In a time of great challenge throughout higher education, it took something extra for a governing board to merit a 2022 John W. Nason Award for Board Leadership.
It was a given that the six boards receiving the 2022 laurels helped guide their institutions through the difficulties posed by switching to online education and other exigencies forced by the COVID-19 pandemic. All went beyond that. At a time of soul-searching about injustice and racial inequities in America, four were honored for advancing the work of justice, equity, and inclusion at their institutions, including diversifying their own ranks. Two boards were recognized for their leadership of institutional turnarounds amid financial upheaval.
They include the boards of a large, urban public university exercising governance responsibilities for the first time; a private institution steeped in social justice work that looked inward and found blind spots in its own response to criticisms; an underfunded state system of regional universities that laid politics aside piloting the campuses to consolidate; a community college that turned around “shameful” graduation rates; another urban university in Richmond that removed symbols of a racist past, and a once single-purpose chiropractic college that overhauled board governance and broadened its program offerings.
The Nason Award, established in 1992 and presented in partnership with TIAA, honors the memory of the late Swarthmore College president who chaired the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council that helped more than 4,000 students get out of internment camps and enter colleges across the United States during World War II.
These are their stories.
Trustees Take the Rein at the University of Memphis
One of Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam’s signature achievements was the 2016 Focus on College and University Success Act (FOCUS) that took the University of Memphis (UofM) and five other universities out from control by the State Board of Regents and allowed each to have an independent governing board. None has run farther and faster than the University of Memphis, which in December 2021 won Carnegie Classification as a top-tier, R1 (for Very High Research activity) institution, positioning it to accelerate the expansion of already rapidly growing research efforts. “It absolutely never would have happened under the Tennessee Board of Regents,” said outgoing President David Rudd.
The new, eight-member board of trustees is chaired by alumnus G. Douglas Edwards, president of a Texas oil company, and includes the CEO of Lowe’s, a retired chief financial officer of FedEx Corp., and other top executives in health-care, finance, and other fields. (It also has student and faculty representatives.)
The 44-member board of visitors that existed before FOCUS had no real authority. “The problem was they weren’t empowered to help us make decisions about the structure and function of the university,” said Rudd.
“We served primarily as community ambassadors for the university,” Edwards recalled.
Since its inception in 2017, the UofM Board of Trustees has placed ensuring student success at the forefront of its responsibilities.
The urban university plays an outsized role in the economy and life of Tennessee’s second largest city, where a majority of the 633,000 residents are African American, a quarter live in poverty, and only 17.5 percent of adults possess a bachelor’s degree, less than half the national average. Edwards sees the university as one of three major employers along with FedEx and the renowned St. Jude’s Hospital that “can change the trajectory of the community, both economically and socially.”
More than half of the 17,000 undergraduates is eligible for Pell Grants and a third are first-generation college students. The board approved a guaranteed tuition plan that allows full-time freshmen to lock in their tuition, and they need only pay for 12 credit hours if they take additional classes. In four years’ time, the graduation rates for Pell recipients, first-generation students, and students of color have increased from the mid-30s to almost 50 percent.
During the summer of 2020, while the entire country grappled with race and social justice issues after a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, the university launched an Eradicating Systemic Racism and Promoting Social Justice Initiative to improve completion rates; hire more faculty of color; provide more training in cultural competency for students, faculty, and staff; infuse diversity, equity, and inclusion into the curriculum; and tap university resources to address racial disparities in the broader Memphis community.
“We live in a city where Martin Luther King, Jr. lost his life. Race is always front and center in almost everything that takes place in the city of Memphis,” said Edwards. “The board along with the administration embraced the challenge and opportunity we had to elevate the conversation about race … and give disadvantaged individuals an opportunity to succeed and to gain a higher education.”
The board approved the naming of the university center after civil rights activist Maxine Smith, who because of her race was denied admission to pursue graduate studies at then-Memphis State University in 1957. It also renamed the alumni mall in honor of Luther C. McClellan, one of the first Black students to enroll in 1959 and the first to graduate in 1962.
The board spent the past year searching for Rudd’s successor and chose Bill Hardgrave, provost of Auburn University. The university is also in the midst of a $600-million capital campaign, which Edwards said “is something we could not have done prior to local governance. The folks we’re asking know there’s a board of trustees that’s accountable and they know the direction we go in will be dictated by folks close to the institution, not hundreds of miles away from Memphis.”
When the board began its work, Edwards said, “We weren’t sure exactly which levers needed to be pulled. We counted on the administration to help us there. But we always knew where we were trying to get to.”
The Board of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education Finds Common Purpose
Amidst a decade-long slump in enrollments and financial woes of long standing, the Board of Governors of Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) recognized that its 14 regional universities faced an even rockier future.
