Music was UNCSA provost's road home

When David Nelson sizes up his experience at UNC School of the Arts, he likens it to coming home.

"It's been a while since I've been in such a concentration of artists," he said. "But that's not a strange world to me."

Nelson, 47, has overseen the school's academic affairs as its provost since July 2010. He came to UNCSA from the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, where he served as senior vice president of academic administration and as dean of the faculty.

In that post, which is similar to his position at UNCSA, he led more than 60 full-time faculty members, dozens of adjunct faculty, eight deans and 14 academic directors; oversaw an $11 million annual budget; and participated in student-recruitment efforts.

At UNCSA, Nelson is shepherding several sea-changing initiatives. These include next year's summer-school program, which the school's recent move from a trimester to a semester system has enabled. The program will augment summer workshops for high school students with for-credit college courses and continuing-education offerings for professional artists and arts teachers.

Nelson also is working with the deans to explore ways to increase enrollment. As many as 300 students could be added to UNCSA's roughly 1,100 students, generating at least $5 million for operations and positions that were eliminated because of state funding cuts. The additional money would be generated through tuition and state subsidies.

Nelson and other school officials are looking at adding more graduate students to the School of Filmmaking and the School of Design & Production. These students put less stress on the "infrastructure" because they don't live on campus or eat in the cafeteria. They could also meet a demand for experienced techs to work behind the scenes at shows.

John Mauceri, UNCSA's chancellor, said he would like more instrumentalists because there are often not enough for every project at the school, including musicals and soundtrack recordings. Such performances are an important part of a musician's training.

Nelson started at Southeastern in the late 1990s when, having fallen for theology, he decided to pursue a doctorate. He received his doctorate in 2001 and eventually became a professor of theology at Southeastern. Along the way, he moved into administration.

When Nelson refers to "home," he's talking about the largely musical one that formed during his childhood. Nelson was born in Illinois, but his family lived in several places because his father was transferred a number of times. By the time Nelson was in middle school, the moving stopped, and Dallas became his first longtime residence. Nelson says his mother was the only one in the family who expressed any interest in the arts; she sang in a church choir. Nevertheless, he became interested enough in music to buy an album of Handel's greatest hits.

"This whole world opened up to me," he said. "I started buying albums and listening to music nonstop."

In time, Nelson learned to play the trumpet. Training in other instruments followed, and when Nelson enrolled in Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he was studying trombone and euphonium.

But that changed during Nelson's freshman year. A choral director started recruiting singers for a performance, including students who, like Nelson, had never taken a voice lesson.

The music that Nelson cut his choral teeth on included Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms" and Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms." He was so taken with the experience that he changed his musical studies to choral conducting and transferred to Hardin-Simmons University, which is known for its choral program. After receiving a bachelor's and a master's at the Abilene, Texas, university, Nelson did a good bit of conducting at Hardin-Simmons and the University of North Texas.

"David has proven himself to be a most extraordinary administrator who understands the arts," Mauceri said. "That's the great thing. He's been a conductor."

Although Nelson's experience at Southeastern will matter most in his current job, he said there's a correlation between choir conducting and his duties at UNCSA.

"You have a lot of different voices," he said. "It's the conductor's job to bring them together in a harmonious way. That's an awful lot like being a provost."

A prime example of that skill pertains to another effort to introduce rankings for UNCSA's faculty. All members are designated by the UNC system as low-rung "instructors," and they keep that status regardless of their qualifications and accomplishments. They can't move up the professorial ranks, as their colleagues in other UNC-system schools can, and earn higher compensation each time they do.

A proposal for ranking UNCSA staff is being formulated, and it's likely the faculty will vote on it in December, said Jason Romney, who heads the school's faculty council. If the proposal is approved, it would go to the UNC board of governors, which would then consider giving its blessing and making the money available.

Past efforts to introduce rank at UNCSA have failed, likely because instructors were leery of having to publish or perish, Romney said. This proposal seems to be gaining traction because Nelson has proposed tying a new evaluation system to decisions about rank. The system would not require publishing; it would look at progress in several areas.

The current system boils down to deciding the year before an instructor's contract is up whether to renew it, with student evaluations and dean and peer committee observations of teaching key factors in the decision.

Under the new system, an instructor would consult annually with a dean and propose ways in which the instructor could grow or improve inside and outside the classroom. Rank would depend largely on the progress the instructor is making. The starting rank of veteran instructors would be determined by a committee, and ranks of beginning faculty would be determined by Nelson and the dean.

The school would provide resources for development. Or introduce ways for instructors to "see what works in other classrooms" or exchange ideas on successful teaching methods, Nelson said.

"David was able to propose scenarios that helped many faculty feel it was worth investigating," Romney said.