Monday, October 30, 2000
Clearing another path
UGA’s ‘Mr. Climate’
Vet prof demonstrates value of support organizations
First director of Institute of Government dies
Campus Closeup
Kudos
New associate dean leads expansion of business executive program
Musically reclined
University’s ‘teacher of teachers’ announces retirement in June
By Larry B. Dendy
ldendy@uga.edu

If good teaching is the heart of a university, many would say Ronald Simpson deserves a Nobel Prize for cardiac resuscitation.
When Simpson came to the University of Georgia in 1981 as the first director of the Office of Instructional Development, classroom instruction was not the university’s strongest suit. OID had just been created to address that weakness, but it needed vision and direction.
In 15 years as director of OID (now the Office of Instructional Support and Development), Simpson not only focused attention on the necessity of good teaching, but also created programs that dramatically improved the quality of instruction in UGA’s classrooms and laboratories.
“No one in the last 20 years has done more to promote the art of teaching, and to support the development of faculty members, than Ron Simpson,” says Tom Dyer, vice president for instruction.
Simpson stepped down as OISD director in 1996 to join full-time the Institute of Higher Education as a professor. For the past two years he has been acting director.
Simpson has announced that he will retire next June, concluding a 40-year career in higher education in which he has come to be known as one of the university’s and the state’s foremost “teachers of teachers.”
While serving as OISD’s founding director, Simpson helped spawn programs that are now keystones of teaching support at UGA. Among them:
• The Lilly Teaching Fellows Program, which has helped advance the careers of scores of young UGA faculty members;
• The Senior Teaching Fellows Program that helps senior faculty members learn new techniques and technology to improve teaching;
• The Teaching Assistants Mentoring Program that helps inexperienced graduate students learn to be better teachers;
• Instructional Improvement Grants that enable faculty members to develop new teaching methods and materials; and
• Classroom support services that provide equipment and technology for classroom and lab instruction.
In addition, OISD sponsors conferences and workshops and conducts a seminar series on teaching, operates demonstration classrooms and laboratories, publishes a newsletter and a handbook, and offers assistance in computer-based and multimedia instruction.
Since 1995, Simpson has also been coordinator of the Governor’s Teaching Fellows Program, which was started by former Gov. Zell Miller to provide teaching support and assistance to faculty members in all of Georgia’s public and private colleges and universities.
He has also served as coordinator of the National Peer Review of Teaching project at UGA, and as editor or editorial board member of several leading professional journals.
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