Pennsylvania ranks near the bottom of the 50 states in terms of public expenditures on higher education. Nowhere was that felt more than in the string of regional campuses stretched across the Keystone state from West Chester to Shippensburg to Slippery Rock and enrolling 93,000 students. (Flagship Penn State University, with 90,000 students by itself, is governed by its own board of trustees.)
An internal review of PASSHE suggested that the nature of the politically appointed board limited the likelihood of strong and consensus-driven decisions to make fundamental change.
But that is what it did in a unanimous July 2021 vote to consolidate six universities into two to produce economies of scale, set the stage for growth, and allow every student access to the classes they needed to graduate on time.
“We wanted sustainable, fundamental change. That’s what we were looking for,” said Cynthia D. Shapira, the board chair since 2016. That change extended to the board’s own structure. It eliminated the traditional standing committees such as Finance, Human Resources, and Academic Affairs that mirrored the system’s own administrative structure and in their place established Student Success, University Success, and Governance and Leadership committees. It had never before had a Governance Committee.
Shapira, a onetime higher education management consultant and community activist with broad leadership experience in the nonprofit and philanthropic world, had one overriding purpose in mind: freeing time for the full board to concentrate on charting the system’s future while allowing the standing committees to work out matters under their purview beforehand.
“There are certain actions the (whole) board has to take—we must execute our fiduciary duty – but I wanted to get everything administrative that I could onto a consent agenda (so) the board meeting can be about real strategic issues,” said Shapira.
“The genius of Cindy’s leadership,” said Chancellor Daniel Greenstein, “has been that data analysis is underneath everything. If you’re going to advance an argument, it’s got to be advanced analytically.” Presidents of the component universities got the message and built data dashboards of their own.
The board stabilized the system financially by requiring individual universities to align their costs and revenues, sharing services and paring redundant programs. It froze tuition for three consecutive years and increased student aid. They involved faculty leaders in system governance. The board and chancellor were also transparent about the economy measures and other changes they were entertaining.
That was paramount if the system were to emerge from consolidation stronger, said Greenstein, a former University of California (UC) system vice provost who was hired in 2018 to help shape and implement the redesign.
The crux of the consolidation was to merge three California, Clarion, and Edinboro universities into one called Pennsylvania Western University or PennWest, and Bloomsburg, Mansfield, and Lock Haven into another as yet named.
Whatever their individual weaknesses and strengths, these 14 institutions played an important role in producing a college-educated workforce for their regions. Since the system, even after significant belt-tightening, would be asking the governor and legislature for more resources to fuel growth, it was essential to muster bipartisan support in Harrisburg. Right beside Greenstein at every meeting with the governor and lawmakers sat Shapira. “She helped rebuild our advocacy efforts. The board chair’s engagement in advocacy was absolutely critical,” the chancellor said.
When she joined the board in 2016, “it did not understand what a board was supposed to do. It was not trained in governance—we had no governance committee—it was not self-perpetuating. The challenge was getting it to understand its responsibility.”
One thing that helped were a series of nondeliberative, educational workshops held in private where the chancellor gave in-depth presentations, explained the trend lines and fielded questions. Pennsylvania’s sunshine law allowed that as long as the governors “didn’t say, ‘What are we going to do about it?’” Greenstein said.
It all worked. The final vote of approval was 18-0.
“We’ve come so far getting the board to understand its responsibility,” said Shapira, who is also president of a family foundation. “We still have obvious Democrats and Republicans on the board yet under incredible pressure every single one has managed to rise to the occasion and put the best interests of students, the Commonwealth, and the System at the forefront.”
Greenstein said it was “enormously helpful” to have such a knowledgeable and engaged board chair. That expertise is only growing. The work led Shapira to become a student again and she is now completing a doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania.
Adler University Looks Inward to Remedy Structural Racism
Adler University’s mission is about social justice and has been since it was founded in Chicago in 1952 by a follower of the Austrian physician and therapist Alfred Adler, who first championed the idea that health and wellness is determined by community life. From campuses in Chicago and Vancouver, Canada, as well as online, it prepares graduate students to become agents for social change in careers as psychologists, social workers, mental health counselors, and professionals in other fields.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion has long been a hallmark and priority for Adler. More than 40 percent of its nearly 2,000 students, 30 percent of the faculty, and 44 percent of the trustees are racial and ethnic minorities. Its graduation rate for minority students is 86 percent, almost precisely the same as for everyone. Two-thirds of the faculty and staff hires in 2020–2021 were people of color. The board itself is highly diverse, with 10 women, eight men, eight persons of color and five LGBTQ+.
Despite all that, amid the society-wide reckoning spurred by the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, when administration leaders and the board of trustees took a hard inward look, they came to a jarring conclusion: the university itself was not immune to structural racism.
