Building a Good Society

MELLON FELLOW TAKES THE HELM AT THE ASPEN INSTITUTE “At their best,” observes Daniel R. Porterfield MN ’89, “nonprofit institutions serve the larger public and all individuals without a preset agenda that causes them to favor special interests over the larger collective. That’s critical to our mission—to participate in the building of a good society […]

Mission to Diversify the Teaching Population

BLAKE NATHAN’S TF ’12 EDUCATE ME FOUNDATION It was 2015. Blake Nathan TF ’12 was in just his second year of teaching at an Indianapolis middle school, fresh from Harvard’s Urban Principal National Leadership Institute, and working towards a second master’s degree in Education Leadership from Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). As if that weren’t […]

Mind, “The Most Powerful Instrument in the World”

(Gordon Bower, professor emeritus of psychology/Courtesy Gordon Bower, Photographer: Sharon Ann Bower)   With a father who read the entirety of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a high school teacher who took an interest in his intellectual development over his pitching arm, and influential mentors throughout his graduate career, Dr. Gordon H. Bower WF ‘54 was primed early […]

Rethinking Higher Ed Through Cognitive Science

STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN WF ’70 AND MIVERVA’S ONLINE APPROACH What would higher education look like if every aspect of the experience was rooted in the science of learning? Stephen M. Kosslyn, a 1970 Woodrow Wilson Fellow, is exploring this question as founding dean and chief academic officer of the Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate […]

From NASA to Ninth Grade

A NEW KIND OF LAUNCH Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) After her master’s program in Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a year as project manager for an electrical contractor, Wanda Harding TF ’16 decided to float her résumé. When it landed in the right hands at NASA, Ms. Harding left her native […]

Can Higher Education Help Renovate American Democracy?

Rajiv Vinnakota , President https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFxDAn-3MOI Raj Vinnakota participated as a panelist in a webinar hosted by the Harvard Ash Center on new civic initiatives in higher ed, featuring moderator Danielle Allen and fellow panelists John Bridgeland, Cecilia Muñoz, and Jenna Storey. Raj discussed the priority of the College Presidents for Civic Preparedness coalition in ensuring all students had […]