TAMU-T academic leader relishes his job
Texas A&M University-Texarkana's newest top academic leader says both campus and community members have helped make his transition into the provost and academic affairs vice president positions a smooth one.
“When people ask me what our experience is here, the term I’ve been using is ‘pathologically nice,’” said Dr. David Yells, who began the position at the beginning of the year. “Everybody has just been so helpful, and it just made the transition very nice.”
Now, he says he’s settled in (he got his Texas driver’s license last week) and that he’s ready to help the young institution grow by looking at the community demand for programs and finding a way to provide those for students to enrich their lives.
As provost and vice president of academic affairs, he is responsible for the academic enterprise at A&M Texarkana, including courses and curriculum, the hiring of faculty and assessing academic performance.
“It’s been exciting. I’ve really enjoyed it,” he said of completing his first semester in the position. “Working in the A&M System is a privilege, and working at an institution like Texarkana, which is in a growth mode, is very exciting, too. Having an opportunity to sort of shape an institution as it develops is very appealing to me.”
Right now, he said, there are many opportunities for growth, adding that the school’s new RN-to-BSN program is an example of needs-based offerings.
“I recently learned that there are 110,000 registered nurses in this state,” he said. “There’s a big push to have them go back to school and get their bachelor’s degree.
“We’re hoping to work with the hospitals and health care systems and really see that as a service to the community.”
He said the university is also working around nurses’ schedules, because the majority are employed and can’t attend classes during a traditional daytime schedule.
The chance to help create and implement programs like these in a more personal setting is another reason he chose A&M-Texarkana.
“One of the things I stressed when I interviewed here (is that) I have a very relationship-based leadership style,” he said. “I like to get to know the people I work with, and that was getting harder and harder at my previous institution.” Yells comes to the university after 17 years at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, where he was most recently dean of humanities and social sciences. “It was up to about 35,000 students when I left, so it had gotten humongous,” he said.
“It was more and more difficult to be the leader I wanted to be, and if I had tried to go up in that organization, it would have been even worse, so I specifically looked at smaller institutions like Texarkana and thought that was really the kind of place I’d like to be.”
Yells holds a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Bellevue University in Nebraska, as well as a Master of Arts in physiological psychology and a doctorate in developmental psychobiology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he specialized in brain-behavior relationships.
Following graduate school, he completed a two-year postdoctoral residency in a psychiatry department at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, focusing on brain mechanisms of psychopathology. He began his career at Utah Valley University (then Utah Valley State College) in 1999. He became department chair in 2001 and dean of the college of humanities and social sciences in 2008.
He and his wife, Kris, who holds a doctorate degree in social work from Utah Valley University, have been married for 16 months. Together, they have seven adult children.