If you’re looking for a hero in American history whose work and words have increasing relevance today, it would be difficult to find a better candidate than Ida B. Wells. Born in 1862 in slavery and living until 1931, Wells had an extraordinarily productive and courageous life, fighting for racial and social justice. She truly…
Author: David Potash
Not So Sporting: A Scandalous Reminder
All the way back in 1989, seemingly hundreds of years ago, David Whitford wrote A Payroll To Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption, and Football at SMU. I picked it up at a used book store, curious about a scandal I had heard about, but did not really follow. I’m glad that I read it.…
Leaders & Leadership: Revisiting Guidance
Leading effectively can be a life’s work. Inherently situational, leadership is defined and informed by context, people and circumstance, all of which constantly change. Recent experience hammers this home: figuring out how to lead in a pandemic, in the crucible of the recent crises, calls out for tools that can offer assistance and perspective. Recently…
Addressing Addresses
Deirdre Mask, I would wager, is an outstanding dinner companion, the kind of person you’d like to have sit next to you on a delayed airplane flight. I’ve never met her, so this may be idle conjecture. If you dip into her recent first book, though, I would be surprised if you thought otherwise. The…
Reality Pedagogy
Way back in 2016, before the pandemic and so much else, Columbia University Teachers College professor Christopher Emdin published For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . and the Rest of Y’all Too. Emdin is a successful academic and scholar, an innovative practitioner, and an important public voice. He also knows social…
Merit Debunked
One of the most insightful books about higher education in the past few years is The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl. It received a good degree of notice and mostly positive reviews, and was mentioned as one of Forbes Magazine’s…
Leadership Theory and the Community College
One of the most well-known professional development parables is the story of a rookie lumberjack who is a phenom when first let loose in the forest. Many trees fall but as the days add up, the new lumberjack cuts fewer and fewer trees. Frustrations mount and our lumberjack considers quitting. Only when a seasoned colleague…