Posts Tagged: college presidents

Lessons in College Presidential Appointments: Dartmouth College to the University of Florida

In April 1981, David McLaughlin was named the 14th president of Dartmouth College. Though separated by four decades, there are striking similarities between Dartmouth’s appointment of McLaughlin and the University of Florida’s selection last week of its next president, Ben Sasse. If the past is prologue, Sasse and Florida are in for a rough ride. McLaughlin was an alumnus of Dartmouth, both...

Revisiting the Work of Dartmouth’s John G. Kemeny: A NEJHE Q&A with College Presidential Historian Stephen J. Nelson

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. In the following Q&A, NEJHE Executive Editor John O. Harney asks Nelson what lessons today's leaders could learn from his latest book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency (Lexington Books, ...

John Hennessey, Barrier Breaker

John Hennessey lived a remarkable, full life as a professor, as a leader in his field of management and business, and moral, ethical leadership, and as dean at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and provost at the University of Vermont. He was extraordinary on many fronts, a great man who lived in tumultuous times marked by world war as a young man, later as a graduate student and then ...

Race-Baiting on Campus: A College President Speaks Up About Diversity

A college president spoke up to his students and campus community the other day. His concern was a timely topic: race and race relations, bigotry and racial slurs. And who was the president? Well, while we don’t often think of these leaders in this way, the superintendents of our three major military academies are the presidents of their universities. And this superintendent of the Air Force Aca...

The Conundrums of the University’s Ideological Battlegrounds

The lively experiment that is the college and university in America is characterized by sustained struggles and tempered triumphs that have both undergirded and challenged the fundamental foundation of the academy. The economist and philosopher Kenneth Minogue conveyed in his book, The Concept of the University that the university can and should allow ideologies to be debated within its gates. How...

Reflecting: Perspectives on the College Presidency

Following are perspectives from Stephen J. Nelson, who recently wrote his fifth book about college presidents, College Presidents Reflect: Life in and out of the Ivory Tower. Nelson is associate professor of Educational Leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar in the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. NEJHE has published his thoughts on previous occasions: Tales from ...

Tales from the Presidency: The Dartmouth and NYU Chapters

An expert on the college presidency weighs on on challenges facing presidents at Dartmouth and NYU ... Cashing chips at Dartmouth? Dartmouth College did not need the round of controversial headlines that were about to come its way nor the cascade that was surely to follow. Only weeks in office as president, Philip Hanlon found his back to the wall. What had happened and so early on his watch? A...

Propping Up Presidencies? (Book Review)

Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How to Prevent It; Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, Gerald B. Kauvar, and E. Grady Bogue; The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2013. Most books on the college presidency are either autobiographies or prescriptions for success. We avoid autopsies, diagnoses of leadership collapses and college president resignations/terminations. Usually no one want...

Comings and Goings: They’d Rather Be in Philadelphia?

Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies associate director Paul E. Harrington moved to Philadelphia-based Drexel University. Harrington has been a frequent contributor to NEJHE and to NEBHE events****Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J., will also leave leave Boston for Philly, departing as dean of Boston College's Lynch School of Education to become the 27th president of Saint Joseph'...

Holy Moly: McFarland to Step Down as Prez of Holy Cross

Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J., announced he will be step down as the 31st president of the College of the Holy Cross once a successor is in place.A computer scientist with an interest in the intersection of technology and ethics, McFarland was named president of the Worcester, Mass., Jesuit college in 2000. Before that, he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga Universit...