Linda Neavel Dickens was born in Pennsylvania but grew up in Baytown, just outside of Houston. After her two older siblings began attending UT, she was determined to follow them — it was the only school she applied to. After finishing her BA in English, Dickens traveled across Europe — even working for a few months at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England — before returning to Texas and taking a job as a mental health worker and activity specialist at a residential treatment center. Her experiences at the center led her back to UT Austin for a master’s and then a Ph.D. in adult and organizational learning. “It occurred to me that there had to be a better way to run an organization,” she says. Now, as the university’s associate vice provost for strategic academic initiatives, she’s committed to helping UT Austin work more effectively and with greater support for faculty, staff, and students.
On learning the importance of support:
I started out in Plan II and was summarily dismissed after the first year because of my low GPA. I had been a great student in high school, but I was completely overwhelmed at UT and didn’t know how to navigate it. I was anxious, I got depressed. I was obviously struggling with grades, and no one from the program reached out to me that entire first year. There’s so much more support for students now compared to the early ‘80s.
After I left Plan II, I went into English and loved it. I’ve always been a strong writer, and I was in the English honors program despite my first two years of not-great grades. I had tremendous experiences in the English department, but I share that story about Plan II because it was a formative experience for me. My career since then has focused on improving support for people in organizations, including at UT Austin, and it’s incredibly important to me to do everything I can so that people have the tools to succeed.
On working her way up:
I like to say I started as a water polo referee at UT and worked my way up to associate vice provost. In the early ‘80s, I was a lifeguard and an intramural water polo referee; I’ve been a swimmer my whole life. Then I became an academic coach for women’s athletics for about two years. Now I’ve worked at UT for 38 of the past 44 years in one way or another.
When I began full-time work at UT in 2007, I facilitated program evaluations, coordinated assessments of student learning, and worked with faculty on educational research. Then I started specializing more on assessment. Basically, I was consulting with faculty about what was important to them about their programs. What did they see as the key knowledge of their field? What did they want their students to be able to do by the time they graduated? How did they want to measure learning? I loved it. And then I got like five promotions in five years. I found my spot at the university, and I just went up and up.
Around 2016 I became the accreditation liaison, which means I’m responsible for the accreditation of the entire university with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. There are about 95 standards of quality covering everything you can imagine about our operations — from the way we hire our faculty to the way we offer student services to the way we conduct performance appraisals — and I’m in charge of ensuring we maintain and document our compliance with the university’s policies related to those standards. When I took over as liaison, my biggest goal was to change the culture of accreditation on campus, because people found it frustrating. I saw it as an amazing opportunity to do what I could to make accreditation easier and improve the system, and people were very responsive and helpful. Plus, I work with fantastic teammates. Now I think the university’s accreditation practices are solid, and I try to use my position as leverage to create organizational change. I’m trying to make work better for people. I’m trying to contribute to an organizational dynamic that helps people thrive.
On watching Austin change:
Austin in the ‘80s was pretty awesome. On Lamar between 6th and 10th, on the east side of the street, it was all used car lots. Now that’s dense, prime real estate. To me, that’s a great visual for what things used to look like and the pace of Austin in the ‘80s, when it was cheap and easy to live here.
Living with a wide variety of people at the 21st Street College House co-op was one of my favorite college experiences, as was going out to hear live music. There was a place called Club Foot that was downtown in what had been a bus terminal. They brought in a lot of new wave, punk-ish bands, like Echo and the Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs, that kind of music. I was there a lot and also went to Liberty Lunch a lot, dancing to reggae or Joe Ely. I loved Joe Ely — I saw him over and over and over again, and he always put on a great show.
The city started really growing in the late ‘80s. One big difference is that there used to not be as much wealth in Austin. UT and the state government were the largest employers. Then when the tech started coming in… wow. There’s such wealth in this city now compared to 40 years ago. It is shocking to me how much things have changed, and I think that the wealth is even more shocking than the growth. And now that we’re a large city, we have friction everywhere. I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily, I just mean that you have to do a lot more planning. Things just aren’t as easy to access as they once were.