May 25, 2006  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

D.C. is known in higher education circles for its universities, but most of the prestigious institutions are private. D.C.’s Southeastern University is one of the city’s public schools, and its nondiscrimination policies have made it a comfortable and career-building location for Dr. Gugu Moche, the school’s dean of faculty and academic affairs.

Moche (pronounced mow-chay), a lesbian who hails originally from South Africa, started at Southeastern as an adjunct professor in 1998. She taught, and still teaches, mathematics — a subject she is so passionate about that she can inspire even the most algebraically challenged.

“It’s the mystery of the numbers,” Moche says of her interest in mathematics. “What you think is complex is actually a pattern. I love it — it makes me smile.”

In 2000, she earned her full professor status at the university, and then in the spring of 2005, she was offered her current position as an interim option. The temporary appointment quickly gave way to her permanent dean’s title in January.

“She understood the vision that the board and I had for the university,” says Dr. Charlene Drew Jarvis, the president of the university and a former D.C. city councilmember. “It was clear once she got that role that she knew exactly where we wanted to go, how we were to get there and what role she would play in that.”

MOCHE MOVED TO the United States in 1991 after she won a scholarship to Hood College in Frederick, Md. At one point in her undergraduate career she was pre-med, but she says mathematics lured her back into the numerical fold.

“[Mathematics] is a universal language,” Moche, 38, says. “It’s an algorithm that goes behind what we see.”

After Hood, she went on to earn her Ph.D. from D.C.’s Howard University. During her doctoral study, she worked full-time as a contractor for the federal housing enterprise oversight office, which oversees the activities of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac foundations. She now lives in D.C. with her partner of five years.

With the dean position now in full swing, Moche doesn’t teach nearly as much as she once did, but she’s managed to hold on to two courses. Most of her time is taken up working with just about every aspect of university academic life.

“I have oversight with the faculty, what we teach, the library and the support services, student affairs, the registrar, and career services,” she says, laughing about her lengthy list of duties.

Her main aspirations, though, lie in her desire for the school to advance technologically, so the students can expand their learning capacity.

“I’ve always believed that instruction has to be accessible,” Moche says. “In a lot of cases, students waste a lot of time trying to take notes. At times they’re lost, but all they want to do is take notes and get home and look at them.”

 In May of this year, Moche and Jarvis were able to secure a $50,000 grant from Verizon, with the intention of using the money to improve the learning process by way of new educational technology.

“Dr. Moche is working hard to make sure that technology is dispersed across the curriculum,” Jarvis says. “Not only in our computer science and information system — it’s [for] the students in liberal studies and public administration.”

One of the programs that Moche has employed is smart boards from SMART Technologies, Inc., a company that uses computers to enhance educational and corporate communication styles.

Think of smart boards as being advanced blackboards. Using a stylus or even a fingertip, a professor can write notes for the students to see on a display board that is then projected onto a larger screen. That information is then made electronically available to the students on the class website. The old style professors’ blackboard scribbles are now part of the electronic notes for that course.

Video streaming of the lectures is also being implemented into the university’s education program, allowing students who aren’t in the classroom to access the lectures in real time from any computer on campus.

“I thought it would be helpful in some way to take the pressure from listening to participating,” says Moche. “Our students now learn differently.”

EDUCATION ENCOMPASSES MANY subjects, according to Moche, including every interaction a professor has with a student.

“I think she has a unique subset of descriptors,” says Jarvis. “She’s a Ph.D in mathematics, an African woman, a woman in the gay and lesbian community.”

Moche uses her layered cultural identities to expose students to different worldviews.

“Being from outside the culture, being who I am ...