How can we create meaningful engagement and a rich learning environment for our members when program participants and presenters cannot gather in person? Like administrators and faculty at member campuses, CIC staff reflected deeply on this question in order to revise CIC’s summer and fall schedule of leadership and faculty development seminars and workshops in response to public health recommendations. Live convenings have been postponed until the spring and summer of 2021. But through virtual platforms and with the enthusiastic participation of faculty members and leaders of member colleges and universities, CIC staff and senior advisors have hosted online convenings to facilitate meetings among selected participants, spark discussions on timely topics, and anticipate the return of live events. From leadership development programs such as Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission and the Executive and Senior Leadership Academies; to faculty seminars including New Currents in Teaching Philosophy, Deliberation & Debate, Teaching Interfaith Understanding, American History, and Seminars on Science Pedagogy; to the public humanities initiative Humanities Research for the Public Good, CIC programs are moving forward and most are connecting virtually with participants selected for these programs.

Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission Program

This spring, CIC selected 20 prospective presidents to participate in the next offering of the Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission program. These aspiring presidents, and their spouses or partners, will join more than 200 senior administrators who have benefited from this program’s distinctive approach to leadership development. The group, originally scheduled to meet in summer 2020, will meet for the first time July 17–21, 2021, at the Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington, outside of Portland, Oregon. The yearlong program also includes a winter seminar February 20–22, 2022, at the Emory Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

CIC strongly believes and experience confirms that presidential leadership and institutional success are strengthened by the congruence of presidential vocation with institutional mission. This program thus encourages participants to explore several questions: Why might you see yourself in a presidency? Where should you serve? Why might differences in mission matter to you? And why should any of this be of consequence to the spouse or partner of someone seeking a presidency? The distinctive approach is successful: To date, 69 participants (34 percent) have been appointed as presidents.

All program participants, in a supportive cohort, read and discuss a wide range of texts—including ancient and modern, contemporary and classic, and spiritual and secular. Experienced college and university presidents and their spouses and partners guide the discussions. In addition to the two seminars, participants also engage in telephone consultations with members of the facilitator team throughout the program year. Frederik Ohles, president emeritus of Nebraska Wesleyan University, leads the program, which is generously supported by Lilly Endowment Inc.

Senior administrators who currently serve CIC member institutions, are contemplating a college presidency in the independent sector, and want to read, think, and collectively explore meaning and purpose in life as those values are applied to the presidency are encouraged to consider this opportunity for the 2022–2023 program year. CIC will issue a call for nominations in fall 2021 and select participants in winter 2022.

Selected 2021–2022 Presidential Vocation and Institutional Mission Participants

Executive and Senior Leadership Academies

CIC offers another yearlong leadership development program that prepares senior college and university administrators to assume a successful presidency: the Executive Leadership Academy (ELA). Participants in the ELA (typically experienced vice presidents and provosts) acquire new knowledge, skills, and experiences that are directly related to the portfolio of responsibilities central to the work of the president. The signature program elements are two seminars during successive summers, led by current and former academic leaders; development of a highly individualized Professional Experience Plan; and a formal mentorship designed to fill in gaps in the participant’s expertise and experience. The Academy also includes readings, webinars, and other gatherings. The ELA is offered in partnership with the American Academic Leadership Institute (AALI), the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), and CIC, and it is generously supported by Academic Search. The program is led by Linda Bleicken, president of AALI and president emerita of Armstrong State University.

After the 2019–2020 Executive Leadership Academy wrapped up with a virtual closing session in June 2020, the 17 participants selected for the 2020–2021 Executive Leadership Academy got off to a strong start with a two-day opening online seminar. Richard Ekman, president of CIC, and Mildred Garcia, president of AASCU, began the seminar with reflections on the historic nature of current events and higher education’s contribution to recovery from past crises. Over the two days, presenters highlighted the value of flexibility and the ability to adapt as one ascends to a presidency and leads an institution. Kenya Lenoir Messer, president of Louisiana Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, noted that taking time to set expectations for oneself and for new constituents is crucial in taking on a new leadership role. In a discussion of the theory and practice of strategic planning, MaryAnn Baenninger, past president of Drew University (NJ), asked participants to draw lessons from the spring semester interrupted by the pandemic. “Colleges’ responses demonstrate that we can change quickly for the benefit of our students and our communities,” she said. The yearlong leadership development program for this cohort will continue through June 2021 when the group will convene for a closing seminar in Washington, DC.

