President Obama has made it clear that a higher education rating system is on the near horizon. Members of his administration have been engaged in listening sessions across the country for months, hearing from students, families, faculty, and administrators. At the national meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC,…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
Don’t Stop – Even If You’ve Heard This Before
While most all of us who pursue careers in higher education are idealists, those that are willing to share their aims and ideals are not all that common. The realities of academia in the twenty-first century are sobering and it’s often safer to keep idealism closeted. When we do encounter the baldly stated hope for education that…
Institutionalized Inequity and Chicago Real Estate
Beryl Satter’s Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America is a brilliant book. A historian with a personal history with Chicago real estate, Satter’s father, Mark Satter, was a lawyer and landlord in Lawndale, a working west-side neighborhood in Chicago. Mr. Satter died in 1965, short on funds and…
Beautiful Collection – Nagle and Picking Up
Twenty some years ago at New York University I met an engaging and super smart anthropologist, Robin Nagle. She had a reputation as a very good teacher (well-deserved) and I was carried away by her enthusiasm and curiosity. We started talking about her interests and she told me that she was fascinated by garbage. I…
Performance Funding & Academic Incentives
Can a funding scheme based on for-profit world motivation make a positive difference in the not-for-profit world of higher education? I am optimistic – but not for the reasons that policymakers may suppose. Public higher education in the United States is increasingly supported through Performance Based Funding (PBF). A recent report by the Education Policy…
Round-Table with Secretary Duncan
Friday morning Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met with 15 college presidents of HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions) at the HACU national conference in Chicago. As president of Wilbur Wright College, I joined in the hour-long discussion. The Secretary’s aim was to ask for feedback about President Obama’s plan for college affordability. It was the first of many sessions Duncan expects to hold…
Humans and Imaginary Vulcans
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is an important book, well deserving of its Wikipedia page. Kahneman, along with his late partner Amos Tversky, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences even though the pair are psychologists. They have a genius for creative experimentation. The book is a high-level summation of their research, along with…