Martin Ringle

For more than 20 years, Marty Ringle has contributed to the higher education IT profession as a change agent, a collaborator, and an organizer. A deep believer in the role and mission of small liberal arts colleges, his career has been marked by his ability to meld diverse entities into a coherent whole. He has held faculty appointments in the fields of philosophy and computer science and led the development of the first bachelor's program in cognitive science in the U.S., at Vassar College in 1978. In 1983 he became chair of Vassar's computer science department. Since 1989, Dr. Ringle has served as chief technology officer for Reed College, where he has built a strong staff, outstanding facilities, and solid institutional reputation for excellence in computing. At Reed, he has applied his fiscal acumen toward leveraging relationships with vendors, alumni, and peer institutions to provide cost-effective approaches to IT.In the late 1980s, he was instrumental in the creation of the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC)—a national nonprofit group of 64 selective colleges. He brought the same collaborative strengths to his work with the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium (NWACC), developed to provide Internet access to the northwest. He chaired the NWACC board during the sale of its subsidiary, NorthWestNet, and since 1999 has served as president and CEO of the consortium. Chair of the EDUCAUSE board of directors in 2002, Dr. Ringle has also served on the Educom board, the boards of the Cognitive Science Society, the Carnegie Inter-University Consortium for Educational Computing, and other professional and corporate advisory groups. He is a respected consultant for numerous colleges, known for his ability to deliver clear, useful reports; his publications and presentations are popular for their warmth and enduring insight. Dr. Ringle holds a dual Ph.D. in philosophy and computer technology from the State University of New York at Binghamton.