Large Community-College System in Arizona Gets Its First Female and Latina Chancellor

An ‘Overdue’ First

Maria Harper-Marinick’s appointment as chancellor of Maricopa Community Colleges on May 4 has been called historic because she is the first female and first Latina higher-education chancellor in Arizona. But, she says, in a state with a large Latino population, the change is “more overdue than historic.”

“I’m proud of the distinction, but I also can’t be ‘the Latina chancellor,’” she says. “I need to be chancellor for the whole community and work on issues of enrollment declining across the board.”

A native of the Dominican Republic, Ms. Harper-Marinick had been interim chancellor since March. Before that, she was executive vice chancellor and provost at Maricopa, where she has worked since 1991. She succeeds Rufus Glasper.

In her role leading Maricopa’s 10 campuses, whose enrollment in the fall of 2014 was nearly 130,000 students, Ms. Harper-Marinick will focus on reaching out to new populations and creating stronger ties with businesses.

Arizona has more than 800,000 people who have earned college credit but never completed a degree, and she sees that demographic as a key source of revenue growth. “I want the colleges to get them back in the system, perhaps by bundling the credits and helping them identify how close they might be to a certificate or degree,” she says. She will reach out as well to the so-called opportunity youth, people aged 16 to 24 who are not in school.

Ms. Harper-Marinick also plans to capitalize on the system’s Maricopa Corporate College, which works with businesses to provide work-force-development training to their employees — for example, in customer-service skills.

Her appointment has not been without controversy, with two members of Maricopa’s governing board publicly expressing concerns about the fairness of the search, given that Ms. Harper-Marinick was the only candidate remaining at the end. That perception is one of the disadvantages of being an internal candidate, she says, and she agreed to be considered for the post only if there was a full national search. Her appointment was approved on a 5-to-2 vote.

Via email, Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University and a leader of the search, praised Ms. Harper-Marinick’s “distinguished reputation” and said she was instrumental in starting a community-college transfer program that serves as a national model.

Familiarity with an institution has its advantages. “The typical question during an interview is ‘What are you going to do in the first 60 days?’ If I were not internal, I would say, ‘I need to get to know the people and know the system,’” says Ms. Harper-Marinick. “But for me, I can just get to work right away.” — Angela Chen

Pathway to Employment

As parents and lawmakers put colleges under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their degrees lead to good jobs, career-placement offices can equip students “to speak to the value of their education,” says Mindy J. Deardurff, who is set to become the first dean of the Career Development Center at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minn., on June 2.

That communication skill, says Ms. Deardurff, “becomes more pressing, depending on what the economy and market look like.”

Three years ago, Ms. Deardurff became director of the Undergraduate Business Career Center at the University of Minnesota’s Curtis L. Carlson School of Management, where she has worked since 2003. Under her leadership, job-placement rates within three months of graduation have climbed to an all-time high of 98 percent for the Class of 2015.

Now her challenge will be to translate her success to a liberal-arts institution. She plans to take from her current post to her new one approaches that are increasingly used nationwide, and that bring career preparation closer to the center of the student experience. She expects to involve not only students and professors in her efforts, but also alumni and local employers.

Because of the current emphasis on workplace readiness, professors on many campuses have been bearing the load of such tasks as teaching students how to write effective résumés and apply for positions. Ms. Deardurff says she tells professors: “Some of those skill-building pieces and some of that network-building piece — we can do that for you and make your job easier.”

Macalester’s job center offers help even to long-ago graduates. “If I can build really strong networks with my alum,” she says, “those alum will be lifelong advocates for my current students, and that’s priceless.”

“I don’t necessarily believe that every single student needs to go directly into a vocation,” says Ms. Deardurff. “There are a lot of options” — graduate school and volunteer programs among them. She says she tells students that what is most important is “to help you prepare for lifelong career searches, and do it in a way that will help you identify who you are and what you really want to do.” — Peter Monaghan

The 50-Year Mark

Warren Madden arrived at Iowa State University as a freshman in 1957 to study engineering, never imagining that he would end up being connected to the university for a third of its existence. Mr. Madden went elsewhere after graduation, but returned to work at the university in 1966. He will retire this summer, a half-century later, as senior vice president for business and finance.

Mr. Madden says that a campus the size of Iowa State is essentially a small city, and that he thinks of his job as city manager reporting to the mayor.

“I don’t have tenure, and presidents can ask me to leave when they want, but I think I’ve lasted because of my ability to adjust to their leadership styles and learn how they want to work from early interactions,” he says.

Some presidents had smaller staffs and wanted more frequent updates, while others did more delegating. That has been especially true in recent years as presidents have needed to spend more time off campus.

The biggest challenges came during economic downturns, says Mr. Madden, who became vice president for business and finance in 1984 and was made senior vice president four years ago.

“During times of downsizing, there’s a line you walk you need to walk carefully, on the one hand adequately representing the interests of who is reporting to you, and on the other looking at the bigger picture of the institution,” he says. For example, during a downturn in the mid-1980s, the first goal was to preserve the educational experience, so Mr. Madden’s budget for support services like building repair and grass mowing would take proportionally bigger cuts.

Mr. Madden says he still enjoys being so connected to Iowa State, and he jokes that he gets half of his work done Sunday morning during conversations in grocery-store aisles. The 50-year mark, however, seemed a natural time to step down. “I’ve been involved in more than a third of the facilities constructed at Iowa State,” he adds. “I can look at those buildings and say, I played a role in that.” — Angela Chen

Top Computing Educator

Armando Fox, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, will be honored in June with the Association for Computing Machinery’s Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.

Mr. Fox was instrumental in adapting a software-engineering course at Berkeley to be offered as a massive open online course, or MOOC, beginning in 2011. One of the course’s innovations was an automatic grading system to evaluate the correctness and style of student programming assignments.

Mr. Fox also helped develop, and coined the term for, small private online courses, or SPOCs, which allow faculty members to provide customized versions of MOOCs to small groups of students on their campuses. — Ruth Hammond

Obituary: American-Lit Scholar

Daniel Aaron, a professor emeritus of English and American literature at Harvard University and a pioneer in American studies, died on April 30. He was 103.

Mr. Aaron was an advocate for the study of American authors at a time when universities focused on European literature. He was the first to receive a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard, and he later served as founding president of the Library of America, which publishes classic American literature.

After earning his doctorate, Mr. Aaron taught at Smith College for 30 years. He left in 1971 to return to Harvard, where he taught until he retired in 1983. He instructed many notable figures, including Betty Friedan and John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Aaron was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2010. Among his books is Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. — Anais Strickland

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