Jim Wohlpart, Ph.D.

Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Jim Wohlpart is the Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English in the Department of Language and Literature. As Associate Dean, he is responsible for planning and assessment, including collaborating with departments to develop college-wide goals and assessment strategies and with faculty to develop and implement meaningful and sustainable program assessment. Since coming into the position of Associate Dean in the summer of 2005, he successfully led the college through accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and assisted with developing a Critical Thinking module and Writing Assessment module for General Education. Wohlpart is a Redesign Scholar with the National Center for Academic Transformation and has led a team of faculty in redesigning a required General Education course in the visual and performing arts that increased learning and reduced costs. He is on the Advisory Board of the University Press of Florida and is the Associate Director for the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education.

Wohlpart came to Florida Gulf Coast University in 1994, three years before the university officially opened, to participate with others in writing the curriculum and hiring the faculty. When the university opened, Wohlpart became the coordinator of the Humanities faculty and then eventually the Chair of the Division of Humanities and Arts, a position he held from 2000-2005, when he moved into the role of Associate Dean. Under his leadership, the Division of Humanities and Arts, which included programs in Art, Communication, English, Philosophy, Spanish, and Theatre, grew from 20 faculty to 47 faculty; he assisted in overseeing the building of a state-of-the-art Arts Complex with a Black Box Theatre, five art studios, and an Art Gallery. In addition, he participated in the development of the Liberal Studies degree and the Collegium of Integrated Learning, an innovative, interdisciplinary program required of all students in the College of Arts and Sciences, and in the development and teaching of Colloquium: A Sustainable Future, a required upper level course on sustainability that seeks to develop an ecological perspective in our students.

As a result of his passion for learning and his honoring of transitions, Wohlpart became instrumental in the First Year Experience at Florida Gulf Coast University. Working with a group of innovative faculty, he developed a learning community for first year students, called the Learning Academy, that links three courses to develop an integrated learning environment; the Learning Academy, which he directed from 2000-2001 and 2003-2007, has a retention rate of 90% for first year students and a significantly higher four year graduation rate than the general population. He also led a team of faculty from across the university to create and implement a First Year Reading Project and to design the inaugural First Year Convocation featuring James McBride that led to a significant increase in overall retention of first year students. Wohlpart then assisted in bringing McBride back four years later as the Commencement Speaker. He has also been involved in the University Lecture series, co-chairing the event in 2006 with Mikhail Gorbachev and chairing it in 2007 with Colin Powell, and he has been successful in fund-raising and grant-writing.

Wohlpart continues to teach Environmental Literature, an interdisciplinary course in the English, Environmental Studies, and Communication programs. The course, which includes a service learning component, seeks to develop an ethics of sustainability on the part of his students. An integral part of the course, which focuses on such contemporary environmental writers as Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and Janisse Ray and such environmental thinkers as Mary Evelyn Tucker and David Orr, is to bring the writers who the students read to campus for lectures and workshops. As the course progresses, students both develop an intellectual understanding of a new ethical paradigm and enact that paradigm through their service project, making their learning more concrete and real. Wohlpart has also taught Freshman Composition and upper level and graduate courses in 19th Century American Literature.

Holding a PhD and a BA from the University of Tennessee and an MA from Colorado State University, Wohlpart pursues scholarship on Native American literature, women’s literature, and environmental literature. He has published essays on Dickinson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Douglass, and others in American literature. His current research and scholarship includes editing a collection of essays entitled A Voice for Earth: American Writers Respond to the Earth Charter (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming) and writing articles and delivering presentations that will become part a book tentatively entitled A Mind of Sky and Thunder: Remembering the Forgotten Language. In his free time, he enjoys walking Earth, as gently as possible, often with family and friends, but sometimes alone.