Annual Meeting Podcast

Beginning with this year's Annual Meeting, AAC&U is proud to offer podcasts of selected presentations. AAC&U will offer twelve presentations as part of this podcast. Full descriptions of each are below. To subscribe and listen to these podcasts, and to learn more about using this technology, visit the About AAC&U Podcasts page.

Annual Meeting Presentations for the Podcast:

Women’s Networking Breakfast: Demanding Excellence in the Sciences:  Women Scientists Struggling to Succeed
Nationally known science scholar and educational reformer, Sue V. Rosser chronicles how excellence is undermined in the sciences when women scientists are not full and equal participants in shaping the intellectual contours, culture, and pedagogies of academic science.  Drawing from her book, The Science Glass Ceiling, Rosser charts the difficulties and double standards many women scientists face, but offers practical remedies as the first woman Dean at a science/technical school.
Sue V. Rosser, Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Studies, Georgia Institute of Technology

Opening Plenary: Meeting New Challenges at Home and Abroad: Liberal Education’s New Premium
The global economy is changing. The world is becoming more interdependent. The challenges Americans face both at home and abroad demand new levels of engagement, commitment, and creative problem-solving. In this turbulent age, an empowering liberal education has become more important—for all students—than ever before. Responding to these far-reaching changes, AAC&U has launched Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) to connect the public dialogue about college with these societal and economic shifts, and to make the aims and practices of a 21st century liberal education central to the compact between the academy and society. In this opening session, Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton and Roberts T. Jones, President of Education and Workforce Policy, LLC—both members of the LEAP National Leadership Council—will explore these issues from the perspectives of employers, citizens, and policymakers. They will also address the connected challenges of making excellence inclusive while also raising expectations for all students’ preparation and achievement.
Roberts T. Jones, President of Education and Workforce Policy, LLC; and Barbara Lawton, Lieutenant Governor of the State of Wisconsin

Collaborating for Excellence: Student Affairs, Academic Affairs, nd the Challenge of Transformative Learning
Intentional partnerships between Student Affairs and Academic Affairs can create more comprehensive learning experiences than occur in either sphere separately. Because transformative learning always happens in the context of students’ lives, collaborative campuses can serve as laboratories for helping students develop the knowledge, skills, and values they need to fully contribute to society. The result is a deeper, more engaged, more integrated educational experience.  This session will explore a variety of ways to create partnerships that support student learning and success and that maximize the whole learning community.
Susan E. Borrego, Vice President Student Affairs, and Marsha Moroh, Interim Provost—both of California State University Monterey Bay; and Cynthia Forrest, Dean of Students Emeriti, Framingham State College

The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent
In The Flight of the Creative Class, the follow-up to The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida paints a picture of a global giant on the verge of one of the toughest economic battles of its life. To stay at the cutting edge, the United States will have to find ways to mitigate gross inequality, harness the creativity of all human beings, take on political polarization, retain the traditional openness of American society to international influence, and revamp K-12 and post-secondary education. Beyond just the U.S., Florida looks at how regions and nations around the world are adapting to the global creative economy.  By weaving together such issues, he asks every business, political, and cultural leader to reevaluate the world from an alternate perspective.
Richard Florida is the Hirst Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution

Spiraling Through the Glass Ceiling
Prior to joining Wheaton in 2004, Ronald Crutcher was Provost, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Professor of Music at Miami University, and he currently serves as Chair of AAC&U’s Board of Directors.  President Crutcher is also a member of the Klemperer Trio, which performs regularly in this country and Europe.  He made his Carnegie Hall debut in March 1985 and, in1979, was the first cellist to receive the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale. 
Ronald A. Crutcher, President of Wheaton College (MA)

The Creative Campus
This session will engage the audience in a discussion about the importance of creative teaching and learning, addressing questions such as:  What does the latest research on creativity tell us about the importance of innovative teaching and learning?  What techniques are available for identifying whether the teaching and learning on your campus is creative?  How can faculty and students who have worked together in a privileged creative space sustain the creative strategies they have embraced once they return to a campus where education persists as usual?
Tori-Haring Smith, President, Washington and Jefferson College; Steven Tepper, Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy, Vanderbilt University; and Joe Trimmer, Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry, Ball State University