CIC and AALI also partner on a yearlong program for mid-level administrators in higher education who aspire to senior leadership positions in independent colleges or universities: the Senior Leadership Academy (SLA). Linda Bleicken also directs this program, which is generously supported by AALI and Academic Search.

Before the 2019–2020 Senior Leadership Academy met virtually for its final session this June, the 39 participants selected for the 2020–2021 cohort began their professional development journey together with an online orientation in May and a series of core informational webinars throughout the summer. The webinars explored such topics as “Financial Strategies in Changing Times,” “Job Search Skills in the Virtual Environment,” and “The President’s View of the Cabinet.” SLA participants create a Professional Experience Plan to develop specific skills and areas they would like to strengthen. They also engage in cohort sub-groups, consisting of teams of six people, as well as in pairs. Every participant has a “buddy” and builds a set of team experiences that will be valuable as they apply for and take on cabinet-level leadership roles at independent colleges. All SLA participants will meet again in conjunction with the Institute for Chief Academic Officers and Academic Team Members, which will be held online November 7–10, 2020.

2020–2021 Executive Leadership Academy Participants

2020–2021 Senior Leadership Academy Participants

As part of their Humanities Research for the Public Good project “Spirits on Pine Log Mountain: An Appalachian Community, 1830–1940,” Donna Coffey Little and students from Reinhardt University (GA) conducted research at the Etowah Valley Historical Society.

Humanities Research for the Public Good Initiative

This spring, representatives from 25 colleges met in a virtual workshop to review the progress of campus-based projects supported through CIC’s Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative, and CIC selected 24 additional colleges to launch new projects in 2021. All funded projects combine archival research by students with public-facing programs designed to apply humanities research to issues of public significance. In each case, the students and the college work closely with a community-based organization. Humanities Research for the Public Good is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with supplemental funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The initial cohort of institutions, which first met in 2019, was slated to conduct grant-funded projects during the 2019–2020 academic year. The pandemic, however, disrupted many of the institutions’ public activities scheduled for spring 2020 as well as the cohort’s concluding workshop in April. Instead, more than 100 faculty members, librarians and archivists, academic administrators, and student researchers participated in a virtual workshop on April 24, 2020. As many campus and community activities as feasible will be rescheduled for the fall and winter, while the in-person workshop will be rescheduled for spring 2021 if public health considerations permit.

During the virtual workshop, CIC senior advisor and project director Annie Valk, executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center, highlighted the unique challenge of connecting with public audiences during a public health crisis. “In my experience, however, public humanities projects always encounter unexpected obstacles and changing circumstances that require you to make adaptations and adjustments.”

Participants provided updates on their campus projects during roundtable discussions. Among them: Melissa Petersen, director of library services at Daemen College (NY), discussed the development of an oral history and digital archive of Skateland, a roller rink that served for many decades as the anchor of a largely African American neighborhood near the college; Donna Coffey Little, professor of English at Reinhardt University (GA), described how a team of student interns researched and developed an exhibit on forgotten writers and other community members of Pine Log Mountain in rural up-country Georgia; and Meghan Doran, assistant director for service learning at Simmons University (MA), detailed the collaboration between Simmons students and the Boston City Archives to prepare a series of blog posts about the social history and current challenges facing the city’s West End.

Following the virtual workshop, many of the student researchers participated in a separate focus group convened by staff members of the National Humanities Alliance as part of a national study on the impact of publicly-engaged humanities.

While the initial cohort of institutions was striving to complete the public elements of their projects, CIC selected a second cohort of 24 colleges and universities in March to pursue new projects during the 2020–2021 academic year. An opening workshop, originally scheduled for June 2020, was rescheduled to take place in Washington, DC, June 29–July 1, 2021. The project timeline has shifted accordingly, with campus activities beginning in summer 2021 and concluding in spring 2022. Selected institutions will have an opportunity to revise their original proposals or propose an alternative public humanities project if the original project is no longer feasible.

