As Associate Director of the Office of Educational Opportunity (OEO), Lynda Paul helps lead the OEO’s efforts to make Yale’s hidden curriculum more visible and accessible for students from all backgrounds. She provides strategic and pedagogical leadership for many of the OEO’s student success initiatives, developing programs that help students navigate their educational experiences with greater clarity, agency, and self-understanding. To this end, her work includes overseeing the recruitment, training, mentoring, and ongoing development of a team of approximately 100 student staff members; creating cross-campus and cross-disciplinary learning and mentorship initiatives; and working directly with students in an advisory and academic coaching capacity. She also runs the Academic Strategies Program, a hidden curriculum-oriented student success program that she helped Dean Karin Gosselink build, which became the foundation for the OEO and now operates as one of its four core programs. Across this work, Dr. Paul supports the empowerment of students, helping them take full ownership over their educational choices, experiences, and trajectories so that they can thrive as their fullest and most genuine selves at this institution and beyond.
Dr. Paul is a devoted mentor, teacher, and student advocate. Her approach is fundamentally intersectional, strengths-based, and context-dependent. It is also informed by her background knowledge, training, and cross-cultural experiences in the areas of pedagogy, cognition/psychology, social work/sociology, critical theory, history, language(s), and the arts.
Dr. Paul has been at Yale since 2005. Over the past two decades, she has worked with hundreds of Yale students in her various roles as faculty member, administrator, advisor, post-doctoral associate, residential college writing tutor, and graduate student. She has presented her research at local, national, and international conferences, and is frequently invited to be a guest speaker in Yale courses. Outside of Yale, her professional work and publications extend across a variety of creative, analytical, and academic domains of the arts, social sciences, and humanities. She is also a passionate oil painter, is actively involved in disability rights advocacy, and has volunteered with several organizations that support the needs of vulnerable populations, such as at-risk LGBTQIA+ youth and survivors of sexual assault.
Dr. Paul holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (B.M.), University of Rochester (B.A.), University of Chicago (M.A.), David Geffen School of Drama (formerly Yale School of Drama) (M.F.A.), and Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she received distinction on her Ph.D. in 2012.