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Blog:  Learning Innovation Derek Bruff is an old friend. When I found out that Derek had been promoted to Assistant Provost at Vanderbilt, I was totally stoked. (As was much of our small CTL world). Derek’s promotion is part of a trend in higher education where CTL leaders are also assuming institution-wide leadership roles. This is a trend that Eddie Maloney and I wrote about in our book Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education . Derek generously agreed to answer my questions about his new role. Q1: Tell us about your new Assistant Provost gig ?  How will this change your role as Executive Director for Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching? In many ways, the assistant provost position is an expansion of the work I’ve been doing as director of the Center for Teaching for years. The new role focuses on faculty development and educational initiatives from the Office of the Provost, and the Center for Teaching is certainly the home base for facult...

Image:  At the height of the coronavirus pandemic and movement for racial justice last year, education leaders, policy makers and heads of corporations based in Illinois were faced with a troubling statistic: Black student enrollment in the state’s colleges and universities had dropped about 29 percent between 2013 and 2018, according to an August 2020 report by the Illinois Board of Higher Education. “I was just blown away,” said Zaldwaynaka Scott, president of Chicago State University, the only predominantly Black institution in the state. “The statistics are very much at a crisis level.” The release of the board's report came at a moment ripe for action and change, as colleges and corporations across the country were responding to the murder of George Floyd with promises to become more diverse and inclusive, alleviate systemic racism and barriers to economic mobility, and expand access to affordable and quality higher education. Scott said she easily garnered s...

Image:  Lesley Del Rio wasn’t sure she would complete her studies this year and get her associate's degree in business administration. She and her 10-year-old son were cramped together in their small Denver apartment during the pandemic, and the normal boundaries between her roles as a single mother, college student and working adult came “crashing down.” “For a little bit there, I felt like there was no escape,” she said. “And I still have to turn around and make things happy and comfortable and make sure that I wasn’t oozing fear onto my kiddo so he could feel safe and so he could feel like there was a sense of fun and normalcy in his life still.” Appointments with her mental health therapist started to feel like a chore, just another thing on her to-do list as a working mother in college. Mental health care can feel like “an unobtainable luxury” for parents like herself, she said. Many students parents who need such help struggle to get it, according to a new st...

Image:  The University of Miami is pushing out its law dean despite objections from the faculty, apparently because he didn’t raise enough money. The dean, Anthony Varona, will remain at Miami in his role as the M. Minnette Massey Professor of Law, focusing on media and sexuality law. He served as dean for less than two years, most of which was spent navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. In a message to the law school this week, Miami president Julio Frenk said he’d asked Varona to step down as dean, effective July 1, as the university approaches its centennial and “we prepare to accelerate progress on our strategic priorities.” The historic events of the last 16 months “have revealed both challenges and opportunities that highlight the need for a dean with the required vision and effectiveness of execution to bring the school to new levels of excellence,” Frenk said. In particular, “the current capital campaign -- which will culminate in four short years -- presents ...

Image:  Hundreds of community colleges could one day share online courses after the launch of a new network called the League for Innovation Online Course Sharing Consortium . The League for Innovation in the Community College , a nonprofit membership group whose mission is to cultivate innovation in community colleges, announced the launch of the new online course-sharing consortium today. The course-sharing consortium will be open to League for Innovation in the Community College members to join. The membership group currently has a few hundred institutional members, most of which are based in the U.S., but some of which are also located internationally. The League for Innovation Online Course Sharing Consortium will work with a company, Acadeum, to establish online course-sharing partnerships between participating institutions. The company will provide a course-sharing platform as well as administrative support to the consortium. Consortium Members The following ...

President Biden has announced his intent to nominate Lisa Brown to serve as general counsel at the Department of Education. Brown was a part of both the Obama and Clinton administrations, serving as assistant to President Obama and staff secretary in his White House. During the Clinton administration, she worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice before becoming counsel to Vice President Gore. She is currently the vice president and general counsel for Georgetown University. "Her commitment to helping students grow and succeed will serve as a great asset to the Department as we fight for equal opportunity for all students, reopen America's schools for in-person learning, and work to close equity gaps in our education system," Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. Brown's nomination must be confirmed by the Senate -- so far, the Senate has only confirmed two Education Department nominees, with four others awaiting fu...

During the 2020 fiscal year, states spent $2.68 billion on private colleges and universities, the equivalent of $563 per full-time student across the country, according to a brief by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Most of that money -- 89.7 percent -- went toward financial aid. By comparison, states spent $93.5 billion -- or $8,436 per full-time student across the country -- on public higher education institutions during fiscal year 2020. Pennsylvania allocates the largest percentage of state higher education funding to private colleges and universities, appropriating 8.9 percent of its total spending to private institutions. Meanwhile, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming and Washington, D.C., did not put any state dollars toward private institutions in fiscal year 2020. North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah each had large inflation-adjusted increases in state support for private higher education during fiscal year 2020, uppi...