CIC Wins Public Advocacy Award from Society of American Archivists

CIC is proud to announce that Humanities Research for the Public Good has received a 2020 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists. The award honors an individual, institution, or organization that promotes greater public awareness, appreciation, or support of archival activities or programs. CIC was nominated for the award by one of the program participants, Sally Childs-Helton, head of special collections, rare books, and university archives at the Butler University (IN) library. Childs-Helton commented, “Over the years, I have never seen an organization more deserving of this award, and I’m thrilled that CIC is being recognized. The Humanities Research for the Public Good program and grants have been extremely powerful in connecting undergraduates to archives, and archives to communities.” The award also affirms CIC’s programmatic commitment over many years to libraries and archives.

Humanities Research for the Public Good Second Cohort Participants (2021–2022)

New Currents in Teaching Philosophy Institute

CIC selected 30 faculty members in philosophy from a pool of nearly 100 nominees to participate in the inaugural institute on New Currents in Teaching Philosophy. CIC President Richard Ekman observed, “The volume and quality of nominations highlighted the excellent but challenging work of faculty members at small private colleges and universities to promote the discipline of philosophy and make it relevant and practical.”

Originally planned to take place in July 2020, the inaugural institute was postponed due to the pandemic and will now be held in Baltimore, Maryland, July 25–29, 2021. CIC will offer two additional institutes in 2022 and 2023. The initiative is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and received supplemental funding from NEH.

CIC hosted a special webinar on July 27, 2020, for all faculty members who were nominated to participate in the 2020 program. Edward J. (Ned) Hall, director of the institute and Norman E. Vuilleumier Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, began the webinar by discussing the persistent challenge of justifying the study of philosophy and the specific challenge of teaching philosophy in times of crisis. He then proposed a pair of strategies to address both challenges at once: invite students to grapple with truly urgent and uncertain questions and then treat the classroom as a collaborative community working toward common understandings of contentious issues. “We have to construct a compelling narrative that philosophy has always been essential—and now more than ever, precisely because of the present crises.”

Participants also heard from a pair of University of Notre Dame philosophers—Meghan Sullivan, Rev. John A. O’Brien Collegiate Professor, and Paul Blaschko, assistant director of research and outreach at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study—on best practices for designing and leading online or hybrid philosophy courses that engage students and capitalize on digital technologies. Sullivan also will be one of the lead presenters at the 2021 institute. A recording of this webinar is available for download on the New Currents in Teaching Philosophy website and may be of interest also to faculty members in other humanities disciplines.

2021 New Currents in Teaching Philosophy Participants

Teaching Interfaith Understanding Seminar

CIC has offered a series of summer seminars for faculty members in partnership with Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) since 2015. Long supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the seminars were designed to broaden faculty members’ knowledge and perspectives to help them strengthen the teaching of interfaith understanding, develop new courses and resources, and encourage the development of an expanding network of educators committed to teaching this subject.

In October 2019, CIC announced the first of a new series of three seminars on Teaching Interfaith Understanding, now generously supported by Lilly Endowment Inc. Besides sessions exploring case studies drawn from seminar participants’ experiences, site visits, and course and syllabi work, the new seminar series will emphasize vocation issues and core texts. Some sessions will draw on the most recently published Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) book, Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy (2018). Eboo Patel, founder and president of IFYC, and Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury College (VT) and a distinguished scholar of South Asian religions, will continue to lead these seminars.

