Dr. Richard Vatz is a tenured full professor of Rhetoric and Communication at Towson University wherein he has served for almost 50 years. He won Towson University's "President's Award for Distinguished Service," the university's highest honor, in 2004. In the 2009-2010 year he won the Towson Student Government Association Faculty Member of the Year award and was the ¿rst Towson professor to win that award. He won the 2002 "Teacher of the Year Award" from the Student Government of Towson, and he has won 4 campus Outstanding Teaching Awards, the most of any faculty member. Vatz is the sponsor of two major awards: 1. The "Richard E. Vatz Agenda-Spin Persuasion Award," beginning as of fall, 2018, supports writing and/or media work and pedagogy focused on the rhetor-as-creative-agent, and work focusing on rhetor's responsibility in a persuasion model. This signi¿ cant award of [...], disbursed annually, is to be based on the rhetorical perspective argued in Vatz's "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation" and The Only Authentic Book of Persuasion: The Agenda-Spin Model (Authors Press, 2022), and 2. "The Richard E. Vatz Best Debater Award Endowment," a [...]/year Towson University Award since approximately 2014.He is a Faculty Fellow at the Eastern Communication Association and has been honored by the National Communication Association through his 2012 acceptance in the "Teachers on Teaching" Seminar as well as a separate seminar on his writings.He has a new edition of his book The Only Authentic Book of Persuasion: the Agenda-Spin Model (Authors Press), and he is co-editor of Thomas Szasz: The Man and His Ideas (Transaction Books: 2017), as well as other books and hundreds of articles and op-eds and other writings.