Dr. Emily Lardner says her job as vice president of Academic Affairs is to help Highline improve what it does for students.

Dr. Larder was hired as the vice president in July. She had served as interim vice president for the previous year, then became one of three finalists for the job last spring.

She said she hopes to help people make education more effective for the sake of students.

Academic Affairs includes all the college’s instructional programs and faculty. Dr. Lardner said she juggles all types of different programs in order to keep the college operating.

“In Academic Affairs, a big part of my job is to help teams get organized, to connect people, and to help make sure that communication within our big division keeps getting better,” she said.

Dr. Lardner had previously worked as a professor and administrator at other colleges.

When she first started teaching, Dr. Lardner said she discovered that it “is incredibly complicated, or at least it was for me. I had to keep learning about the field I was teaching–how reading works, how writing works, how writing changes in different fields and situations, and what researchers in my field were discovering about better ways to help students become more effective writers.”

Slowly Dr. Lardner began to understand what it really meant to be a professor. She realized that “when students agree to learn with a teacher, they are investing trust in that relationship, and it takes time to become a trustworthy teacher for all the students in a class.”

This realization led her to further her career in college education and she found a job as a traveling agent based out of The Evergreen State College.

She said she “had the privilege of working with hundreds of community colleges as well as with liberal arts colleges and universities to implement strategies aimed at improving student learning, increasing student success, and closing equity gaps.”

She had traveled to college campuses across the country to help them apply higher education to community colleges.

She said that while traveling she “developed a yearning to be part of a team that was really serious about making the changes we in higher education know can work.”

Highline’s objective to improve education lined up with hers. She said that she knew that using what’s been learned in higher education and applying that to a community college was the next step to a more effective college experience.

As for Highline, “There’s an amazing community of faculty and staff who are passionate about student success and who care deeply about students… and, Highline students are the best students around,” she said.

Dr. Lardner said that her leadership style is very “procedural.” She said that she likes to approach situations one by one to ensure that each task gets finished with the maximum amount of success.

Dr. Lardner said she hopes that Highline can become a “more effective college.” Depending on how effective the college is, students are more likely to learn about the programs offered, enrollment and registration, and support needed to be successful students, she said.

Dr. Lardner said that even now, however, not a day goes by where she doesn’t learn something.

“Effective colleges are places where people are always learning how to do things better for the sake of students, and they must be learning that together,” she said. “One person, or a bunch of individuals, can’t make a college more effective. It takes lots of teamwork.”