiry in Crawfordsville, Indiana, they not only address the prompting issue or project identified by the campus or team involved, they also equip and model for those institutional stakeholders how to use available data and good practices to tackle other challenges.
“In this respect,” notes Buckman, “the Teagle Scholar Program is about creating change agents in higher education and empowering them to have a multiplier effect.”