As a consultant I hope to use my multi-disciplinary administrative experience to help presidents and boards solve problems that are limiting institutional success, recognizing that most problems are systemic and require adjustments in multiple areas to move an institution to a better place.
My administrative work has always been research-based and my writing reflects a career-long effort to inform institutional decision-making and public policy with evidence-based analysis. This strand of my research dates to the early 1970’s when, as a faculty member at Carleton College, colleagues and I began a program of admissions marketing research. One product of this work was a book—Larry H. Litten, Daniel Sullivan, and David Brodigan, Applying Market Research in College Admissions (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1983)—analyzing data The College Board helped collect from high ability students and parents of such students in six large urban markets around the country. It introduced institutional researchers and planners to new ways to understand admissions market position.
As president at Allegheny and St. Lawrence, I encouraged similar research and collaborated with our institutional research folks on studies of special interest. As the assessment of student learning and other outcomes and the study of college costs became more important, my interest and collaborations moved in those directions. Examples of that work are: "Merit and Access," Inside Higher Ed, April 19, 2007; and “The Hidden Costs of Low Four-Year Graduation Rates,” Liberal Education, Vol. 96, No. 3 (2010), 24-31.
This background has led me, both as a Middle States accreditation team chair and in consulting work, to urge institutions facing key decisions to analyze and understand multiple kinds of financial and other data and to benchmark themselves against comparable institutions to assess their situations realistically.
I was most fortunate at Carleton, both as a faculty member and as Vice President for Planning and Development, to have Bob Gale, a Carleton alumnus and AGB’s founding president, as a trustee. He helped sensitize me very early in my career to the impact best practices in board governance, shared governance, and the relationship of board and president have on institutional success. As a result, I worked continually with the Allegheny and St. Lawrence boards on these issues and now very much enjoy assisting presidents at institutions with performance issues in leadership and governance.
I learned early that strategic planning must be tied closely to realistic financial planning or it will most likely be just an empty exercise. I introduced Carleton to multi-year financial planning using computer models I wrote. In 1980 my administrative portfolio came also to include development, the first of a series of leadership roles in four campaigns at three colleges that raised half a billion dollars.
In the end, teaching and liberal education are the reason I am in higher education and I want my consulting to reflect that. The non-academic and student life institutional leadership disciplines exist to serve student learning and development. I tried to become a truly multi-disciplinary leader—seeking deep understandings of admissions and aid, finances, facilities, technology, development and institutional marketing, and student life—because I believe that positive institutional change that leads to higher levels of student learning and student development is always about systemic change.
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