2022: Eric Johnson

Dr. Eric Johnson's legacy at Dakota State University has touched every academic department. Dr. Johnson was part of the cohort of faculty tasked with designing new majors and programs after the new mission of technology and computer education was adopted in 1984. As part of this task force, he along with a few other faculty attended an IBM coding seminar during the summer of 1983. The primary purpose of this trip was to learn directly from IBM developers and managers what skills students would need to find jobs in the computing world. He authored the program proposal, A Brand New Day, detailing eleven new and modified academic programs for Dakota State College, many of which are the foundation of DSU's current catalog. In addition to his contributions to DSU's mission, Dr. Johnson was at the cutting edge of his field of English, developing software that could automate literary text analysis. He was director of the Conference on Symbolic and Logical Computing, focused on software development to aid in humanities research, and he was lead editor for TEXT Technology, a journal for research in the field of computer text analysis.