Karen D. Boyd serves as a Professor of Practice, Director of Undergraduate Education, and Program Coordinator for Undergraduate Leadership Studies in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department. She teaches undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral courses that explore the intersections of higher education history, leadership studies, personal/social responsibility, and student learning.

Can a student’s metacurricular experience in college, in and out of the classroom, set the stage for successful leadership later in life? And how can institutions best structure their programs, activities, services, resources, and student interactions to prepare self-authored personally and socially responsible leaders of tomorrow? These questions motivate Boyd’s practice and scholarship.

Prior to her appointment at UT, Boyd held positions with increasing responsibility in university housing and dean of students’ functions (i.e., student conduct, support, organizations, etc.). Boyd’s undergraduate experiences in Orientation, student organization leadership, and the Residence Hall Council had convinced her that, if shaped properly, the student’s college involvements could serve as effective integrative learning environments cementing institution-wide learning outcomes. Her administrative work at Clemson University, East Carolina University, Georgia Tech, and Carnegie Mellon reinforced this professional philosophy. In each of these positions, Boyd explored ways to enhance student learning through the environments, programs, and personal relationships within her circle of influence. Her professional organization service, and her long history of producing innovative, strategically-selected, transformational student-centered programs, services, activities, and instruction, earned her a reputation for facilitating and assessing supportive and inclusive learning environments, student conduct processes, and leadership education that promotes ethical development and intercultural maturity.

The success of one initiative, Preventative Discipline and Organizational Sustainability (expanding organizational leadership capacity to reduce dangerous student behavior, while increasing collaboration with the university in responding to unethical or prohibited behavior) focused the questions that drove her doctoral work and continue to shape her academic career. Subsequently, Boyd’s applied research agenda seeks to understand why that initiative worked in practice, and how to replicate those student learning successes in other settings and on a much larger scale. Leadership Studies provides an intentionally structured curriculum and accompanying resources supporting student life and other student-focused administrators as instructors. The curriculum goal is to develop self-authored personal and socially responsible leadership in advised and supervised student involvements (See the links to resources below in Scholarly Highlights). The diversity of her administrative and teaching roles, at midsize to large universities with predominantly residential campuses, and her record of forging increasingly complex academic-student affairs partnerships, set her apart as an expert on experiential learning and its impact on leadership development.