Alejandra Campoverdi, by just about every measure, is an amazing person with an inspirational success story. The first in her family to graduate from college, she’s an author, a women’s health advocate, a public intellectual, and a former White House aide under President Obama. Campoverdi was a brilliant student, graduating cum laude from the University…
Author: David Potash
Amping Up Civic Power
Some works of political philosophy and action belong on library shelves. Others have a home in the classroom and community. K. Sabeel Rahman and Hollie Russon Gilman’s Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis belongs in the latter . The book examines current problems with American democracy (inequities, disengagement, lack of trust)…
The Rise of the All-Knowing Universities
Who knows best? And who do we trust to know best? In the years after World War II, America’s large research universities increasingly put themselves forward as the nation’s administrative experts, taking leadership roles in addressing big, complicated questions of economics and society. How higher education came to think of itself as the nation’s manager…
Thought Experiment: Climate Justice Universities
Jennie C. Stephens is a scientist, academic, feminist and provocative thinker. With a PhD from Caltech in Environmental Science and Engineering, along with decades of faculty appointments, Stephens knows about energy systems and the move from old to new technologies. The focus of her latest book, Climate Justice and the University: Shaping a Hopeful Future…
Walking The Walk Through Complexity
Amid the veritable sea of leadership advice, finding a guide that is practical, digestible, reasonable, and makes sense can be quite the task. There are so many ways that we can learn to be more effective, more humble, more strategic, more outcomes driven, accountable and flexible – the aspirational list is endless. Nonetheless, it is…
Politics, State Higher Education Policy, and Deinstitutionalization
Barrett J. Taylor, a professor of education at the University of North Texas and a frequent contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, is a scholar interested in the intersection of politics and higher education policy. His 2022 book, Wrecked: Deinstitutionalization and Partial Defenses in State Higher Education Policy, looks at attacks on higher education…
Don’t Look At That Squirrel – Your Productivity Depends Upon It!
We live in distracted times. Your attention is being tracked, monetized, tricked and transformed into power. One may “give” or “pay” attention, but rarely do we save or marshal it. We tend to agree, though, that when we lose attention, things take a turn for the worse. Cal Newport, Georgetown University professor and entrepreneur, credits…