Graduate student wins national leadership award

A University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate student has received a prestigious national award recognizing future leaders in higher education.

Tessa Lowinske Desmond, a Ph.D. student in Afro-American studies and English, received the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). She and nine other honorees, chosen from a pool of more than 200 nominations, were recognized during the opening plenary of the AAC&U’s annual meeting, held last month in Seattle. The award provided financial support to attend the meeting, as well as a one-year affiliation with the AAC&U and subscriptions to all of its periodicals.

Bob Mathieu, co-faculty director of the Delta Program in Research, Teaching and Learning, director of CIRTL (Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning) and department chair of astronomy, nominated Lowinske Desmond for the award.

“Ever since I met Tessa, she’s been a leader in addressing issues of success among our ever more diverse student population,” he says. “It’s truly an honor to be recognized at such an early age for the potential to be a national leader.”

The award, given since 1996, is sponsored by K. Patricia Cross, David Gardner Professor of Higher Education emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. It recognizes doctoral students who “show exemplary promise as future leaders of higher education; who demonstrate a commitment to developing academic and civic responsibility in themselves and others; and whose work reflects a strong emphasis on teaching and learning.”

Lowinske Desmond grew up in Phoenix, the daughter of a single mother who worked three jobs to support her children. With little parental support, she attended community college and then Arizona State University through a combination of scholarships and jobs, sometimes working up to three jobs at once to pay for her education. Since coming to UW–Madison, she has received her master of arts degree in Afro-American studies and is currently completing her Ph.D. in literary studies, pursuing questions of race and identity in multicultural literature.

“During college, I began to develop the tools to understand my mother’s situation and my upbringing,” she says. “First, I learned about gender inequity, then economic inequity and, finally, racial inequity. The bridge program between Afro-American studies and English offered me the opportunity to understand race and racial dynamics in a deeper way.”

The Cross Award recognizes many contributions that Lowinske Desmond has already made. She facilitates the Student SEED Seminar (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity), encouraging student reflection on personal experiences with identity categories such as gender, class and ability status. Last fall, she received a Humanities Exposed (HEX) grant from the Center for the Humanities to create a Spanish/English program in Madison’s Quann Community Garden. Perhaps most notably, she leads the Learning-through-Diversity in Action (LtDA) initiative across the nationwide CIRTL network, identifying teaching practices that are particularly successful in ensuring that classes are not only welcoming but use the student diversity to enhance learning for all students.

“Needless to say, it’s unusual for a grad student to lead a cross-university initiative, but Tessa is up to it,” says Mathieu.

For Lowinske Desmond, the award validates her chosen path.

“I often feel like an academic misfit, but the Cross committee valued the ways in which I mis-fit. They endorsed the ways in which I try to bridge academic learning with life learning. I’m greatly encouraged, and I’m more convicted in my academic pursuits.”