The former Chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, Steven J. Diner, retired from administration to return to his roots as a faculty member. He celebrated the transition by writing a very solid book of history, Universities and Their Cities: Urban Higher Education in America. Uniquely qualified for the task, Diner had taught urban issues for years. His…
Author: David Potash
Working Against Equity
Descriptive statistics sometimes do not receive the respect that they deserve. It’s unfortunate, for in the right hands, with wisdom, judgment and expertise, descriptive statistics can make a complicated story clear. One of the better uses of descriptive statistics that I have read in quite some time is found in Charles T. Clotfelter’s Unequal Colleges…
Imagining A Different University
Raewyn Connell is a world-famous sociologist who holds a University Chair at the University of Sydney. Extraordinarily prolific and influential in several fields, Connell recently focused her attention on the research university. In The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change, Connell provides a critical and empirical look at…
Anchor Institutions Redux
The concept of colleges and universities as place-bound societal institutions with missions to improve individual lives and the health of their communities, in other words – as anchor institutions – strikes me as increasingly relevant to the future of American public higher education. Yes, higher education does offer advancement to its students, and yes, institutions…
Community Colleges, Immigrant Needs & the Job Market
A straightforward question is sometimes the best way to understand an issue – not because one might find an easy answer, but because the question opens up doors to complexity and helps with broader comprehension. In 2007, Duane E. Leigh, an economics professor emeritus from Washington State University, and Andrew Gill, a professor of economics…
Management By OKRs
John Doerr is a smart and wildly successful businessman, a billionaire and tech leader. An engineer who went to Rice University and then to Harvard for an MBA, Doerr joined Intel just as the microcomputer industry was taking off. He was one of the company’s most successful salespeople. Doerr’s impact and success was much more…
Explaining Economics
Academic disciplines are more than collections of scholars, faculty, classes and majors and graduate students. They are people bound together by like-minded questions and processes, pursuing shared ways of asking and answering difficult questions that can inform who we are and what we do as educated human beings. Sometimes, amid all the bashing of higher…