“We had listened closely to the voices of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) students, faculty, and staff consistently over the years,” said President Raymond E. Crossman. “But concerns (they) raised over time hadn’t been fully addressed.”
The shortcomings included too few people of color on the senior team; inadequate response to microaggressions in and outside the classroom; overreliance on people of color to address racism in classroom discussions; unequal workloads and pay for the same jobs, too few Black-specific books and other materials in the library, and a curriculum that was too White-centered.
Adler already had mandatory diversity training for faculty, but “those trainings weren’t effective,” said Crossman, whose 19 years at Adler make him the longest serving LGBTQ university president in North America.
In June 2020, weeks after the murder of Floyd, administrators were presented with a document titled Black Community Demands and Expectations laying out 48 specific changes they sought in the workplace and learning environment.
“The day we received the demands, we said, ‘Yes, we are doing them. It wasn’t a concession. They made sense,” said Crossman. In subsequent forums and meetings, trustees listened and were vulnerable and honest about their own biases and need to work on them, he said.
Board of Trustees Chair Joy MacPhail, a retired politician and leader of the progressive New Democratic Party in British Columbia and unstinting advocate for working families, Indigenous peoples and the poor, said the trustees had always embraced Adler’s social justice mission, but recognized “we had to dig even deeper to meet the needs of what our students, faculty, and staff were asking for.”
The board in August 2020 created an Antiracism and Inclusion Committee on an equal footing with its Finance and Academic Affairs committees and gave faculty, students and staff a seat at the table. It spent months listening to stakeholders and working on the committee’s mandate and how it would operate. It established a new governance and communication channel for the board and, recognizing that equity and justice work should not be ghettoized into a single committee, instructed each standing committee to develop a rubric or equity lens to guide its work. The leader of the Black Caucus is now a member of the University Cabinet.
“We knew how hard this work is and that we really needed to put our shoulder to the wheel to meet the needs of the changing world,” said MacPhail, who was recently appointed to the Order of Canada, one of Canada’s highest civilian honors. Now, instead of undergoing a single annual training, the board brought in two antiracism activists and educators to conduct diversity training at each board meeting across the 2020–2021 year. Additional sessions are planned going forward. They examined the effects of White supremacy and implicit bias in organizations and leadership. MacPhail and other leaders also completed a six-month training program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University on governance and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Even as Adler dealt with COVID-19 disruptions and adjustments, the board devoted more time to addressing racism than anything else.
“Structural racism across higher education is pervasive, formidable, and it’s not going away,” said Crossman. “There’s no checking boxes. There needs to be commitment to transforming entrenched paradigms. And that requires listening, humility, sacrifice, and stamina.”
MacPhail, owner of Vancouver-based OUTtv, the world’s longest airing LGBTQ+ television network, echoed those sentiments. “One can never stop attempting to make progress, ever. The job will not be done for a long, long time,” she said.
Virginia Commonwealth University Purges Symbols of a Confederate Past
Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) traces its roots to the Medical College of Virginia, founded in Richmond in 1838, which almost two dozen years later became the Capital of the Confederacy. A prominent plaque in a medical building honored the professors who trained physicians and surgeons for the Confederate Army.
A century later the medical school merged with a liberal arts and professional school to create what is now Virginia’s fourth largest and most ethnically and racially diverse university, with nearly 30,000 students, more than a quarter of whom are Black or Hispanic.
VCU’s downtown campus sits in a city long filled with statues, buildings, and streets dedicated to those associated with the Confederacy, most notably the imposing statues of Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and J.E.B. Stuart on nearby Monument Avenue as well as a columned memorial to Jefferson Davis. (Those statues were toppled or removed during the George Floyd protests in 2020.)
After the deadly White supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, VCU President Michael Rao, with the board’s support, ordered an audit of all the Confederate symbols and memorials on campus. After methodical scholarly research, a work group catalogued scores of them, perhaps the most glaring a chapel honoring Jefferson Davis, who had no connection with VCU, as well as the medical school’s McGuire Hall and Baruch Auditorium. The United Daughters of the Confederacy donated money to create the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel in the hospital in 1960.
Hunter Holmes McGuire was a Confederate Army surgeon credited with helping both sides agree to quick releases of captured medical officers—a humanitarian principle still observed by combatants—but who was also a eugenicist who believed Blacks were inferior and should be enslaved. McGuire was later president of the American Medical Association. Simon Baruch, another Confederate surgeon and father of the financier and philanthropist Bernard Baruch, joined the nascent Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
“Candidly, I looked at a lot of the symbols and didn’t know what they meant,” said Rao, the son of a physician from India who has led VCU since 2009 and has been a college president for 27 years.
