Emeritus Faculty

Ned Bowler. After earning a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University and teaching five years at Long Beach State College, Dr. Bowler joined the CU faculty in the fall of 1959.  At the time, Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology was a division in the Department of English and Speech, but within a year a Department of Speech and Drama was formed; it included the communication sciences and disorders branches.  In 1968, Dr. Bowler oversaw the establishment of the independent Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the Graduate School.  Dr. Bowler was elected as this new department’s first chair, a position he held for four years.

Dr. Bowler introduced many students to the fields of speech-language pathology and audiology, preparing them through his roles as professor and clinician at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.  He was successful in building the department’s student body, mostly through many U.S. Office of Education training grants that funded graduate student assistantships and fellowships.  He strengthened the faculty, primarily by hiring new faculty with initial funding by grants from the U.S. Vocational Rehabilitation Administration.  He was continually on the lookout to improve and expand facilities, as well as upgrade professional teaching and clinical instruments, mostly through his initiative and funding from the Colorado State Department of Rehabilitation.  He also fostered a healthy relationship between the Boulder campus program and the School of Medicine in Denver, a partnership that remains strong today.

Dr. Bowler was a devoted mentor.  Graduate students applying to the program in its first years were welcomed and funded.  His door was always open, as was his mind, and students knew they could count on careful counsel.  He was at his most thoughtful on late fall afternoons when the sounds of the CU men’s (in those days) marching band rehearsal were audible in his office.  He taught principles and problem solving.  When a piece of equipment did not work he was quick to remind the frustrated operator that the first thing to check was the power source.  Such advice all these years later may seem quaint.  Perhaps.  It was also effective and memorable.  He loved speech and language and he worried about careful pronunciation, definition, and use.  He was fond of the university; as a result his students came to love it, as well.

Dr. Bowler certainly is the “Father of SLHS.”  He retired in 1981, returning to the campus to teach three summer terms.  He currently resides in Boise, Idaho, some 100 miles from his boyhood home. E-mail

Natalie Hedberg

Yoshiyuki Horii

Elizabeth Jancosek

Richard F. Krug was a faculty member in SLHS from 1963 until his retirement in 1987. He passed away on May 4, 2005. He served for four years in the Army during World War II, both in the United States and in Europe with the 13th Airborne Infantry.  He graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in Special Education in 1949. In 1951, he received his M.A. from Northwestern University in Audiology, a new field of study that was fueled in part by soldiers returning from the war with hearing losses. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1960.

While at Northwestern University, Dick began providing services to deaf individuals for the Illinois Department of Vocational Rehabilitation. In 1951, he became the first clinical audiologist of the newly formed Bill Wilkerson Hearing and Speech Center in Nashville, Tennessee. From 1953 to 1959, he worked with the Oklahoma Commission for Crippled Children and the Oklahoma Department of Health, directing the public school hearing conservation program for the state of Oklahoma. In 1960, he became the Director of what is now the Callier Speech and Hearing Center.

Dick joined the faculty in SLHS at the University of Colorado in 1963 and served as its second chair for seven years.  One of his many contributions during this time was the acquisition and remodeling of the current academic and clinical home of the department.  For 24 years, he served as a consultant in industrial hearing conservation in the Rocky Mountain region and provided pre-certification training for Occupational Hearing Conservationists to a wide variety of companies. He was also engaged in forensic Audiology in the area of workman's compensation. He served on a number of committees in the early days of the Captioned Films section of the U.S. Department of Education and served on committees that developed curricular and instructional materials for schools for the deaf. He served on the editorial board of the American Annals of the Deaf. He was appointed by Governor Richard Lamm to a six year term on the Advisory Board for the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind. Dick was always interested in the education of deaf and hard-of-hearing children and was instrumental throughout his career in advancing educational and audiological practices.

Lynn Snyder, Senior Research Associate and Professor Emerita. She also is the Director of the Center for Language and Learning (CLL) and oversees the administration of the Center and its Modified Foreign Language (MFL) Program for college students with foreign language learning problems. Dr. Snyder also conducts research on the development of computer-based reading assessments for preschool and school age students and reading intervention programs for school age and adolescent students. Her research is conducted in collaboration with colleagues from CU’s Institute of Cognitive Science and is supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Science (IES) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Snyder is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the International Academy for Research on Learning Disabilities. CLL website| E-mail

Richard Sweetman, Emeritus Professor of Audiology. I have a love affair with C.U.!  I arrived in Boulder as a green (beanied) freshman in 1956.  After a few changes of major, it was clear that I was on the popular five-year Arts plan.  Finally, I decided on Speech Education, planning to teach in high school.  But in order to be somewhat prepared if any speech disordered students took my classes, I thought it would be important to take a few courses in communication disorders.  I really branched out by taking two audiology classes to start my senior year.  Within two weeks I had found my future!

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in speech education from C.U. in 1961, I attended Northwestern University, where I earned a master’s degree in clinical audiology.   Luckily, C.U. needed an audiologist that year, so I returned as an instructor in 1962.  I was told I could stay for up to three years without a doctoral degree, so I prepared myself to leave after the three years to become a clinical audiologist.  But…no, I liked the academic life so much that I returned to Northwestern to earn a Ph.D. degree in 1968.  Once again I returned to C.U., with tenure and title of professor coming in the mid-70s.  I taught a lot of courses and supervised many students in HEC (Hearing Evaluation Clinic), and I served as Chair of the Department in three stints for a total of nearly 11 years.  My major achievement as a professor was to introduce audiology to several generations of students and even to turn some students on to the profession.  My major achievements as chair were to be involved in enrolling strong graduate students and in hiring outstanding faculty members whose numbers eventually grew from a graduate student body of two and a faculty of five to the vibrant, conscientious, and caring group now in place.  My major contribution in research came in directing Kenneth Aspinall’s Ph.D. dissertation, which demonstrated that the concept of phonemic balance seems not to be a critical aspect in the assessment of speech discrimination.  In addition to the above activities, from 1996 to 2006 I served as Director of Scholarships for the College of Arts and Sciences.  By the year 2000, however, I had hung up most of my professional robes.
 
Apart from membership on a university committee, occasional attendance at lectures and auditing classes, season football tickets (45 yard line!) and attendance at some men’s and women’s basketball games, I have no active ties to the academic home I love:  UCB, particularly the SLHS department.  However, you may see me on campus as I stop by to pick up mail, to attend some event, and/or to reminisce with old friends and to meet new ones. E-mail

Rita Weiss