New Books in Higher Education

Bob Fisher earned the moniker “Bob the Builder” by spearheading over $1 billion in new construction during his 21-year tenure at Belmont University. Accompanying and enabling the physical transformation of the campus was a dramatic expansion of the University’s programs, including the addition of medical, law and pharmacy schools, the acquisition of two colleges of art & design, that enabled Belmont to grow from fewer than 3,000 students to over 8,000 during his tenure. A core part of growth strategy was becoming “Nashville’s University”, including the largest Music Business program in the U.S. and a new performing arts center that serves as home for the Nashville Opera. Bob share how he was able to leverage his economics and business training to create one of the most remarkable financial success stories in higher education – with the University generating an $82 million annual surplus on a budget of $350 million, while drawing under 2% of the endowment and offering annual faculty salary increases averaging 5%/year. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Paul LeBlanc arrived at Southern New Hampshire University in 2003 it had just attained university-status and begun a few online degrees to supplement its small on-campus population in Manchester, NH. Today it is one of the world’s few “mega-universities”, with 170,000 students, all but 4,000 of which are in online degree programs. LeBlanc describes how he applied the teachings of his friend and board member, the late Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, to take on the University of Phoenix and other for-profits that were dominating online education in the early 2000s, and then to disrupt SNHU’s own successful online degrees by launching low-cost, self-paced or competency-based education. He discuss the trends that are further destabilizing today’s higher education market and how SNHU is positioning itself to benefit from them.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is it possible to integrate scholarly study with contemplative practice? What are the benefits and potential pitfalls of doing so? Join us as we speak to Dr. Ben William about Naropa University’s vision of Contemplative Education along with their brand-new Masters in Yoga Studies program.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas O’Reilly tells the inspiring story of Pine Manor College, which serves more students of color (90%) and first-generation college students (85%) than almost any small private college in the U.S. He shares how he was able to quickly turnaround the College that was in crisis – 6 presidents in 10 years and decades of structural deficits that had depleted the endowment. By developing a range of strategic partnerships and auxiliary revenue streams (that quickly grew to more than 50% of college revenues) he was able to balance the budget and gain national attention for the College’s mission. When the COVID pandemic hit cutting off all this auxiliary revenue overnight, the College was thrown back into crisis. Tom quickly pivoted to Plan B, engineering a strategic partnership with nearby Boston College in record time (under 2 weeks), that included a $50 million investment in a new Pine Manor Institute at BC to carry on the College’s mission of serving high-need students. He shares the lessons from this experience for other colleges and universities considering strategic partnerships. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of William Tierney, University Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. We talk about his book Get Real: 49 Challenges Confronting Higher Education (SUNY, 2020), about what people really believe when it comes to higher education, and also about what people need to do when it comes to higher education.William Tierney : "Oftentimes the board and the administration and the faculty are in cahoots with one another, in the sense that the marker is only how to improve in the rankings. And you can see this when a teaching college becomes a state university, and then it will try to move away from teaching and move towards research. And a board member will feel good about that: 'Boy, I came in, and my institution was ranked 250th, and now it's a 100. We the board are doing a great job.' And what the administration will say is: 'I transformed the institution. We were 250, and now we're 100.' And the faculty will say, 'Yup, the students are better.' And all this impacts on writing centers like this: Writing centers are often seen as problems–––you know, that kids go to the writing center because they have a problem. Well, then, if we don't have writing centers, then we don't have students who have problems–––which is, of course, the exact wrong way to think about an essential skill that we need for the twenty-first century." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Drummond provides a master class for any higher education leader contemplating a strategic alliance or merger with another institution. She describes and draws lessons from the many earlier failed partnership efforts of Andover Newton Seminary as it sought ways to continue its mission and become financially viable. And then describes in detail the carefully crafted, three-stage process which ANS negotiated with Yale Divinity School to move the Seminary to New Haven. This is the first of three episodes with presidents who’ve led the successful integration of their institutions into larger universities.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020), Katina L. Rogers tackles three major issues in academia – post-PhD careers, academic labor practices, and inclusivity and equity. Rogers demonstrates how scholarly reward practices hide the realities of faculty work, value normative rather than innovative outcomes, drive admissions practices for graduate programs, and narrow the definition of post-PhD success. Yet Rogers does not accept that the university of the past – or even the present – must be the university of the future.Rogers begins from the basis that higher education, humanities graduate study and scholarly research are public goods. She calls for a more expansive view of humanities graduate training that is generative rather than replicative. Rogers argues against reducing humanities PhD cohorts and programs, instead laying out a framework for faculty and advisors to initiate institutional change. She provides graduate students with context and analysis to inform the ways they discern their own graduate training. Perhaps most importantly, she highlights that multiple careers pathways can offer engaging, fulfilling, and even unexpected pathways for students who seek them out.Amanda Jeanne Swain, PhD. Historian. Humanities Center executive director. Navigating academic systems with faculty and grad students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an age characterized by rampant anti-intellectualism, Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her 'Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) charges the academy with thinking constructively rather than competitively, building new ideas rather than tearing old ones down. She urges us to rethink how we teach the humanities and to refocus our attention on the very human ends that the humanities can best serve. One key aspect of that transformation involves fostering generous thinking, a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is a companion to the interview with David Galas on the founding of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, the newest of the Claremont Colleges. Gayle Riggs describes the family background and unusual career path that prepared her husband Hank to successfully lead Harvey Mudd College and then found KGI. This included two very different roles at Stanford: first as a faculty member who founded the Engineering Management program whose graduates have led many Silicon Valley firms, and then as head of Development, where he led Stanford’s first billion dollar campaign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Galas describes his unusual journey from Air Force brat to theoretical physicist to Systems Biologist in charge of the Human Genome Project for the U.S. Department of Energy. He then became a bioscience entrepreneur creating both a string of start-up companies and co-founding, along with Hank Riggs, the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Science, the 7th and newest of the Claremont Colleges. He describes their unusual partnership and what led Hank to create KGI after his successful tenures as President of Harvey Mudd College and leading the first billion-dollar campaign in higher education for Stanford University. Together with the founding faculty they created the first higher education institution with the mission of bridging the gap between scientists and business to develop leaders who could help commercialize the exciting breakthroughs coming from the life science revolution.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices