Standing 6 foot 7 inches, with a booming voice and loads of academic accolades to his name, Associate Professor Drew Loewe can be intimidating.

Just take a look at this website where his resume details the sorts of triumphs that academics hold dear: Writing Center directing, manuscript reviewing, Honors Thesis advising and committees galore. To make it all scarier, he had a career as a lawyer before he joined the faculty in 2008.

“This sounds goofy, but I was intimidated by his stature,” said English Writing and Rhetoric major Shelby Sementelli. “I was also intimidated by his expansive knowledge, and at first I thought he was going to laugh at my surface level understanding of the readings for class.”

Since he started teaching in 2008, Loewe has been published 12 times in various academic formats; he has been a part of 14 different administrative and university positions, including Fencing Club adviser. Somehow, he’s made time to attend seven different teaching and writing workshops and symposias since 2012. He also is an avid bread baker, a metalhead, an online dater (met his wife in an AOL chatroom back in the nineties) – and the guy loves his social media. He posts pictures of his latest bread concoctions on Facebook and uses Twitter to follow fellow writing profs, among others.

“I’ve heard the ‘intimidating’ thing from time to time. I guess that my height and my high standards for classes create a certain impression for some,” Loewe said. “I also hear often that I’m one of the most helpful and approachable professors on campus, so go figure. I don’t try to be someone I’m not: what you see is what you get.”

Loewe grew up in Southern California, between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. He’ll tell you he hasn’t changed much.

“As a kid I liked to do pretty much the same things I like to do now,” he said. “I like to read, I like to watch football and I like to ride my bike. I got the golf bug at age 11 and played pretty much every day till I was 18. I was on the golf team in high school and I worked at the golf course so I was surrounded by golf.”

After graduating high school, Loewe went to the only college he applied to—the University of California, Santa Barbara and graduated in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Immediately afterwards, he applied and was admitted into the Gonzaga University School of Law in Spokane, Washington (while there, he developed a passion for mountain biking); and in 1993, after graduating cum laude, he decided to move back to California, where he prepared to take the bar exam.

“I took and, thank God, passed the bar and began working as an attorney in Southern California,” Loewe said. “At that point I thought I’d live my whole life in California. Then I met my wife on America Online (AOL).”

If it has never occurred to you that gray-haired, professorial types hung out in chat rooms (remember them?), well, it worked for Loewe.

“We ‘met’ on AOL in a random internet chatroom in December 1995 and met in person in 1996,” he said. “We were engaged by summer 1996 and got married in October 1997.”

He and then Mireya Fernandez, who lived in San Antonio, had a long distance courtship. After they married, she joined him in California, where they decided that they would eventually return to Texas. They lived in San Antonio, where Drew Loewe practiced law and Mireya Loewe worked as a consultant for the North American Development Bank.

However, life as a litigation lawyer started to become unappealing for Loewe. He was handling insurance defense cases, which involved budgets and reports. Loewe described it as, “a real grind.”

In 2002, he decided to quit practicing law.

“The practice of law itself is interesting, or can be, but doing it on a sort of billable-hour-hamster-wheel just got to be kind of soul-sucking,” he said, adding that rejecting a career was, “almost like a death, a death of your concept of yourself, that you’ve always worked very hard to achieve.”

Loewe tried to think about things he enjoys as he planned his next steps. After he took a couple of classes at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he decided that he wanted to teach college.

“I always found teaching attractive and interesting,” Loewe said. “I’m influenced by the fact that my father taught high school English for 35 years, that my sisters has taught English for 25 years at community college, and that my brother-in-law is an English teacher.”

In 2004, he graduated from UTSA with a master’s in English. Five years later, he received his doctorate in English from Texas Christian University, where he wrote a dissertation about one of his favorite rhetorical figures—Kenneth Burke.

At first, Loewe used the traditional, lecture- based approach to teaching. As his experience with teaching grew, he started to tweak the way he taught. Now he incorporates websites like Reddit into his Current Theories of Rhetoric and Composition class. Loewe said he prefers to teach via the Socratic method.

“Rather than ‘Here’s my thoughts on something. Absorb them and spit them back to me in the approved fashion,’ the Socratic method can move the ball forward in productive ways and it allows one to be honest about the fact that you, as a teacher, are also a lifelong learner,” Loewe said.

Loewe likes to holds his students to a high standard.

“If you have lower standards, students will race to the bottom to join you there. If you have high standards, a lot of times students will work their ass off for a ‘B’ but they would otherwise be a ‘C’ or whatever student,” Loewe said.

Loewe’s dedication to students inside the classroom is matched only by his dedication and concern for them outside the classroom.

“I’m from Kansas and one time over the summer there was a tornado kind of close to my parents’ house,” Sementelli said. “The next day I had an email in my inbox from Dr. Loewe. He wanted to make sure my family and I were okay. It really warmed my heart to know that I had a professor who cared so much about me.”

And then there’s the bread.

“I’ve gotten to where I can consistently produce — without bragging — an excellent, boule of bread,” Loewe said. “And my challenge for this year that I’ve set for myself is the baguette.”

Loewe said he would not be where he is today without the help and guidance of those like Ann George, his dissertation chair and others, like English Writing and Rhetoric Department Chair Mary Rist.

“I always say everybody at the department would take a bullet for her,” Loewe said. “ She’s just great about helping us in little things like scheduling and ways that we can all manage with our kids. I mean our department meetings always have wine and snacks and lots of laughter and that’s not always true of academic department meetings.”

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