By Rick Vacek | August 29, 2025
They heard about it from the first minutes of New Faculty Orientation. Dr. Prabhas V. Moghe, the new President of The University of Texas at Dallas, talked passionately and extemporaneously about what he calls his “North Star.”
Student success.
“He set the right energy and the right tone, and then it just followed through the whole day,” said Dr. Meghna Sabharwal, Associate Provost for Faculty Success, who oversaw the daylong new faculty orientation on Aug. 19 in the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center. “It was very student-centric because that’s why we’re here. Student and faculty success are inextricably linked.”
But student success has many definitions that go far beyond good grades and institutional accolades. When new faculty members were asked what student success means to them, the reactions were as varied as students themselves.
“It’s about you wanting to belong to this community … and this community making you feel like you belong,” said Dr. Muhammad Saad Yousuf, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. “The goal is not just to have academic success but to provide an environment in which the student almost feels like they’re at home.”
“It is students leaving my class feeling more empowered and fulfilled,” said Dr. Tiffany Bragg, Visiting Assistant Professor of History in the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology.
“Generally, people do better when they care about what they’re doing. So, it’s helping students find what they care about and connecting it to the classes in which they’re learning,” said Dr. Daniel Burleson, Professor of Instruction and First-Year Director in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.
“I want to prep them for their professions but also make them critical thinkers and good, civic citizens,” said Dr. Chelsea Taylor, Assistant Professor of Instruction in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies.
Four excellent definitions, for sure. But Dr. Joseph Byrnes, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Earth Systems Sciences in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, had another way of looking at it:
“I think it would be defined by students because they have different goals. You need to be able to facilitate the range of things they bring to the table.”
And make students the stars.
Sometimes, success doesn’t happen without failure.
Dr. Jennifer Painter, Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College, once had a student who got a D on the first anatomy exam.
“I gave her my pep talk: ‘Come see me if you want some pro tips,’” Painter said. “And she came and met me for office hours pretty much every week. She just didn’t know how to be successful. She didn’t know how to study. She didn’t know how to anticipate questions or connect materials. But she was dedicated to showing up.”
The student finished the semester with a final grade of B, but her improvement didn’t stop there. Two-thirds through the next semester, she came to Painter’s office and proudly told her that she applied what she learned in studying for anatomy and was getting an A on every test in physiology.
“It’s helping students become empowered to take those lessons on and be able to come into themselves and work independently,” she said. “They might need some scaffolding in the beginning, and then they can be successful.”
Dr. Ricardo Vicente, Director of Risk Management and Insurance Technology and Professor of Instruction in Finance in the Naveen Jindal School of Management, remembered a disadvantaged student who thought an improvement from 40% on the first test to 48% on the second exam was great progress.
Vicente tried his best to extract much greater progress, but when the semester was over he had no choice: He had to fail the student. He felt bad about it … until the student told him this:
“Thank you for treating me with equality. Every other professor who knows my situation, I appreciate they were showing compassion for me. But I wasn’t feeling equal.”
The student retook the class the following semester, Vicente said, and did much better.
Sometimes tough love isn’t the solution, however. Yousuf once was in a class with an older student who needed help from note-takers – one of whom was Yousuf – and a study group. It showed him how students can and should support each other.
“That gave me an opportunity to be part of that process and now me, as a new assistant professor, allows me to encourage my students to be part of that process,” he said. “I can see how it can help that person. She did really well in our class. I don’t know what grade she got, but she was really happy afterward.”
The three stories provide one overriding lesson: There are many paths to student success, and failure can be one of them.
“A lot of times students come in and they haven’t had an opportunity to fail,” said Burleson, who has seen students who failed a class later mentor students in that same course. “It’s really exciting, not to see students fail, but to see students respond to that.”
The full day of presentations, panels, workshops and mentoring information at New Faculty Orientation emphasized the fact that student success isn’t possible without faculty success.
“It seems like the two were very much paired in everything we heard today,” said Dr. Kevin Waite, Watson Distinguished Associate Professor of History in the Bass School. “I was struck by the fact that we have dedicated offices to student success and faculty success. The success is part of the terminology, and it seems like it’s part of the mission of the University.”
Faculty success, in turn, isn’t possible without faculty working together seamlessly.
“It was really helpful to meet other new faculty,” said Dr. Yingyi Lin, Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. “As newbies, we’re sometimes hesitant to ask too many questions. The intensive day really puts a connection between the faculty. I felt very comfortable to ask my peer the question.”
“You’re in your lane – ‘I do this research and it’s only me.’ It’s isolationist,” Taylor said. “It was really nice to see so many people around to support you and the encouragement to get out and network and meet your mentor and participate.”
“What I mostly heard was there are resources for faculty to be successful,” Painter said. “Much like our students, we have resources. We need to access them and utilize them, but there are plentiful resources. There’s mentorship – I’m really excited about the mentor program.”
But it all came back to the students, whose success is part of the foundation that has propelled UT Dallas up so many national rankings.
“People gave a good impression of the student body, which is good to hear,” Byrnes said. “That’s something you want to hear coming in as new faculty. That’s encouraging and seems genuine.”
“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to find better ways of connecting students to what is happening,” Burleson said. “There are so many good things happening here; how can we figure out a good framework to get students connected to what they need?”
There will be much more during the academic year – workshops, social gatherings and many other ways for new faculty to create even more new connections. Burleson noted that he wrote down many names of people he wanted to email right away.
Ultimately, it was a day to expand on Moghe’s vision.
“I think the president put it pretty nicely,” Yousuf said. “He had a triangle that he drew. In that triangle he had faculty success, student success and institutional success, and they’re all intertwined.
“What I took out of it is that I have to take care of myself, I have to take care of my team, I have to take care of the student, and that will automatically help and provide service to the larger university. It just feeds into one another, and there are resources for it.”
New Faculty Orientation made sure that vision is clearly defined.