Graduate Fellow Named - Barrett Taylor

Elisabeth Hughes

A graduate student working with Dr. Sheila Slaughter, the Louise McBee professor of higher education, Barrett Taylor was the recipient 2011-2012 of the Zell and Shirley Miller graduate fellowship. The fellowship, established in 2005, honors former senator and Mrs. Miller for their many contributions to higher education and is awarded to the graduate student who shows great promise for a future career in higher education.

Taylor came to the Institute with a BA from Southwestern University and an MA from the University of Alabama. As a doctoral student, he worked for four years with Professors Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie and Penn State Professor Liang Zhang on an NSF grant examining universities as sites of innovation and economic growth. He built datasets and published several articles with IHE faculty members and postdoctoral associate Brendan Cantwell, now an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and presented papers at meetings of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Taylor is very grateful for his time at the Institute, “It was such a propitious time. Professor and former IHE director, Dr. Tom Dyer, and Dr. Slaughter were great mentors, I could not be more grateful to them for the feedback they gave me and how they contributed to my development as a scholar”. He is also full of praise for his fellow students, “In addition to the mentoring from faculty, the very high caliber of students at the Institute meant that I was steeped in an environment of scholarship and analysis.”

Taylor, who recently graduated with a Ph.D. from the Institute of Higher Education, has moved to the University of North Texas where he is an assistant professor of higher education in the Department of Counseling and Higher Education. This fall he will be teaching classes in administration and the finance of higher education.