Practicing What I Teach: Does a Career as a Higher Education Professor Inform My Work as a Dean?

Abstract

In this 2008 ASHE presidential address, Linda Eisenmann explores connections between research and practice by using her own situation as a long-term professor of higher education now serving as a university dean. Eisenmann shows how her scholarly specialty as a historian of education helps her understand shifts in the student body, curriculum growth, and the context for institutional change. She then examines how her background as a higher education generalist guides her work with faculty. Using the example of a revised first-year seminar program, she explores campus change using several conceptual ideas from higher education literature.