Chad Taylor began his faculty career during the fall semester of 2000 at Heartland Community College in Normal, IL while attending graduate school at Illinois State University. In 2001, he received his Master of Science degree in mathematics and stayed on at the university to teach full time as a non-tenure-track faculty member while maintaining an adjunct position at Heartland CC. Although Chad’s B.S. degree is also from ISU, his athletic loyalty is to the Fighting Illini of the University of Illinois. You will often find him clad in orange and blue and yelling crazy phrases like Oskee-Wow-Wow!!

Chad takes his profession very seriously, and he is extremely involved in the department and on campus. During the spring of 2009, the soon-to-be fifth president of Harper College, Dr. Kenneth Ender, asked Chad to be part of a small group that would champion the president’s student success agenda. The group of 3 faculty and 3 administrators spent a week in Austin, Texas learning about Achieving the Dream, which is a nationwide initiative designed to help more community college students succeed. Including the schools who attended the 2009 kickoff institute, there are now 102 institutions across 22 states that participate in the initiative. Chad is excited and eager to find strategies and policies at Harper College that will lead to more student success.

Chad’s personal life is, well, personal. But we can say that he finally married his longtime girlfriend, Amy, in 2007; and he broke down in 2008 and acquiesced to adopting a dog. The dog, Bella, is a miniature dachshund that is cute as a button. Chad would never admit it to anyone, but he is really very fond of Bella and couldn’t imagine his life now without her. The same could probably be said about his wife Amy, but then again, Bella doesn’t spend too much money shopping, nag when Chad wants to play golf, or post “honey-do” lists on the weekend.