Faculty - Science and Humanities

David Haus earned his B.A. in American Studies from Penn State University, and he is a graduate of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State. He earned his M.A. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, focusing on Early American History and Culture. He earned his Ph.D. in History at Bowling Green State University, focusing on 20th Century U.S. Policy History. He has minor fields in Latin American History and the History of Modern Japan.

Before coming to Husson David served as an Instructor of History and Distance Learning at Bowling Green State University and Assistant Professor of History at Bluefield State College. He has held several administrative posts during his career including Faculty Senate Chair, Associate Dean of Assessment and Distance Learning, and Dean of Arts and Sciences. He serves as a Social Studies education program Curriculum Reviewer for the West Virginia Department of Education and a certified Quality Matters reviewer. He is the co-founder and former editor of H-Policy. David designed and continues to offer his Social Studies Content Licensure preparation seminars to teacher education students at several institutions in the United States. The program is designed to help students prepare for exams such as the Praxis II: Social Studies Content Exam offered by ETS.

David is currently working on his scholarly monograph "Radio Is an Extension of the Home: Protecting Private Space from Public Vulgarity, 1929-1935". It re-examines the public debate between commercial interests and educational reformers over the organization and control of radio in the early 1930s. Other scholars have explored this moment in American history, arguing that the National Committee on Education by Radio stood little chance for success because of its own ineptitude before a powerful commercial radio industry. My work attempts to make sense of the NCER’s choices and motivations in the struggle for educational radio while examining the broader implications of the NCER’s arguments on our understanding of New Deal politics, associationalism, gender, and consumerism. I conclude that the NCER was a progressive group that watched the very progressive machinery its members once supported quash its campaign for radio reform and alter its conception of democracy, as federal regulators devalued its expertise and sacrificed educational radio at the altar of the New Deal. However, I contend that the NCER posed a greater threat to the commercial industry than other scholars have found, and it could have succeeded under different circumstances. The NCER fought against the conflation of consumerism and democracy while fighting to stave off what it saw as cultural domination by the East coast, and it compels us to rethink the nature and periodization of progressivism and the centrality of radio in the context of urban-rural conflict of the 1920s and 1930s.

Before joining Husson, Frank spent five years chairing the Department of Humanities at Georgia Perimeter College in Dunwoody, Georgia. Before that, he was first coordinator of first year composition and then an assistant dean in the graduate school at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He has been instructing in collegiate settings for more than 30 years, teaching primarily writing and linguistics. Frank received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Amherst College, where he played soccer, worked in the dining hall, and sang in the glee club. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also taught scuba diving and helped to run a recreational facility. He has had a Fulbright in Finland and a short teaching stint in Gaza City. He has four grown children scattered about the country.

My students usually notice right away that I repeat myself a lot, and one of the things I say often is "This is not 13th grade". I mean that college students have to find ways to become more active learners, in order to meet their professional and career responsibilities. For many, that means learning better ways to learn, ways that I hope will sustain lifelong mental, emotional, and spiritual growth. I also start many classes with "You need a blank piece of paper", because I want my students to feel how writing can help them learn, in any class and not just in mine. Probably what I ask the most is "Where's the critical thinking"? For me, that's the most important thing college has to teach.