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…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
Building a Better Hispanic Serving Institution
Latinos in Higher Education and Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Creating Conditions for Success is an ASHE (Associate for the Study of Higher Education) report from 2013. It’s concise, well-written, grounded in research and scholarship, and an extraordinarily handy guide. It helps provide an understanding of better and best practices across HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions) and other MSIs…
Thinking Through Anchor Institutions
The Obama presidency ushered in many educational initiatives, including a more comprehensive look at what role universities and colleges might take in strengthening communities. The idea of an “anchor institution” has been in play for several decades as scholars, politicians, activists and others considered the many ways that placed-based nonprofits impacted their surrounding communities. Institutions…
A Closer Look at Grit
Some ideas seem so accessible and “right” that we accept them without much question. They resonate with our assumptions and align with common sense, or at least our common thinking. I don’t know if higher education is more susceptible than other sectors to these kinds of group-think trends, but we know that it happens. Certain…
Democracy and Higher Education
Colleges and universities are products of and contributors to our broader civic culture. Higher education reflects the world and often can point to where things are headed. Occasionally it may even influence direction. Untangling what our collective responsibilities are, within academe, to the development of a healthy civic culture, particularly an engaged democracy, is a…
Wise Pivots
Accenture, a global professional services company, is one of my college’s most active and generous business partners. We have learned so much from them through meetings, projects, collaboration, and day-to-day interaction. Consistently collegial and extraordinarily professional, the team at Accenture have helped to strengthen us and our students – and we’re not even their clients.…
Congratulations Graduates, And . . .
At the request of a neighborhood high school principal, I recently gave a short speech at their commencement. I was honored by the request, but to tell the truth, the invitation gave me pause. I’ve been to several high school graduations, including my own, and for the life of me I cannot remember who spoke…