Retirement Announcement

Note: This is an announcement of my retirement in August of 2026 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that I prepared for communications folks in my departments. It was a cathartic exercise to write this, somewhat like what writing your own obituary must feel like, and it helped provide some closure. The third person voice is weird, but here I share the announcement in full:

Professor Matthew Tadashi Hora from the Departments of Educational Policy Studies (School of Education) and Liberal Arts and Applied Studies (Division of Continuing Studies) officially retired in August of 2026 after 20 years at UW-Madison.  A cultural anthropologist learning scientist by training, Dr. Hora retires as an internationally recognized scholar of higher education and workforce development whose mixed-methods research contributed new insights and questioned the conventional wisdom on topics such as active learning, workforce skills gaps, college internships, and the nature of “soft” skills.

In a career cut short by the ongoing effects of multiple traumatic brain injuries, Dr. Hora published 40 papers in journals such as The Journal of the Learning Sciences, American Educational Research Journal, and Harvard Education Review, wrote 3 books, founded the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions (CCWT), taught hundreds of undergraduates and mentored over 35 master’s and PhD students.  Dr. Hora was appointed Assistant Professor at UW-Madison in 2015, received tenure in 2021, and was named full Professor in 2024. He was also the Principal Investigator on 15 studies funded by over $10m in support from the National Science Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and Strada Education Network.  Dr. Hora’s book “Beyond the skills gap: Educating college students for life and work” (Harvard Education Press) was also named the best national book on liberal education by the Association of American Colleges & Universities in 2018, and he was also appointed to the National Academies Board on Higher Education and Workforce in 2023.

Born in Long Beach, CA and raised throughout Southern California, Hora originally sought a career in organic farming and environmental education. In his first “real” job he managed a Community Supported Agriculture farm near Washington D.C. for the Capital Area Food Bank, which led to his first book on the Mid-Atlantic food system and an oral history study on food-related experiences of elderly Black women from the South.  After obtaining a Master’s degree in Applied Anthropology from the University of Maryland-College Park (2004), in 2006 Dr. Hora started at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research studying how disciplinary cultures within STEM departments impacted the adoption of active learning methods.  This work resulted in the book, “A Guide to Building Education Partnerships” (Routledge, 2011) with Susan Millar and led to an interdisciplinary PhD in the Learning Sciences in the Department of Educational Psychology at UW-Madison (2012). 

In his career Dr. Hora made several methodological, empirical, and practical contributions to social science and education research.  His methodological innovations include the development (with Joe Ferrare) of the Teaching Dimensions Observation Protocol which allows observers to capture critical features of classroom environments in 2-minute intervals, along with new network analysis techniques and an online tool with over 500 users. The TDOP was widely adopted by the STEM education community and Dr. Hora’s team gave over 25 invited workshops on using the instrument.  The TDOP also served as the foundation for multiple adaptations by other researchers (e.g., COPUS, RIOT).  Dr. Hora also created the first National Survey of College Internships - now administered by Strada Education Foundation - and was among the first scholars to apply methods from anthropology and sociology such as freelisting, causal network analysis, and affiliation graphing to analyze observational and qualitative data in higher education contexts.  

Dr. Hora’s empirical research also broke new ground in three areas, starting with a new culturally informed theory of teaching that informed observational studies of faculty teaching (Hora & Ferrare, 2013, 2014), and novel accounts of instructional decision-making that incorporated cognitive, cultural, and structural influences (Hora, 2012), particularly the impact of inaccurate beliefs about student learning (Hora, 2014) and faculty experiences from graduate school (Oleson & Hora, 2014).  Dr. Hora shifted to studies of “skills gaps” that revealed the demand by employers for transferable skills taught via active learning and liberal arts curricula (Hora et al., 2019), how skills like oral communication are differentially defined and used according to profession (Hora et al., 2019), and how employer hiring is dominated by evaluations of cultural and personality “fit” (Hora, 2020).  Dr. Hora also conducted the first in-depth studies of access- and quality-related issues with internships (Hora et al., 2021), particularly in Minority Serving Institutions (Hora et al., 2022) and with an eye towards implications for campus practitioners (Hora et al., 2024). 

Finally, Dr. Hora made considerable practical contributions to the field of higher education through his teaching, training, and policy work.  Dr. Hora created an online faculty development course on how to teach transferable skills (e.g., critical thinking) that was taken by over 650 instructors and was translated into Spanish by request, and the course is now available via EdX and the CIRTL network.  In 2017 Dr. Hora founded CCWT which achieved prominence by hosting 2 national conferences on internship research, providing grants and communities of practice for junior scholars, hosting over 45 lectures by eminent scholars on college-workforce issues, and generating over 25 widely cited technical reports and policy analyses on topics such as unpaid internships and skills instruction.   Dr. Hora also gave over 100 invited talks and consultations with campus leaders, career services professionals, and local, state, and federal government policymakers on how to improve student employability and workforce development policies.

Dr. Hora wishes to thank Drs. Susan Millar, Mindi Thompson, Nancy Kendall, and Xueli Wang for their ongoing support and encouragement.  His retirement plans include a book project on the socio-cultural, political, and ecological forces that shaped life and career decision-making in his family from feudal Japan to Hawaii, Los Angeles and Wisconsin, and what insights these stories may have for current and future generations.