Career Overview

Gary A. Olson is a noted scholar of rhetoric, writing, and culture. From 2009-2011 he served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Idaho State University. A multi-campus, Carnegie Foundation “Research High” doctoral university, Idaho State serves as the state’s principal university promoting education in the health care professions and related sciences. Olson oversaw seven colleges, ISU’s libraries, and the Idaho Museum of Natural History.

Olson served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University from 2004 to 2009, where he led the college through an five-year strategic plan; created a college-wide technology support unit; established the college’s weekly newsletter; formed three high-level advisory boards; launched a number of faculty support initiatives; and created the institution’s largest faculty and staff recognition awards, raising nearly a quarter of a million dollars to endow them.

For nearly two decades (1985-2004), Olson served as an administrator and faculty member at the University of South Florida, one of the nation’s top 63 public research universities offering 219 degree programs (including the MD) to over 46,000 students on four campuses. Olson served as the chief academic officer at USF’s St. Petersburg campus from 2002 to 2004, helping to lead the campus to become a free-standing, self-governing, and separately accredited campus within the USF system.

Olson writes a popular monthly column on higher education administration for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he is co-editor, with John W. Presley, of The Future of Higher Education: Perspectives from America’s Academic Leaders (Paradigm, 2009).

He is the author or editor (often in collaboration) of 20 books and over 100 essays and articles and has written on a number of subjects central to rhetoric studies, including the role of theory in rhetorical scholarship, the connections between ideology and discourse, and the contributions of Stanley Fish.

Olson conducted a series of scholarly interviews with some of the world's most prominent intellectuals. He began the series in 1991 as editor of the Journal of Advanced Composition (now simply JAC), a leading journal of theoretical scholarship. Over a decade and a half, he conducted extensive, in-depth interviews probing the life's work of such internationally renowned intellectuals as anthropologist, linguist Noam Chomsky, deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, philosopher of science Sandra Harding, Biologist Donna Haraway, political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, and feminist theorist. These interviews were published in JAC and later in a series of books published by State University of New York Press, Southern Illinois University Press, and Paradigm Publishers.

As Provost at Idaho State, Olson led in creating the Division of Health Sciences, the College of Science and Engineering, and the College of Arts and Letters. He oversaw successful reaffirmation of institutional accreditation through the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, enhanced cooperation among the chief academic officers of public universities state-wide, and substantially enhanced academic student services by creating the institution’s Student Success Center (composed of Advising, Honors, TRIO, tutoring, and other services). He also enhanced openness and transparency on campus by establishing the institution’s first annual Academic Assembly, regular faculty and staff open forums, a Provost’s Faculty Advisory Board, regular meetings with department chairs, and regular letters to faculty and staff updating them on recent developments.