Freeman A. Hrabowski, III is President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author most recently of "Holding Fast to Dreams: Empowering Youth from the Civil Rights Crusade to STEM Achievement" (2015). He chaired the President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans and is an advisor on…

Equity, once viewed as racially divisive and associated with activism within social justice movements that academic purists disdained as advocacy work, is now being embraced on the academic scene. The author questions whether this embrace of equity signifies an embrace of its critical and anti-racist foundations or whether the proliferation of…

Liberal education has been, since the creation of the republic, America's "signature" higher learning curriculum. There have been three enduring purposes for a liberal education: (1) developing the powers of the mind; (2) cultivating an examined sense of responsibility to self and others; and (3) acquiring empowering knowledge--the kind…

The United States is undergoing a transformation from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. The result is profound, accelerating, and unremitting change--demographic, economic, technological and global--which is disrupting the lives of many Americans. The result is that Americans will need upskilling and…

In the fall of 1981, author Peter Ewell, President Emeritus of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS), moved to Boulder, Colorado to direct a project funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation entitled "Using Information on Student Outcomes to Improve Program Planning and Decision-Making." Before this point--not…

As the higher education leadership landscape has become more complicated, particularly through retirements, there is greater difficulty in finding the best candidates for non-presidential positions, which has resulted in more facilitated searches. Candidate recruitment is the most visible work, but equally important is managing, enhancing, and…

Reform in American higher education depends on recognizing freshman courses as the foundation of higher-order thinking and learning. These courses must be recognized for their intellectual significance and their inherent possibilities for multi-disciplinary scholarship. The Maimon Hierarchical Fallacy is a phrase coined by Elaine Maimon to refer…

Adrianna Kezar recently sat down with Chancellor Tim White of the California State University system to discuss, among many other things, the newly released California State Graduation Initiative and what it will take to enact it. The key commitments of the initiative are: (1) hire more tenure-track faculty; (2) develop engaged advising; (3) solve…