Written by Kurt Baumbach, Academic Evaluation Services
Dear TAICEP Colleagues:
I was asked to share some words about Dr. Lou Nunes, the president and founder of my company, Academic Evaluation Services, Inc., who passed away on May 20, 2024. As I was gathering my thoughts, I realized I could not express myself better than when I nominated her for the TAICEP Hall of Acclaim in 2021. I would like to share the speech I gave at the ceremony in full:
“I love this photo of Lou, that was at the last in-person NAFSA conference in Washington DC. She saved pins from every NAFSA conference she attended and attached them to her bag and, as you can see, there are A LOT of pins! And she looks so happy.
It has been very challenging to try to condense Dr. Lou Nunes’ life and career into five minutes because she has just done so much. For those of you who don’t know her or don’t know her well, Lou was born in Brazil but her experience with international education began at a very young age when her father was stationed in Washington, DC, and she attended school in the US. Back in Brazil, she earned her first degree in English and Portuguese at the Notre Dame Faculty in Rio and began a career in teaching, teaching ESL to students from elementary school age up to working professionals.
In the 1980’s she did what so many of our students and clients do, which is to pick up and move to a new country. She moved to Ohio and earned her Master of Education degree at Bowling Green State University and then her Ph.D. in Curriculum Theory and Development at Louisiana State University, and she did all of this as a single mother with three school-age children.
It was also at Louisiana State where Lou first got involved with credential evaluation. She was working in the International Graduate Admissions office there before starting at SpanTran, a private credential evaluation organization, in 1996 and finally starting her own credential evaluation organization, Academic Evaluation Services, Inc., in 2005 where she is currently the president.
Through it all, she has been heavily involved in the associations that have supported our field. She has presented innumerable conference sessions, webinars, and workshops, and has served on and chaired committees in organizations including but not limited to NAFSA, AACRAO, EAIE, FAIE (our local Florida organization), and of course TAICEP, where she is a founding member. She has expertise in all areas of this field but exceptional expertise in the credential evaluation of Portuguese-speaking countries – she is the author of the 2004 AACRAO-NAFSA-PIER Country Study of Brazil, and also of Cuba, where she was involved in the NAFSA Cuba Engagement and the Congreso Internacional de Educacion Superior in Havana.
On a personal note, I wanted to share something she told me on my first visit to Tampa when we were discussing me coming to work for her. She said “I’m not a capitalist, I’m a socialist”. At first I thought she was being literal and sharing with me her political or economic philosophy. But she clarified, the thing she wanted to share rather than accumulate wasn’t money or wealth or property, but knowledge and experience. For her, this isn’t just a job or a business or a venue to make money, it’s her vocation and her passion.
She is all about two things, sharing knowledge and mentoring and developing the next generation. That’s why she has been so involved in all these facets of our field, as well as supporting and encouraging me and our other evaluators to get involved in as many ways as we can. For her there was no point in just building up all these accomplishments if she wasn’t going to pass it down to those coming up after her.
And she lives what she believes, too. She knows what an impact we can have on our clients lives. Prior to COVID our office was open to the public and whenever a client had questions or was maybe getting elevated she was quick to go speak to them personally and had a way of helping them understand the process and usually although they came in angry but they would leave happy and smiling. She also hired a lot of staff who were new to this country and maybe a little unsure of how things work here and who sometimes struggled with English but she saw the value in them and what they could contribute and it has been really cool to see many of them grow and blossom here thanks to Lou’s opportunity. Some of them are with us for a short time and some have stayed with us for years but I’ve always been impressed by how many of them stop by years later to visit and chat with Lou.
Anyway, I’m going on too long here I think so I’ll wrap it up. There’s a lot I had to leave out but I hope you all agree that there are few people in our field more deserving of this acclaim than my colleague, mentor, and friend, Dr. Lou Nunes.”
Kurt Baumbach
Academic Evaluation Services
Editors note. The original text of Kurt’s speech was not altered. We apologize for any confusion that writing about Dr. Nunes in present tense causes.
If you are so moved, memorial donations for Dr. Lou Nunes may be made to the USF International Student Support Fund which supports students to stay in school during times of crisis. https://giving.usf.edu/online/gift/f/610005/
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