CIC selected 25 faculty members out of 41 nominations to participate in the first of the new seminars. Originally scheduled to take place in June 2020, the seminar was rescheduled due to the pandemic and will now take place in Chicago, June 13–17, 2021. In the interim, IFYC is providing supporting services to the selected participants, thanks to supplemental funding from NEH. This June, these faculty members were able to convene online for a webinar on “Interfaith Studies and Racial Justice.” Seminar participants made initial introductions and heard from Patel, Patton, and IFYC program manager Calvin Taylor about the historical and contemporary connections between the struggle for racial and social justice worldwide and interfaith work. Patel discussed the importance of such work during this historic moment and remarked, “We all now live in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Participants also learned about two online courses being developed for use by faculty members, the first of which will focus on “The Centrality of Interfaith Work to Well Known Racial Justice Movements.” Should participants choose to adapt the online courses for their classes in the fall, IFYC staff will visit with classes or lead modules as requested. Taylor introduced IFYC’s online resources, including its library of syllabi, interviews, and case studies that were developed by previous Teaching Interfaith Understanding seminar participants. In addition, IFYC staff will be available to work individually with participants who are developing and revising interfaith courses over the summer.

2021 Teaching Interfaith Understanding Participants

American History Seminar

CIC announced in November 2019 a new seminar for faculty members in history and related fields: “The American Civil War: Origins and Consequences.” The 19th in a series of seminars held in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, this seminar was originally scheduled to take place in June 2020 and has subsequently been rescheduled for June 20–25, 2021. The seminar is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with supplemental funding from NEH.

Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War Emeritus at the University of Virginia, will lead the seminar for the 25 CIC faculty members who were selected. The seminar will be held at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and will provide participants a forum to address the issues that divided the nation during the Civil War era and that continue to resonate today. Participants will explore the drama and tragedy of this tumultuous period, particularly the central role of slavery in precipitating sectional tensions and secession; the ways in which military and civilian affairs intersected and influenced one another; the question of what the war left unresolved; and how Americans have remembered the conflict.

2021 American History Seminar Participants

Deliberation & Debate Workshops

CIC recently launched a new series of workshops, Deliberation & Debate: Advancing Civil Discourse through Courses for First-Year Students. The workshops were developed in response to recent episodes on campuses that have raised questions about the preparedness of today’s first-year students to discuss controversial issues with respect for a diversity of ideas and opinions. The workshops will prepare faculty members who teach first-year courses to use techniques that promote civil discourse, such as logical argument, the use of evidence, and empathic listening in either new or modified courses that are taken by a large proportion of first-year students. Michael Gilligan, CIC senior advisor and president emeritus of the Henry Luce Foundation, is leading the workshops.

Generously supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, and with supplemental funding from NEH, each workshop will accommodate about 20 teams of two faculty members who regularly teach first-year courses and who have the institution’s approval to design new courses or integrate aspects of civil debate into existing courses. CIC selected 21 teams for the first workshop, which was originally scheduled for July 2020 and has now been postponed to take place July 25–28, 2021, in Washington, DC. The second workshop in the series will be offered in 2022.

2021 Deliberation & Debate Participating Institutions

Seminars on Science Pedagogy

CIC’s Seminars on Science Pedagogy are designed to improve teaching effectiveness and student learning in introductory biology, chemistry, and physics courses on CIC member campuses. The seminars use methods based on research in cognition and neuroscience that have been shown by Stanford University physicist and Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, with colleagues at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of British Columbia, and Stanford University, to yield significant increases in student learning in science courses at all levels. The first seminar, which took place on the campus of Holy Names University (CA) in July 2019, was funded by the W. M. Keck Foundation and the National Science Foundation. A second seminar, originally planned to take place at Holy Names in July 2020 and now rescheduled for July 12–16, 2021, also is funded by the Keck Foundation.

CIC selected ten institutional teams to participate in the 2019 seminar and nine teams for the 2021 seminar. Each team consists of four faculty members from at most two departments. Teams spent the academic year prior to the seminar collecting baseline data on student learning in existing classes, reflecting on current teaching and learning practices, and exploring resources on active learning and student cognition. During the five-day seminar, participants use background readings as the starting point for group discussions. Due to the disruption of the spring 2020 semester, teams selected for the 2021 seminar will continue to collect background data during the 2020–2021 academic year. Teams that participated in the 2019 seminar will continue to collect data on the impact of curricular changes through 2022. The program evaluator, Sandra Webster, professor of psychology at Westminster College (PA), has been working with teams from both seminars on assessment procedures for the project.

2021 Seminar on Science Pedagogy Participating Institutions