Don Wayne is a retired professor who served as Provost of Revelle College at the University of California San Diego, and prior to that as Chair of the UCSD Literature Department.  He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrews Clark Library.  He has a background of teaching in a variety of higher educational environments, including an academic enrichment program for students from underserved K-12 schools (the SEEK Program, Herbert Lehman College CUNY), an experimental college for high achieving students (Bensalem, Fordham University), an undergraduate program in Comparative Literature at Ohio State University, and 38 years of teaching undergraduate and graduate courses at UC San Diego.

Don comes from a family of five generations of K-12 teachers and school administrators. The current adult generation includes three teachers in California: one of his sons is a public middle school teacher; one daughter-in-law is a public middle school principal, another daughter-in-law teaches in a private school that has an educational philosophy very similar to that of ILA.

Don was born in New York City where he attended public primary and secondary schools.  He did undergraduate work at Queens College and Cal State Los Angeles. He has a PhD in Literature at UC San Diego (1975). His graduate work included a year of study in France,  at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1971-1972), where he studied with Roland Barthes and Louis Marin.