Since her stint at MIT and the completion of her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, Steele has enjoyed an outstanding career as both an academic and an administrator at the University of Arizona. She has published five books and has taught for 20 years at the University of Arizona. After progressing through the stages of her academic career, from assistant to associate and then to full professor, she was looking for a new challenge and turned to administration. In 1990, she became associate dean of arts and sciences at the University of Arizona, then associate vice provost in 1994, and associate vice president in 1996. Steele says she enjoys the challenges of administrative work.
Administration has an immediacy to it.
There are a bunch of constraints and you have to try to figure out the best course of action. In the past eight years, the University of Arizona has made major changes in its approach to undergraduate education and Steele has been at the forefront of those changes. The university also restructured the general education courses to provide separate classes for students finishing their major and for those with little or no background in the subject. We no longer updated the catalogs, pamphlets, and booklets, we updated the resource and the publications were generated off that. Steele says she was attracted to UConn because of its research mission and its size.