The concept of colleges and universities as place-bound societal institutions with missions to improve individual lives and the health of their communities, in other words – as anchor institutions – strikes me as increasingly relevant to the future of American public higher education. Yes, higher education does offer advancement to its students, and yes, institutions…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
Community Colleges, Immigrant Needs & the Job Market
A straightforward question is sometimes the best way to understand an issue – not because one might find an easy answer, but because the question opens up doors to complexity and helps with broader comprehension. In 2007, Duane E. Leigh, an economics professor emeritus from Washington State University, and Andrew Gill, a professor of economics…
Management By OKRs
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…
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…