By Rick Vacek | May 27, 2025
The Faculty Mentoring Program usually allows two colleagues to build a relationship and share information over the course of an academic year.
It is designed to be casual and carefree as it builds collegial comfortability.
But for Dr. Kathryn Evans and Dr. James Wilder of the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology, it was more like crisis management.
Comfortable? Absolutely, thanks to their camaraderie.
Casual and carefree? Hardly.
Evans and Dr. Enric “Ric” Madriguera, MA’84, PhD’93, co-founded an annual University of Texas at Dallas tradition, the Texas Guitar Competition and Festival, in 2001. Evans was the Executive Director, and Madriguera was the Artistic Director.
Just a few weeks after the 2024 festival and only a few hours after a planning meeting for this year’s event, Madriguera died suddenly. “We said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ and then he wasn’t there the next day,” Wilder recalled.
Evans needed Wilder, who had been a part-time UT Dallas instructor, to take over as Artistic Director after he was hired as a full-time faculty member in August. She was chosen to be his mentor, but it was hardly a typical mentoring situation.
“It wasn’t just a matter of, ‘Here are your classes and here’s how to teach it.’ There was a lot more to it,” she said.
Nine months later, Evans walked up to the stage to accept the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentoring (Non-tenure track). Her nominee? Wilder, of course.
It’s a most unusual story that deserves to be told in a most unusual fashion – by letting them tell it themselves in a conversation, edited for brevity and clarity, that reflects their relationship.
It’s hard to imagine a better example of mentoring magic.
First, there was the urgency of the mentoring:
“We met on a weekly basis, and multiple times it was a daily call kind of thing,” Wilder said. “It was fantastic. We clearly became thick as thieves. It mirrors my own kind of teaching philosophy, the idea that you’re supposed to lead from behind, in a sense. Dr. Evans did that constantly and was cheering my successes. Dr. Evans did a wonderful job in getting all of my very specific and unique questions answered. She followed me every step of the way.”
Evans: “It was under the most difficult of circumstances. As we began this process in September, it was my intention to make sure that Jimmy could learn everything he needed to know about this, and, of course, we were doing it on the fly because we were in the middle of the planning, which had started in the summer, so that he could take over as Executive Director. So that’s a little different mentoring process.”
Wilder: “It’s also training me to delegate. It’s training me to train someone else. It’s cranked up to 11.”
Evans: “On-the-job training!”
Wilder: “We were doing these tributes and memorial shows for Ric, and that was at the same time as planning the incoming festival. There was a reason we were meeting multiple times and calling every day. There were six different events, not even counting the festival, that we were juggling. It was a large part of our year and still is to this point.”
Evans: “We’re supposed to be planning next year right now! We have to contract performers and we have to get judges and we have to work with the events staff to secure all the spaces. It’s just a lot. So I was quite flattered to win the award. I know Jimmy wrote a great letter. I give him all the credit.”
The result of that mentoring:
“Jimmy jumped in with both feet, and the festival in March is probably the most successful one we’ve ever done,” Evans said. “Jimmy also did a great job of becoming the face of the program, which is really important. As a mentor, I had a great mentee. We were more organized than we had ever been in years past.”
Wilder: “The festival ends March 8, and the preparation begins March 9.”
“I think this is a terrific program that the Provost’s office is doing. I think it’s really, really helpful for new faculty.”
DR. KATHRYN EVANS
Evans: “It was a learning experience for me, too. It was always, ‘How much can I give Jimmy to do?’ I kept giving him more and more and more and more, and he just gobbled it all up.”
Wilder: “Luckily, thanks to Kathryn, we were able to work on the stuff we needed, this administrative-level material, which was so much more useful for me and is why I jumped into the deep end. I was in ‘yes’ mode. I was just saying ‘yes’ to everything. I feel prepared now to help other people. I feel prepared to delegate and to guide others and people who come alongside me. I feel I understand this competition inside and out.”
The last word on mentoring goes to Evans, the award-winner:
“I think this is a terrific program that the Provost’s office is doing. I think it’s really, really helpful for new faculty. Mentoring a new faculty member is really individual and depends on what school they’re in, what the position is, what you are expected to do in addition to teaching classes because, believe me, no full-time faculty member just teaches classes. We have lots and lots of other duties. We don’t just walk in, teach classes and go home.
“I think that’s where the mentoring becomes really critical. There’s no book for this. All this other stuff that new faculty do is, in a way, very dependent on what situation you’re in and what your school asks of you.”
But now there’s a new chapter on how a mentor and mentee can make beautiful music together.