A President Looks at New Ways to Help Financially Needy Applicants
January 10, 2016
New Assault on Debt
Sheila C. Bair is widely credited as being one of the earliest high-ranking government officials to sound the alarm about the lending tactics and financial products that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Now the former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has set her sights on another area of the financial sector: student debt.
As the new president of Washington College, a liberal-arts institution in Maryland, she has made college affordability her top priority.
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New Assault on Debt
Sheila C. Bair is widely credited as being one of the earliest high-ranking government officials to sound the alarm about the lending tactics and financial products that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Now the former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has set her sights on another area of the financial sector: student debt.
As the new president of Washington College, a liberal-arts institution in Maryland, she has made college affordability her top priority.
Ms. Bair says she is concerned about the state of the economy that college students are entering.
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“If I can just make a little dent in that by helping the students who go here expand their job prospects and reduce their debt, I want to do that,” she says.
She recently announced a tuition freeze for the next academic year and has created a scholarship program called George’s Brigade, which offers full scholarships to high-performing, financially needy applicants, and allows such applicants from the same community to be admitted as a group so that they can support one another in adjusting to college.
In August, Ms. Bair became the first female president in the college’s 233-year history. But while that milestone was a long time coming, her hiring happened quickly.
She first learned of the position last spring when she called her friend Rebecca W. Rimel, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts, for advice about a different academic position.
Ms. Bair had worked at Pew after leaving the FDIC and both women also own homes near the Washington College campus in Chestertown.
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Ms. Rimel, a former member of the college’s Board of Visitors, mentioned that the college was looking for a new leader. Within a few weeks, Ms. Bair had spoken with the search committee and was hired for the position.
But while her hiring process went smoothly, she encountered a major challenge a few months into her presidency.
In mid-November, Ms. Bair evacuated the campus and ordered it shut through Thanksgiving week, after a troubled student who had been suspended from the college earlier that semester was reported by his parents as missing and armed.
The sophomore student, Jacob Marberger, was found dead five days later of what the police described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Ms. Bair says that it breaks her heart that the college was not able to prevent Mr. Marberger’s death, but that she has no regrets about her decision to evacuate and close the campus.
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“Based on what we knew,” she says, “we just couldn’t take any chances.” — Ben Wieder
A Rare Dean
Eli Jones had not intended to leave the University of Arkansas after just three years as business dean. But he still had the Aggie spirit, he says, so when he got a call from his alma mater, Texas A&M University, he couldn’t say no.
Mr. Jones, who became dean of Texas A&M’s Mays Business School in July, credits many professors there for “planting that seed” that led him to pursue a doctorate. He earned a Ph.D. in marketing at Texas A&M in 1997, after having earned a bachelor’s degree at the university in 1982 and an M.B.A. four years later.
Early in his career, he worked in sales management for companies like Nabisco and Quaker Oats. Now he brings perspectives in business theory and practice to his academic and administrative work as an “accidental dean,” he says.
“Universities saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. To be invited back by professors who taught me is a huge blessing.”
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In his two previous business deanships, at Arkansas and Louisiana State University, Mr. Jones led successful fund-raising campaigns and developed international partnerships. He has grand plans for Texas A&M as well. He spends “17 hours a day” thinking about how to move the school forward, he says, and will hold a strategic-planning meeting this week with administrators and selected faculty and staff members at the Mays school.
Mr. Jones, who is African-American, is also concerned about creating greater diversity in the field of business education. Soon after he earned his doctorate, he became a member of the then-fledgling PhD Project, whose goals include diversifying business-school faculties. He saw the project’s Marketing Doctoral Student Association grow from 20 members in 1997, the year it was founded, to 200.
In the past two decades, the percentage of business professors who are African-American, Hispanic, or Native American grew from 1 percent to 4 percent, for a total of about 1,300. Deans from underrepresented minority groups are also scarce, in part because it takes years for a faculty member to rise to an administrative level, says Bernard J. Milano, president of the PhD Project and the KPMG Foundation, the project’s lead supporter.
There are 43 deans from underrepresented minority groups leading business schools in the United States, Mr. Milano says. Seventeen of those deans are at historically black colleges. That’s why work by deans like Mr. Jones is so important, Mr. Milano says. He remembers getting a phone call from the University of Arkansas when a search committee was interviewing Mr. Jones. “I told them he’s too good to be true,” Mr. Milano says. “Everywhere he’s been, he’s made a huge difference.”
Now Mr. Jones works to support graduate students and faculty members in the PhD Project. He says he wants hiring to reflect “our country and our world.” When he talks to students considering a graduate degree, he can provide a reason to feel encouraged: “I tell them this career has been good to me.” — Kate Stoltzfus
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From Dean to Provost
Donald E. Heller, who will become provost at the University of San Francisco in February, has spent much of his career at large universities, where he has done research on issues like higher-education finance and financial aid.
He is finishing up his fourth year as dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education. Before that, he was a professor of education and director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University.
His next destination, a Roman Catholic institution with fewer than 11,000 students, is about a fifth the size of Michigan State.
“I’m looking forward to being in an institution that’s a bit smaller than the flagships and land-grants I’ve worked at,” he says.
The Jesuit university’s focus on diversity and social justice fits with his own commitment to those causes, he says. He has long advocated for more economic and racial diversity at colleges. At Michigan State’s College of Education, he increased the number of tenure-track faculty from minority groups by 52 percent.
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After spending nearly two decades at Big Ten universities, Mr. Heller is also looking forward to being at a university where athletics aren’t quite as dominant.
San Francisco “is really a very different kind of institution in many ways,” he says, “but to me that’s what was really attractive about it.”
Enrollment management will be among his responsibilities in his new role, and he hopes to help the university take further steps to foster a diverse student body.
“I’ve spent a lot of my career researching issues related to college access,” he says, “and this will be my opportunity to put those into practice.” — Ellen Wexler
New Association Chief
Lynn Pasquerella will step down as president of Mount Holyoke College to lead the Association of American Colleges & Universities.
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On July 1, she will succeed Carol Geary Schneider, who has been president of the association since 1998.
Ms. Pasquerella, who took the helm at Mount Holyoke in 2010, said in a written statement said she was thrilled by the opportunity to direct an organization “that has been at the forefront of advocacy for liberal learning as a means of redressing economic segregation in higher education.”
The association, known as AAC&U, has more than 1,300 member institutions. — Andy Thomason
Obituary: Diversity Advocate Dies
Walter J. Leonard, an administrator who developed a widely imitated diversity plan for Harvard University, died on December 8 in Maryland. He was 86.
In 1969, after earning a law degree at Howard University, Mr. Leonard became assistant dean and assistant director of admissions of Harvard Law School, where he used a strategy of conferences, recruitment, and outreach to increase minority and female enrollment. Two years later, he became special assistant to Harvard’s president, Derek Bok, and was assigned to bring the university’s affirmative-action practices into compliance with federal law. The resulting Harvard Plan has been used as a model by hundreds of colleges nationwide.
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In the mid-1970s, Mr. Leonard left Harvard to be president of Fisk University, a historically black institution in Nashville that was then in danger of closing. To prevent that, he used his life insurance as collateral to obtain a loan for the university. He held the post for seven years.
Mr. Leonard was the author of many scholarly articles on affirmative action, student-protest movements, and the First Amendment. — Anais Strickland