College of Liberal Arts at California State University Long Beach

The College of Liberal Arts provides a high-quality education to first-generation college students and others for whom a college education may otherwise be inaccessible. The CLA is committed to engaging students in scholarly disciplines and debates, introducing them to new research methods, exposing them to the history and lived experiences of a number of groups who have been historically marginalized in American society, and preparing them for both their professional and civic lives.

Meet The Dean

David Wallace learned the basics of being a writer as a Communications major at Crown College in St. Bonifacius, MN – his parents’ alma mater. After completing his bachelor’s degree he returned to his small, coal-mining hometown of Homer City, PA. He worked to pay off his school loans and then wandered into the Department of English at the local university. Thinking that being a college professor might be kind of cool, he enrolled in a couple graduate courses.
The instructor of his first graduate course about teaching writing wisely advised him to gain experience by working with students in the writing center and so it was in Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Writing Center that he fell in love with the teaching of writing. Just a month after he completed his MA in Rhetoric and Linguistics he began a Ph.D. program in Rhetoric in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. There, he had the good fortune to study with ground-breaking rhetoric and composition researchers Linda Flower and John R. Hayes. He also worked as a research fellow at the National Center for the Study of Writing and Literacy at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.