By Rick Vacek | January 16, 2024
Faculty at The University of Texas at Dallas have two more colleagues ready to assist them in the Office of the Provost.
On Oct. 1, Dr. Meghna Sabharwal joined the office as associate provost for faculty success. The professor of public and nonprofit management in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (EPPS) works with Dr. Francesca Filbey, senior associate provost for faculty success and Bert Moore Chair in BrainHealth, on planning and implementing the expanding Faculty Mentoring Program.
A month later, Dr. Sean Cotter MA’95 added associate provost for faculty affairs to his role as professor of literature and translation studies in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology. He oversees the faculty annual review and non-tenure system faculty promotion review processes and the faculty workload report, in conjunction with Dr. Stephen Spiro, vice provost for faculty affairs and C.L. and Amelia A. Lundell Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences, and Dr. Mehrdad Nourani, senior associate provost for faculty affairs.
Dr. Inga Musselman, vice president for academic affairs, provost and Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair of Academic Leadership, said Sabharwal’s experience in academic leadership and faculty mentoring are vital to her new role.
Sabharwal is the former program head of Public and Nonprofit Management in EPPS and was chair of the Academic Senate Committee on Faculty Mentoring from 2018 to 2022. She also is chair of the UT Dallas NSF ADVANCE Grant Retention and Advancement Team and a mentoring team lead for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) UT Southwestern-UT Dallas FIRST research program.
She is a National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) fellow and is the editor-in-chief of the Review of Public Personnel Administration. Her extensive research portfolio centers around public human resources management.
Sabharwal values her opportunities to serve.
“Leadership is all about others. It’s not about you,” Sabharwal said. “Our goal is that faculty feel like UTD cares for them and they belong. I think the Provost’s Office is extremely committed to fostering that environment where faculty can be successful.”
Musselman said Sabharwal was chosen for her new role because of her leadership and mentoring experience.
“She has a talent for collaborating and getting things done efficiently and effectively,” said Musselman. “This will be especially important as we continue to grow our Faculty Mentoring Program.”
Cotter, who began his UT Dallas faculty role in 2004, also has considerable academic leadership experience. He is the former literature and languages program coordinator for the School of Arts and Humanities (A&H, now part of the Bass School), was a member of the A&H ad hoc Curriculum Committee and Workload Policy Committee, and served on other University committees, including the Committee on Educational Policy and the University Assessment Committee.
“I have an investment in bureaucratic processes. If they work well, then people don’t worry about them.”
DR. SEAN COTTER
“He has a pragmatic, problem-solving, system-clarifying approach,” Musselman said. “He also is interested in data systems, a need in faculty affairs moving forward.”
Said Cotter, “I think my role is to help processes work better because these processes help people’s lives. If non-tenure-track promotion is working better, that means that people who are not in the tenure stream are getting taken care of. They’re getting what they deserve after working for so long.
“I think that’s important – I think people need to be recognized. I have an investment in bureaucratic processes. If they work well, then people don’t worry about them. If the processes work, everyone gets a fair shake for the amount of work they have to do, and then they can just concentrate on doing the work.”
Cotter earned his master’s degree in humanities from UT Dallas before going on to the University of Michigan for his doctorate in comparative literature – an interesting twist given that he was born in the hospital of Michigan’s bitter rival, The Ohio State University.
His specialty – translating Romanian literature – is the result of another twist. When he signed up for the Peace Corps, he was set to ship out to Kazakhstan before a bureaucratic issue sent him to Romania instead.
He didn’t know any Romanian at the time. Now he teaches three graduate-level translation classes (workshop, theory and history) from several languages into English and puts his craft in melodic terms.
“You can listen to a piece of music, and you can analyze it, you can enjoy it, you can be transported by it. But until you sit down and try to play it yourself on your own instrument, you haven’t started to translate it,” he added. “If you listen to a symphony and they try to create it on a piano, that’s really where you start to do translation.”
Sabharwal’s life journey also traversed an ocean, and her story contains even more twists and turns.
She grew up in Hyderabad, India’s sixth-largest city (population 6.7 million) and wanted to be a doctor. But then came the entrance exam: She estimates that only a couple hundred out of the 150,000-200,000 students tested in her state qualify for medical school. She didn’t make the cut and was forced to go into agriculture, something akin to an arranged marriage.
“I had no interest in agriculture whatsoever,” she said. “It was a professional degree, and people told me, ‘It’s a four-year degree. It will help you go abroad.’ That was a big thing back then. So I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ But I was miserable.”
“I want to help. I do a lot of mentoring with my students, and I want to carry that to this role.”
DR. MEGHNA SABHARWAL
The one class that interested her, however, was agriculture economics, and it got her thinking about continuing her studies in the United States. That led her to Arizona State University, where she earned a master’s in agribusiness and resource management and then a doctorate in public administration.
From the moment she first stepped off the airplane through the entirety of her nine years in Arizona, she wilted in the intense sunshine there.
“People would say, ‘You’re from India. You’re used to the heat.’ And I said, ‘Nothing like this.’”
Her evolution at UT Dallas, her home since 2009, has proved far more comfortable, but she laughs at how she got here. Growing up, she couldn’t have found Dallas on a U.S. map. She never thought she would become a teacher – that’s what her mother did, and Sabharwal wanted no part of it. But here she is.
“I don’t think any of our paths are linear. We think they’re linear, or we’d like them to be,” she said. “It’s been a great trajectory here at UTD – so many opportunities that wouldn’t have happened if I did not venture out. I don’t know where I’d be.”
Sabharwal’s down-to-earth personality governs her classroom demeanor. “If you ease up, tell them a funny thing and they laugh, it changes the dynamic,” she said. That trait is outweighed only by her desire to serve.
“I want to help,” she said. “I do a lot of mentoring with my students, and I want to carry that to this role. It’s such a great team here. We all care about UTD. At the end of the day, we want UTD to be successful – our students, our faculty. If our students are successful, our faculty are, and vice versa.”