The Hope Lab at the University of Wisconsin, working with the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds Study, the Association of Community College Trustees, and Single Stop, a national organization focused on helping economically vulnerable students and their families, posted at the end of 2015 a powerful report – Hungry To Learn – on food and…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
Understanding Others – Harder and More Useful Than You Realize
Few life skills are more useful than understanding what other people are thinking. Successful leadership demands an awareness of it. Meaningful projects inevitably require of groups of people working together. Negotiating without it is close to impossible. Empathy – knowing and sharing another’s feelings – is vitally important to being a connected human. But empathy…
Telling Truths with Numbers
For all of us who work in colleges and universities, we might be doing fine with our students but we have a long way to go when it comes to educating the public. Data is at the very foundation of informed decision-making. Numbers do not lie. But when happens when people do not have data? Their guesses…
Partying Promises That Access Does Not Equal Success
Are our years in college the best one’s life? If so, is it because of the opportunities for personal growth, intellectual development, and lifelong friendships? Or does the myth of college rest on parties and Bacchanalian excess? The answer is probably a bit of both. One of the best places to answer that question are our…
Equity’s Bar is High
Like all worthy goals, equity sets a demanding bar. For higher ed, equity poses special challenges. Community colleges shoulder much of the burden of access. Most the millions who study in community college students enroll with needs and demands that extend well beyond the classroom. Two year students are poorer and more likely to have received a…
Who Decides
In more than twenty-five years of work in higher education, I have never seen or heard of a college or university that has shared governance definitively figured out. Regardless of structure, unionization, and a host of other factors, governance is consistently a site of debate and more often than not, confusion. William G. Bowen and…
Cheaters Never Win?
Students cheat. Surveys for the past 50 years have been disappointingly consistent: about 75% of all college students admit to cheating at least once. There is no shock or head scratching when we learn of plagiarized papers or purloined exams. What happened at the University of North Carolina, however, was different. UNC was home to institutionally…