By Rick Vacek | September 22, 2025
Dr. Robin Paige’s first mission as the new Vice Provost for Academic Success and Innovation is to understand the context and relationships of student life at The University of Texas at Dallas.
Her passion is to make sure students know how much they matter.
“They matter as people, who they are as a unique person,” she said. “Their education matters, their learning here matters and their goals when they leave the institution also matter.”
She was quick to add the means to that end for students:
“The way you know you matter is through relationships. Where students spend most of their time when they’re here with us is in the classroom. Those relationships with peers and faculty in that learning context are really important. You want what sociologists call a ‘third space,’ where you’re seeing the person as a person, not a student sitting in front of you. They matter.
“Are there opportunities for that in their classes? Are there opportunities for that as they walk around campus? Do they feel that, even if they don’t know somebody, they have a shared understanding?
“That makes relationships a lot easier, when there’s a shared culture and a shared understanding about what it means to be here as a UT Dallas student and a part of the UT Dallas community. We have different individual goals, but there also are collective goals that make those individual goals possible.
“Relationships, people and feeling connected are the foundation to academic success. After that, the skills and knowledge usually follow pretty easily.”
As the newest member of the Office of the Provost, Paige oversees the Center for Teaching and Learning, the AccessAbility Resource Center and Educational Technology Services and serves as a liaison with other Academic Affairs units, leads the Student Success Working Group and supports the mentoring programs.
It’s a role that requires a personable approach, and Dr. Inga Musselman, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, was impressed by that talent the first time they met.
“Dr. Paige is a great conversationalist who connects well with faculty and administrative leaders,” Musselman said. “She is thoughtful, measured, knowledgeable about student success and experienced in innovation, and she brings to UT Dallas an impressive breadth of experiences as a faculty member and leader in varied institutions of higher education.”
Often in life, the ability to handle a challenging role is aided by an important relationship with a role model.
Paige certainly has one.
Dr. James Whearty (pronounced “wordy”) was her first English professor as an undergraduate. She loves to tell students the story of how he changed her life by the way he taught and by being so accessible.
“He got me invested,” she said. “I was bored in high school. I was going to college just because that’s what was expected of me. I just wasn’t invested. But I mattered to him. My learning mattered. He tried to make it as authentic and relevant to me as possible.”
Whearty snagged her attention with his handling of class discussions about Hiroshima, John Hersey’s book about six survivors of the nuclear bomb that devastated the Japanese city at the end of World War II.
“That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, not only can this be something I’m invested in,’” she said. “I was engaged in it. I was learning that I could be good at it.”
After earning her sociology degree from the University of California, Davis with highest honors, Paige completed her master’s and a PhD in development sociology at Cornell University.
She began her career in education as Co-Director of the Service Learning Program and Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Gavilan College in Gilroy, California, on the other side of San Jose from Los Altos, her hometown.
She then moved to Rice University, where she taught in the sociology department as an Associate Teaching Professor and ascended from Assistant Director to Director during her eight years in its Center for Teaching Excellence.
Most recently, she was Executive Director of the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Chicago as well as Associate Dean and Associate Senior Instructional Professor in The College, the academic unit responsible for undergraduate education at the university.
In other words, she has continued Whearty’s work.
“I wanted to make sure that when I was working with students and designing my courses that it was relevant and interesting to them,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t going to reach every single student, but I wanted them to know their learning mattered and I wanted them to know that they mattered to me – that their goals mattered to me, both in the classroom and beyond.
“I would think of different ways to make that possible beyond the typical curriculum. There are pretty simple ways, such as using people’s first names and making sure their work and contribution to the university is seen.”
By working at several institutions, Paige has seen students and faculty in many different contexts. Her background in sociology has taught her to seek out those contexts and try to understand them.
And when contexts intersect with relationships, she arrives at the place that drives everything she does.
“I think relationships are really the key to how we accomplish anything,” she said. “What I have tended to focus on, both as a faculty member and in my leadership roles, has been the classroom. How are faculty and students engaging, both within the classroom and outside the classroom?
“I think we’re at a pivotal moment right now in education. … I look at a very human-centered approach to it in saying, ‘What we really need students to develop is what is human about them right now, their problem-solving and critical thinking, their ethical reasoning around things.’”
DR. ROBIN PAIGE
“The two things that guide me are thinking about the context we’re in and how we build a context in which everybody can be successful based upon their goals.”
It’s a team approach, familiar to Paige in all the years she played competitive softball. She has since taken up mountain bike racing and now prefers road cycling and weight training.
“I’ve always been athletic, but nothing serious,” she said. “I don’t do marathons or anything like that.”
Instead, she is excited about innovation – the second half of her job title – as higher education sprints into integrating new technology with an age-old learning challenge: Everyone is unique.
That’s why she wants to think about it through the life cycle of the students, from what makes them interested in UT Dallas to what they say when they’re leaving. What, in their view, qualifies as a useful innovation?
“Everything is moving and changing so quickly right now that I think we have to be adaptable and flexible in what we consider to be innovative,” Paige said. “It can be something completely innovative to higher education, or it can be something innovative to us here at UT Dallas or in particular schools and programs.”
The University of Chicago, for example, instituted exploratory teaching groups, which convened faculty members to discuss ideas they might not have had time to explore. That’s not exactly a revolutionary idea, but it was a great way to tap the faculty’s expertise and formulate new ways to help students.
“I think we’re at a pivotal moment right now in education,” Paige said. “It’s easy for us to get lost in what feels like a technological race as we equip students with these very technological skills, which are critical.
“But I look at a very human-centered approach to it in saying, ‘What we really need students to develop is what is human about them right now, their problem-solving and critical thinking, their ethical reasoning around things.’ Moving forward in higher ed, I think those are the critical things.”
It’s a passion filled with compassion, a Whearty-inspired investment in the future.
A task that truly matters.