Biographical sketch
As an undergraduate at the University of Denver, Gerry Philipsen was on the debate team for four years, participating in those years in over 300 judged debates. This was always in a competitive milieu in which you debated both sides of the year’s debate topic, and thus it was a sustained education in looking at both (or more) sides of a question. He likes to think this made him an open-minded man. In 1965, he was selected as a member of the two-person US International Debate Team, and in that capacity in the winter of 1966 visited 26 universities in the British Isles where he spoke in the university debates unions.
After graduating in 1967 with a bachelor of arts (in social sciences and in speech), he entered graduate school at Northwestern University, with the support of an NDEA fellowship, and finished his Ph.D. in public address and group communication in 1972. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, he wrote his doctoral dissertation, Communication in Teamsterville: A Sociolinguistic Study of Speech Behavior in an Urban Neighborhood. His advisor was Professor Ethel M. Albert of anthropology.
From Northwestern, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and in 1978 joined the faculty at the University of Washington. At Washington he won the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1984 and the award for Distinguished Faculty Contribution to Lifelong Learning in 2002 (the first year it was awarded). He has served as Chair of the Faculty Senate, Chair of the Senate Committee on Planning & Budgeting, Chair of the department, and Secretary of the Faculty.
Gerry Philipsen and his wife Marie Lorenzen Philipsen live in Edmonds, Washington. Their three children and their spouses, and their three grandchildren, all live in the greater Seattle, Washington area.