About

Thoughtful reflection yields emotional and intellectual growth if you’re willing to evaluate who you are and what you’ve done in your life.  Self-examination has the capacity to fuel a personal evolution.  Our experiences may change us in a myriad of ways if we summon the courage inside to allow them.  At times, my journey has been incredibly rewarding, but it has also presented challenges that have strengthened my resolve as I follow my path.  I’m always searching for the lesson ensconced within an experience because doing so fosters the growth that I need to sustain myself.

After attending a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at Amherst College, I entered a doctorate program in political science to better understand how governing institutions function in our democratic republic.  Many of the theoretical and empirical works that I've studied to date inform my classroom instruction.  In addition, a latent effect of my training is that it influences how I analyze news reports about major developments around the world.  While teaching is my chosen profession, I'm a human being who’s deeply concerned about the implications of political decisions and events that affect the human condition as we understand it in local, regional, national, and global contexts.

Fully immersed in my twelfth year of teaching at the college level, I’m thinking more about the transformative power education has on people’s lives — mine included. This stage of my career began when I accepted a position that took me to a remote city on the Colorado River in the low desert of western Arizona.  While there, I learned a great deal about my craft, organizational operation, and interpersonal relationships.  Furthermore, I learned how they are all intertwined.  The people we surround ourselves with at our place of employment are vital to our professional success and emotional well-being.  Who we encounter throughout the day influence both our mindset and trajectory.  I’m thankful for the valuable friendships that I cultivated during my time there.

For more than four years, I taught in the Government Department at Lone Star College-CyFair, a large suburban community college that is located about thirty miles northwest of downtown Houston, Texas.  The rapid expansion of the area produced an incredibly diverse student body composed of people from all over the world.  In August of 2017, I began my tenure as department chair.  This position included a variety of responsibilities such as recruiting quality part-time instructors and putting together the semester schedule of classes that we offered.  What's more, in an effort to build social capital and improve the completion rate, my colleagues and I instituted the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) on our campus as part of a system-wide initiative that began at LSC-Kingwood.  We sought to teach students the importance of voice and agency and how to become advocates on issues that matter to them.  From 2015 to 2017, I served as the first campus coordinator, which required me to chair the faculty committee and oversee a variety of events during the academic year.

In June of 2018, I accepted a faculty position at Lake Tahoe Community College.  My teaching assignment included history and political science courses in both the on-campus and online modalities.  During my time there, I further developed my commitment to viewpoint diversity when exploring complex issues (e.g., free speech, media influence).  After all, there are often multiple ideas and perspectives that beg to be examined to broaden our understanding of the milieu that surrounds us.  Moreover, I served as chair/lead of the department.  This role afforded me the ability to shape my program by creating a political science transfer degree and writing and rewriting courses.  Beyond these professional challenges, I collaborated with a colleague who helped me bring deliberative dialogue to students enrolled in the Promise class.

Since the Silver State has become my adopted home, it made perfect sense to join the faculty at Western Nevada College in Carson City. We offer courses such as Survey of American Politics as both regular and dual enrollment sections, the latter of which enables ambitious high school students across the region the opportunity to earn credit toward their college degree. I’m also teaching Survey of United States Constitutional History. As someone who enjoys briefing Supreme Court cases, my students are asked to examine the holding and reasoning behind landmark decisions. Furthermore, one of my important tasks moving forward is to update the political science curricula to reflect changes in the discipline.

Civic engagement has been an interest of mine for almost a decade. So, when I heard about The Better Arguments Project’s Ambassador Program, I knew that I had to apply. Central to this training are five principles — take winning off the table, prioritize relationships and listen passionately, embrace vulnerability, pay attention to context, and make room to transform — that collectively teach participants how to communicate with people across ideological differences. Then, each member has the responsibility to carry forth what we learn into our respective communities. My ‘commitment to action’ will include delivering public presentations at local venues and writing op-eds for newspapers.

When I'm not writing presentation slides or searching for supplemental materials to use in my classes, I enjoy listening to podcasts, taking pictures for my photoblog, looking for scorpions on the outskirts of town, hiking in places both low and high, riding my mountain bike in nearby parks, and attending desert clean-ups organized by a local nonprofit.  So, what's the next step?  My plan is to explore the Great Basin Desert and reintegrate the term elevation gain into my regular vocabulary.  In addition, I would like to record some new songs on my 4-track.  I’m greying, not gone.  Never relent.  Sometimes life changes in ways we could never anticipate.  That's part of what makes it an adventure.

Mantras

It’s probably impossible to be totally value-free in the social sciences, but we should still make a good-faith effort to be objective.

Good ideas don’t lose their relevance because we get older.

May happiness be unearthed through the pursuit of your endeavors.

Love over anger. Love over bitterness. Love over spite. Love wins, every time.

Photographs

About: Up on Wheeler Peak (13,065 feet) looking across the Snake Range, NV, 2019

Homepage: Out on Balboa Pier in Newport Beach, CA, 2023