Caelin Bragg
Lantern Staff
Troy Nordman is the associate dean of the humanities and social sciences department and is also one of many professors at Butler who has a Ph.D.
Butler’s associate dean of humanities and social sciences began his tenure at Butler in 1991 when he began teaching English and literature at the college level, which he continued while transitioning to lead instructor for the department in 1996. After two decades of teaching at Butler, Nordman then started going towards the administrative side and took on the role of associate dean in 2012.
“Every year is just like starting over,” Nordman said. “It’s what’s exciting about being here at Butler.”
Nordman is a born and raised Kansan, growing up in Augusta, where he still lives with his family. Nordman attended Augusta High School before going to the college level at Wichita State University, where he earned his master of fine arts. Before transitioning to English and teaching, Nordman first started with a track and field scholarship and went for a pre-med major before switching in his junior year.
Nordman began work on his Ph.D. in the same year he assumed the associate dean position, in 2012 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. It was also the first experience he had doing the majority of his work online.
“[I] knew early on that what I wanted to do, as far as the dissertation, was to study what it is we’re doing at the community college level, specifically I was hoping that I could tie it, in some way, to what we’re doing here at Butler,” Nordman said. “I also knew that within the English department, we were looking at what we were doing with our students in the developmental track, because so many of those students would start and they just wouldn’t complete, so we were looking at some options on what to do to help those students persist.”
Nordman studied ways that students work with different structures of developmental teaching and found that students reacted best to the way Butler’s current Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) runs. Students liked the way ALP could get them through EG101 along with EG060, and they also had stronger bonds with their teachers as they had six hours a week with them through the program.
That has been the biggest focus of Nordman’s life. He wishes to be a service to all, something he knew when he first started college with his pre-med major, but he realized his service would be better utilized in education and not medicine.
“My interest was in helping students [who’ve] made the decision ‘ok, maybe I’ll go to college, but I’m not sure what I want to do,’” Nordman said. “And, to me, the most exciting thing as a teacher, and even [as associate dean] still, is being able to communicate with students and help them get to that next point in their lives where they [say] ‘oh yeah, now I know what I want to do.’ Education opens many, many doors for students, and there are just people that need to help take them to the door and say, ‘go ahead and open that one’ or open it for them and sometimes nudge them in, not necessarily push them, but just encourage them.”
Even though most students go through the doctoral process at an earlier age than Nordman did, he thinks it is never too late to start.
“I’m one who just thinks you should never stop learning, investigating things, learning new things,” Nordman said.