Linda Ettinger spent 30 years as a University of Oregon faculty member, but it took no time at all for her to list the most rewarding experiences of her UO career.
There were three of them, and each was an opportunity to address ideas and learning in an interdisciplinary way, "while working with talented and innovative colleagues from (eventually) every school and college across the campus," she says.
Ettinger retired at the end of 2013 after spending the bulk of her UO career as academic director of the Applied Information Management, an interdisciplinary graduate program designed for working professionals who manage information in a variety of organizations and professions.
Congratulate Linda Ettinger on her retirement.
The first of her most rewarding experiences came in 1982, shortly after she was hired as a faculty member in the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts. She was asked to help produce the Annual Pacific Northwest Computer Graphics Conference and continued as director of the conference for the next four years.
"That conference started a real love and interest in working in an interdisciplinary capacity with colleagues from throughout the university," Ettinger says.
The conference brought together academics and professionals from fields including computer science, medicine, business, art and engineering to explore how their disciplines and industries interconnect with the field of computer graphics.
The second of her most rewarding experiences came in 1990, after voters approved Oregon's Ballot Measure 5. The statewide property tax limitation resulted in several UO departments – including Ettinger’s home department in AAA – being slated for closure.
“It was a very difficult time in our campus history,” Ettinger says. "However, my faculty saw it as an opportunity to develop a dynamic program in arts and administration.”
Building the program enabled close cross-disciplinary connections with the School of Music and Dance, the Bach Festival, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural and Cultural History.
The third of Ettinger's most rewarding experiences began in 1986 with the launch of the UO's Applied Information Management master’s degree program. Ettinger served as AIM's academic director from its inception to 2013, working to frame curriculum with faculty from the Lundquist College of Business, the Department of Computer and Information Science and the College of Education. She designed and taught in the “information design” portion of the AIM curriculum and helped to design AIM's applied research component, which is considered by many to be critical to the program's success.
AIM shifted in 2000 from being an onsite offering at the UO's Portland campus to its current status as a fully online program. That provided the catalyst for an analysis of instructional methods in higher education – led by UO colleague Jane Maitland-Gholson – with the goal of maintaining AIM's relevance to faculty and students.
Ettinger now counts Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction classes – offered through the UO by Lisa Freinkel, an associate professor of English and vice provost for undergraduate studies – among her most important post-career activities.
"What I'm trying to do now – which is sometimes very hard but also very exciting – is to pause as I ease into retirement," she says. "I'm interested in how to be less reactive and more reflective, with the hope that I will notice the next set of unique opportunities that may come my way.”
- by Katherine Cook, UO Office of Public Affairs Communication intern