IHE Welcomes New Faculty

Perhaps the most lasting impact of IHE’s 40th anniversary year in 2004-05 will be the outstanding new faculty who will join the Institute in fall 2005. Professor Sheila Slaughter,   from the University of Arizona and, most recently, the National Science Foundation, will be the first chairholder of the Louise McBee Professorship at IHE. Associate Professor Christopher Morphew joins IHE from the University of Kansas. And Professor Larry Leslie, formerly of the University of Arizona, will hold a part-time appointment, teaching and  assisting in outreach and public service activities. Each is profiled in brief below.

UGA President Emeritus Charles Knapp will also join the faculty with a part-time appointment. IHE has long had a philosophy of mixing scholars with very senior higher  education officials, fostering an intellectual community shaped by the special expertise of policymakers and leaders. Terrel Bell, for instance, taught and visited IHE numerous times during his tenure as U.S. Secretary of Education; and Sven Groennings, former director of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education of the U.S.  Department of Education, also visited on several occasions. Knapp’s appointment continues that tradition; see the interview with President Knapp on page 26 of this issue. IHE is delighted to welcome these distinguished new colleagues in fall 2005.

These outstanding faculty have set the bar especially high for two additional faculty searches under way in 2005-06. An anonymous gift has established the Zell Miller  Distinguished Professorship in Higher Education, the second endowed chair created in as many years at IHE. The Miller Professor will be a senior scholar with expertise in linkages between higher education and economic development. And the Institute will also search for another senior professor whose expertise will complement that of the current faculty.

Sheila Slaughter, Louise McBee Professor of Higher Education

Sheila Slaughter joined the faculty of the Institute of Higher Education in August 2005, as the inaugural chairholder of the Louise McBee Professorship. Slaughter comes to the Institute after nearly two decades at the University of Arizona. Most recently, she was Visiting Scientist at the National Science Foundation in 2004, where she served as  Program Director of Societal Dimensions of Engineering, Science, and Technology.

The opportunity to participate in and help strengthen IHE’s intellectual community in the higher education policy arena drew Slaughter to IHE: “The University of Georgia’s IHE is one of the most promising programs in the country. The combination of strong leadership, a solid resource base, and top scholars should make the IHE a highly ranked program in the next few years,” said Slaughter. Further, she noted, “I am honored to be the Louise McBee Professor of Higher Education. I am pleased to hold a chair named for a  woman who had a hand in shaping the course of higher education in Georgia. When I met Louise McBee, I felt like she was a kindred spirit. In addition to creating opportunities for women, she is an outdoors person, who climbed Mount Everest!” Slaughter will teach a variety of courses at IHE.

Slaughter’s recent books include Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education, with Gary Rhoades (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and Academic  Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, with Larry Leslie (Johns Hopkins, 1997). As these titles suggest, her research interests range over the political  economy of higher education, including the markets for graduate student and faculty labor; the commoditization of intellectual property and relations between the academy and  industry; and research ethics and professional value systems in higher education. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation among other funders.

Slaughter received the Award for Lifetime Research Achievement (2001) from Division J of the American Educational Research Association as well as the Research Achievement Award (1998) of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, of which she served as president in 1995-96. Prior to her tenure at the University of Arizona, Slaughter held faculty appointments at SUNY-Buffalo and Virginia Tech. She earned her bachelors and masters degrees in English literature and her PhD in educational policy  studies at the University of Wisconsin.

The McBee Professorship honors Louise McBee, who has had a distinguished career and a profound impact on higher education both at the University of Georgia, where she served for more than 25 years, and statewide, through her leadership as a member of Georgia’s General Assembly for over a decade.

Christopher C. Morphew, Associate Professor of Higher Education

Christopher C. Morphew joined the Institute as associate professor in July 2005. Says Morphew, “I am delighted to have the opportunity to work with colleagues who share research interests in higher education policy and governance, and especially in the context of a freestanding Institute dedicated to higher education. It is also particularly energizing to join the Institute in the midst of such an extraordinary period of growth and development,” he adds. “The momentum is terrific.”

An expert in state systems of higher education, governance, and finance, Morphew is already contributing to that momentum, bringing with him a Lumina-funded research  project examining student migration patterns and interstate exchange. A prior research project supported by the Association for Institutional Research proposed a resource cost model approach to estimating instructional costs for academic programs. And the Ford Foundation and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators  supported a study titled, “Lessons from Intercollegiate Athletics in Creating Community from Difference,” with J. Douglas Toma and Lisa Wolf-Wendel.

Morphew has been a frequent contributor to the leading scholarly journals in higher education on themes including academic drift, institutional diversity, and planning and  governance. His current book project, with Mario Martinez, examines what types of structures and policies states should enact in order to achieve their higher education goals. The recipient of many honors, Morphew was a Ford Foundation Policy Fellow at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (2004); an Associate of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (2001-02); and was selected as a Fellow of the Salzburg Seminar’s Universities Project on the Social and Civic Responsibilities of Universities (2001).

Morphew earned a BA at Notre Dame in government and philosophy, an MS in education at Harvard University, and an MA in sociology and PhD in social sciences and educational practices at Stanford University. He will teach courses on state systems of higher education and organizational theory at the Institute.

Larry L. Leslie, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Higher Education

After more than 25 years on the faculty of the University of Arizona, including terms as director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education and vice dean of the College of Education, Leslie retired in July 2003, becoming Professor Emeritus of Higher Education. With the promise of stimulating colleagues, students, and intellectual community, the Institute was able to lure him out of retirement to join the faculty. He will teach a doctoral seminar this fall on finance in higher education, and assist in IHE’s outreach and service initiatives. “Although I have kept busy consulting and speaking professionally since retirement,” comments Leslie, “I never imagined that I would ‘come out of retirement’;  however, the opportunity to join a program that obviously was on the fast track to national prominence was too hard to resist.”

Leslie’s scholarship includes Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, with Sheila Slaughter (Johns Hopkins, 1997); the first and second editions of Finance in Higher Education (1986 and 1993), co-edited with Richard E. Anderson and David Breneman; and numerous articles in well-regarded journals in higher education and related fields. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, among other funders. Leslie’s publications and research awards illustrate not only his interests in fi nance, markets, and management of higher education, but also an international comparative perspective reflecting his several Fulbright awards and visiting appointments in Australia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Mexico.

This comparative higher education experience makes his appointment to the faculty all the more important, as IHE extends its outreach and service initiatives in Croatia and  several other nations that have sought IHE’s assistance in reshaping and improving their higher education systems. Leslie worked closely with the University of Miskolc,  Hungary, for instance, in securing $26 million in funding from the World Bank to reform Hungary’s higher education system. Leslie’s work was recognized in 1995 with the Research Achievement Award of the Association for the Study of Higher Education; he has numerous other awards and honors to his credit. He is also noted for outstanding doctoral teaching and advising: eight of his doctoral students have won national dissertation-of-the-year awards.

He began his faculty career at the University of Utah, and then moved to Penn State University for seven years before joining the Arizona faculty. Leslie earned a BS in  chemistry and an MA in educational administration and educational psychology from the University of Minnesota, and his EdD in higher education and sociology at the University of California-Berkeley.