It’s nearing the start of the fall semester and transfer students are flocking to college. No news with this – every year millions of students enroll in a new college or university. Throughout the nation the process is similar. Students gain acceptance, submit transcript from their home institution for evaluation, and then after processing, are…
Author: David Potash
Tipping Points and Higher Education
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is now fifteen years old. It has weathered financial crises, dramatic innovation in technology and science, and the inevitable backlash that accompanies success. For a while, it was what everyone talked about. You found it in airport bookstores and on magazine covers. The book was, in many ways, a tipping point for…
A Welcome Reminder Of Why We Do What We Do
Higher education is a twelve month a year, seven-day a week enterprise, but summers feel different. In the summer, students gather and disperse in hard-to-discern patterns. Faculty come and go. Some teach and some are away. The pace shifts for those on campus, compressed for some and leisurely for others. In the summer, administrative, logistical and…
How We Get The Point
Way back in days of yore, people who worked in higher education communicated with each other without using email or PowerPoint. Students and younger colleagues find this difficult to imagine. Hard copy typed memoranda and reports were the medium of choice. When making presentations, words were key. Sometimes we talked to each other on telephone. A chalkboard or overhead…
Spurs to Rethink Race
The recent race-hatred murders in Charleston, South Carolina and the heightened debates about reforms to mass incarceration and criminal justice, highlight the urgency of examining race as a critical factor shaping contemporary American life. It is inescapable – whether we think we are beyond it, whether we focus our attention on it, or wish that we have…
Case Studies and Higher Education Leadership
Bill Rezak, former president of Alfred University, offers a different kind of case study in The Best Dang Job in the World. The book tracks the imagined career of Rick Nedic, a made up ambitious dean with a facility with numbers and blessed with a supportive wife. Nedic’s professional life is played out in the broad middle…
Lower-Income Working Families in the Post-Welfare World – Lessons for Higher Ed
Caring for students will not guarantee success. Ongoing critical attention to students’ histories, experiences and values is essential for institutional effectiveness in higher education. For those of us who work at open access institutions, this means special awareness and sensitivity to issues of money, poverty, and agency. According to the federal government, a working family of…