Mapping the Future of Inclusion and Excellence
Given the rapid changes we are experiencing in the economy, in the U.S. college-going population, and in global geopolitics, scholars have argued that diversity, as a component of academic excellence, is essential to higher education’s continuing relevance in the twenty-first century. At the same time, our “post-Michigan” educational environment calls for campuses to connect their educational quality and inclusion efforts more fundamentally and comprehensively than ever before. Join our speakers as they discuss this next generation of diversity and excellence work: What will it look like? How will both our thinking and our actions need to shift? Who will need to be involved? How will we know we are accomplishing our goals?
Alma. R. Clayton-Pedersen, Vice President, Office of Education and Institutional Renewal, and Caryn McTighe Musil, Senior Vice President and Vice President, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives – both of AAC&U; and Jeffrey Milem, Associate Professor, Department of Education Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland

ACAD Keynote: Valuing our Values: Taking Liberal Education to the Next Level
W. Robert Connor is President of the Teagle Foundation, which places a special emphasis on seeing that today’s students have a challenging, wide ranging and enriching college education, best achieved when colleges develop broad and intellectually stimulating curricula, engage their students in active learning, set clear goals, and systematically measure progress toward those goals.  Prior to joining the Teagle Foundation, Dr. Connor was President and Director of National Humanities Center in North Carolina, an independent center for advanced study in literature, history, philosophy, and all other humanistic fields.  He retired from Princeton University in 1989 as the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics. 
W. Robert Connor, President of the Teagle Foundation

From Athens and Berlin to L. A.:  Faculty Work in the New Academy
The faculty role in American colleges and universities has been profoundly shaped by visions of excellence emerging from ancient Athens and late 19th century Berlin.  We are still living with the power and persuasiveness of variations on the teacher/scholar theme framed by that rich legacy; for Max Weber, the moral obligation of the teacher is to “ask inconvenient questions” of a privileged elite.  The new academy is asking much more—under radically different conditions—and is even suggesting that the faculty role be “unbundled.”  If L.A. is more our future—with its diversity, size, global perspective, technical base, and market priorities—new, more capacious visions of scholarly excellence will be required.  What will the work of faculty look like and what will be its attractions and rewards?
R. Eugene Rice, Senior Scholar, AAC&U, and Senior Scholar, Program in Leadership and Change, Antioch University

Why Read: Can Great Books Change People’s Lives?
In Why Read?, Mark Edmundson dramatizes what the recent identity crisis of the humanities has effectively obscured: that reading can change your life for the better. His Harper's Magazine article "On the Uses of the Liberal Arts" is reported to be the most photocopied essay on college campuses over the last five years. Ruminating on his essay and the intense reaction to it, Mark Edmundson exposes universities' ever-growing consumerism at the expense of a challenging, life-altering liberal arts education.
Mark Edmundson is the Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia

Legislative Attacks on Academic Freedom: The Latest Threats and Ways to Counter Them
Many state and federal legislators today have a strong interest in creating mandates for curriculum, faculty hiring, and other traditional academic prerogatives. How do initiatives such as the Academic Bill of Rights square with constitutional free speech principles? What is happening in state legislatures? Presented by two higher education law experts, this presentation provides historical context, developments in state legislatures around the country, and a discussion of today's legislative threats.
Ann Franke, JD, Attorney; Lawrence White, President, Lawrence White Consulting

Closing Plenary: Liberal Education and the Republic of the Imagination
Azar Nafisi is author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a compassionate and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran and how it affected one university professor and her students.  Reading Lolita in Tehran has won diverse literary awards, including AAC&U’s Frederic W. Ness Book Award for 2004.  Azar Nafisi is a Visiting Professor and director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.  She taught at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and Allameh Tabatabai before her return to the United States in 1997 — earning national respect and international recognition for advocating on behalf of Iran's intellectuals, youth and especially young women.  She is currently working on two books, one tentatively titled The Republic of the Imagination, which is about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples, and the other, The Pursuit of Happiness, about culture, history, and loss.
Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books