After ten years on the Higher Education Consortium for Special Education (HECSE) executive board, Jeff Anderson is stepping away.

During his time on the board, Anderson, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, has worked countless hours advocating for the field of special education, with a focus on teaching the next generation about policymaking and how to inform policymaking, adding: “I have conducted, arranged and hosted numerous conferences, meetings, trainings and updating constituent and stakeholder groups and membership drives. Indeed, my work in HECSE has been one of the highest points of my professional life, where I can point to tangible things that are better now than they were ten years ago. It is time for me to rotate off the board and allow others to continue and enhance the work that I have done.”

At its core, HECSE is an educational advocacy group focused on improving outcomes for people with disabilities through excellent preparation of university faculty, who in turn prepare people to become special education teachers and doctoral students who will engage in teacher preparation and conduct research. HECSE members connect with congressional leaders as private citizens to help them understand the special education field. As experts in the field, members work to inform policymaking by sharing the current state of the research, understanding that without data and expertise, policymaking is often based on ideology.

Anderson had known about HECSE’s important work ever since starting his own doctoral program in the mid 1990s. When he arrived in Bloomington in 2007, IU’s HECSE representative had just left for a position elsewhere, and a replacement was being sought. Anderson was immediately interested, leading to a decade of work making changes for the better in the world of special education.