Jeff Bardzell’s Unique Path to Academic Leadership

Falling in Love with Reading

Jeff Bardzell freely admits that he wasn’t much of a reader growing up—or much of a student. That is, until he forgot to bring a book for a required quiet reading period in his 9th-grade English class. He borrowed a fantasy novel from a friend and then found that he couldn’t put it down. He completed the book, finished the series, and then started over, re-reading the series dozens of times in the coming years, until the characters came to feel like old friends.

Now a voracious reader, his vocabulary improved, his appetite for new ideas—and new worlds—took off, and his writing ability greatly improved. By his senior year he had gone from middling to among the best students in his class. He went on to college and graduated with a degree in English with Honors from the University of Mary Washington, then a master’s in comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington. He continued to a doctoral program, but after completing his classes, he stopped.

“I was very pessimistic about getting an academic position in comparative literature because the field went in a little bit of a decline. I, incorrectly, thought my discipline was in trouble. I thought my future was hopeless.”

Wading into IT

Bardzell knew that one path for literature majors outside academia was publishing, and he started looking at the new world of “online publishing” that was emerging in the ’90s.

“I thought, well, OK, I’m going to try to distinguish myself from all the other literature people by being a little bit tech savvy. It was the summer, so I had some time, and thought ‘I’m going to teach myself programming.’ And I got a book on HTML. I didn’t realize that HTML wasn’t programming, and I was astonished to learn that I could do HTML within a day. Because HTML used basically the same logic as WordPerfect 5.1, which is what I I’d written all my papers in.”

Bardzell used his new skills to secure a job in financial management services with the university, later moving to information technology services. Along the way, he kept buying books to learn new skills.

A Life-Changing Book Review

One of those skill-boosting books—this one on Macromedia Flash—disappointed him, and he turned to what was at the time a relatively new platform: the Amazon customer review. Bardzell wrote his second-ever Amazon review of the Flash book. (His first had been for his favorite translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.) Surprisingly, one of the two authors of the Flash book reached out to Bardzell about his review—in Latin. The author also had training as a classicist and had noticed the topic of Bardzell’s other book review. The two struck up a correspondence and the author asked if Bardzell had any interest in coauthoring a Flash curriculum with him for a new web training site. Suddenly, Bardzell had a new side hustle.

Bardzell later took off on his own, co-authoring books on Macromedia Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, and more. One unexpectedly successful book proposal required him to teach himself ASP and Cold Fusion in a month. He saw some commercial success but continued to work as an IT trainer at his university. But over time, he found that teaching people Excel and advanced features of Word over and over again wasn’t right for him.

Reignited Academic Passion

He started missing the academic life, and was getting pressure from family members to finish his Ph.D. So, as a student of literature—specifically, a medievalist—Bardzell decided to take a trip to Italy. Upon arrival, he found that his hotel was just around the corner from La Casa di Dante, a museum set up to resemble Dante’s house, and the small church where Dante fell in love with Beatrice. The trip re-kindled his desire to complete his dissertation, which he did a year later.

The newly credentialed Bardzell had finished his Ph.D. at the perfect time. Indiana University was launching a new School of Informatics and needed to hire more than 20 faculty members.

“I think because they were hiring so many faculty, they were a little bit willing to consider outside-of-the-box candidates. There was a student in informatics who chose Indiana because he had read my computer books, and he wanted to work with me. He talked to the executive associate dean of informatics and arranged a meeting between the two of us. And the Dean said, ‘I’m going to hire you as a visiting faculty to give you a chance, and if you prove yourself, well, the position is there. And I took it and I did. And so that’s how I went from comparative literature to human-computer interaction.”

Discovering Joys of Leadership

“Every academic leader ever known tells the same story.  I was involuntarily drafted into a leadership position, which was director of our Human-Computer Interaction/Design program, and I discovered fairly early on that I was pretty good at it. I found a lot of professional satisfaction in an area I didn’t expect using the professional capacity I didn’t know that I had,” said Bardzell.

After his time as a program director, he moved to Penn State, where he became an associate dean working under Dean Andrew Sears.

“He was just a fantastic mentor for me. And I feel like we did good things together and so I got to continue that experience of having an impact, of helping people, and also finding satisfaction in that while working with somebody who is good at it, and seeing what the upper possibilities with that are.”

Becoming a Tarheel

And so, when the opportunity to become dean of the UNC School Information and Library Science became available, Bardzell was ready. His combined passions for technology and literature made the prospect of working in a joint information and library science program appealing. He liked the size of the school. And the way faculty spoke about the school during the interview process clinched the deal.

“I did feel the match was here. I felt comfortable with the academic intimacy here. And I want to honor that, and I want to be part of that.”

Bardzell’s first day at SILS was April 1. He was eager to arrive quickly so that he would have time to get to know faculty before the summer break. Despite the grueling schedule of a new dean, he has found some time to start exploring and embracing his new home.

“In Pennsylvania I lived in a small town and before that I was in a small town in Indiana. Here in the Triangle, I’ve got kind of the best of all worlds. I’ve got a real city. I have an NHL team. I am so excited about having NHL team! But there are art museums, there are ethnic restaurants, there’s more than one good restaurant. There’s meaningful choice. Durham is a very different character than Cary or Chapel Hill. I find that exciting. I love the nature here, the lakes! Because I paddle and I kayak. I love the lakes. I have a mountain bike, there’s great mountain biking.”

The Future of SILS

What has Bardzell enjoyed most about becoming dean? “Discovering the potential of this school is really rewarding. There is so much potential. And then realizing I’m in a position where I can help actualize some of that potential. And then thinking about all of the stakeholders who will benefit.”

“I think we have an opportunity to serve the state in an area where I think the state really would benefit,” he continues. “I think there is a gap between technological innovation and the discovery of social and business value that technological innovation makes. I think SILS is everywhere in that gap, helping to make those connections and to help realize, and to democratize, the potentials of technological change for everyone.”

“Our 90-plus-year-old school reflects a 2,000-plus-year-old cultural institution that has been around because of its agility. It has learned it has been part of empires. It’s been part of democracies. It survived revolutions, plagues, the dark ages, wars, famine—and yet the library was still there. And I think part of that had to do with the universal need for knowledge and for having centralized locations where we access it, but also the communities. I think the ways SILS stays relevant has to do with communities of practice and knowledge access. New technological possibilities are opening up, and they’re changing how all communities of practice work. And I think that’s why information science and library science have come together and why they make sense together.”

“I feel like we’re in a moment where there’s a lot of potential energy and alignment. I think this is a real opportunity to shape things—it’s not going to be incremental change. I think this is a moment where people can make a substantial difference. So, I would invite alumni to participate in that. I want to hear from alumni. I want alumni coming to our classes. I want alumni talking to our faculty. This is a high-energy moment.”

 

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