Deborah Meier’s The Power of Their Ideas: lessons for America from a small school in Harlem focuses on the common sense innovations, policies and leadership decisions that made the Central Park East Elementary School and Secondary School (CPESS) a nationally-known success story. A founding co-principal and a driving force in the school’s development, Meier recounts…
Organizational Change in Higher Education – a summary review of the scholarship
Adrianna J. Kezar, an associate professor at University of Maryland and an ERIC higher education editor, summarized a raft of recent scholarship on organizational change in Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations. The title is a mouthful, and while accurate, an even more precise description would emphasize that…
Metaphors and Institutional Understanding
Change is a constant if an academic unit is going to stay active and engaged in the professional world, both within and outside of academia. Change does not come easy to higher education, however, as its benefits are rarely clear while its costs are all too apparent. As a dean, I do much of my…
2011 Convocation
August 30, 2011 Welcome, faculty, staff, colleagues, alumni, friends and above all, new students to Convocation. On behalf of everyone at Curry College, we are absolutely thrilled you are here – and I am honored to speaking before you this morning. Now you may be wondering – why am I here? And what, exactly, is…
Academia’s Dilemma
Important and interesting questions are often difficult for higher education to digest. Michael Pollan raises just such a vital question in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The book has reached into America’s public intellectual consciousness in a thoughtful and profound way. It is related, perhaps, to a similarly provocative…
Career Advice Can Appear in the Strangest Forms
Career development centers are hot spots on college campuses. Prospective students and their parents inspect them, faculty seek their perspective on student success and failure in the world of work, employers liaise with them to find talent, and alumni offices partner with them to keep graduates engaged. In a world that demands outcomes, higher education…
If You’re Bored with Art in London . . . .
Napoleon is reported to have once quipped that from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. The observation is particularly apt when it comes to contemporary art. A few steps and a turn of the head, a mood, a sound, or even the mildest of predilections can render the abstract profound or the…