“There’s a difference between history that cannot be changed or erased—and shouldn’t be—and the idea of honoring and commemorating” those who fought for slavery, he said, adding that these displays were deeply offensive to the very students whose lives VCU seeks to lift.
The board of visitors was totally unified, said H. Benson Dendy
III, rector of the board of visitors. “There really was not any controversy. We came to the realization that this needed to be done.”
“How do we expect students or faculty to walk past memorials to those who fought or strongly supported their being enslaved?” he said. “It becomes a fairly simply decision.”
The board in 2019 created the Committee on Commemorations and Memorials led by Aashir Nasim, VCU’s vice president of institutional equity, effectiveness, and success. A year later, after extensive listening sessions and gathering more than 3,000 comments on all sides of the issue, the panel recommended 18 actions to the board. In September 2020 the board unanimously approved the recommendations in total, including naming the School of the Arts for Dr. Murry N. DePillars, for VCU’s first Black dean who put the arts school on the map.
McGuire Hall is now simply the Health Sciences Research Building and the auditorium bears no name. VCU workers chiseled Jefferson Davis’ name from the Memorial Chapel in December 2020 and the space actually was closed. Elsewhere a plaque was removed that honored Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, whose home once stood on the campus. The plaque had been presented by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society in 1912, a time when statues and markers were being placed all over the South.
In all, VCU decommissioned 28 memorials, plaques, paintings, and names on or adjacent to campus. “The board felt it was very important not just to remove the names but to honor people who did reflect our priorities and our character today,” said Dendy.
Dendy and Rao offer the same advice to other boards facing dilemmas over their institutions’ past.
“Get all the input you can, give it very reasoned consideration, but don’t drag it out,” said Dendy.
“On any matter the best thing you can do is gather the facts and truths. Be prepared to explain why you are doing what you’re doing” but then act decisively, said Rao. “That’s one of the challenges our society faces. If you don’t deal with the things you should be dealing with, they just go on and on and on.”
A Retooled Board Places Students First at Community College of Rhode Island
The Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) has made dramatic progress in improving graduation rates since Meghan Hughes became president of New England’s largest two-year college in 2016. The push has been accelerated by a decision in 2020 to marry the separate boards of the CCRI Foundation and the Alumni Association, which had a history of working apart, not in tandem. Unlike the student body, the boards of both were largely older, White males. Only five percent were Black or other people of color. Today, 38 percent are and most of the 18-member foundation board of trustees is female. The leadership of the newly created Alumni Association Assembly, now under the foundation board, is also far more diverse.
Thirty percent of first-time, full-time students now graduate in three years, double the previous rate, and 18 percent earn a degree in two years. Board members have reached into their own pockets to fund scholarships to help make that happen.
The college has doubled the number of low-income students in its full-time cohort and boosted full-time enrollment of students of color more than 150 percent.
Hughes came to the Warwick, Rhode Island, campus from leading the Rhode Island branch of Year Up, a high-powered, tuition-free training program that prepares young people for college and careers. She was determined to improve CCRI’s “shameful” two-year graduation rate of four percent and to do it fast. “There’s no moral case that can be made for doing this in an incremental way,” said Hughes, who began her career in academe as an art history professor.
She recruited Bobby Gondola, director of global philanthropy for the toy maker Hasbro and a former Year Up executive, as the college’s chief fund raiser and executive director of the foundation. “I made it very clear that I would need the foundation to operate very differently than the way it had since its founding,” she said. “That started with rebuilding a board that reflected Rhode Island and the values we were bringing to this work, and who were as passionate as we are about serving our students.”
Kim B. Lee, vice president for diversity and inclusion for International Game Technology PLC and one of the new board members, calls Hughes “a little bit of a brawler for our students. She will go to bat for them and she’s got the board to stand behind her on that.”
Antonia “Toni” McGuire, a foundation trustee and president of the alumni group, credits CCRI with laying the cornerstone for her career as a nurse, executive, and vice president of the National Association of Community Health Centers. “Meghan is a force,” said McGuire. “She walked through those doors and never looked back, telling kids she believed in each one of them. She treated everybody as though theirs was the most important story in the world.”
“And we all began to tell our stories. We all started saying, ‘Wow, this is bigger than all of us. We have such an opportunity to make this community better,’” said McGuire, a Class of 1975 alumna.
Most of the 13,000 CCRI students attend college part-time and hold down jobs. Nearly half are minorities and low-income. “The DNA of our [advancement] organization is we must drive an equity agenda, we must bring opportunity to our students,” said Gondola.
The college is an important source of talent for employers across the state and beyond looking to fill the ranks of nurses, public safety officers, IT specialists, and other skilled workers they need.
The revamped foundation board launched a Diversity Council to hold the college accountable in reaching its expressed goal to become a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community and achieve equitable student outcomes.
Lee, who chairs the governance committee, said that while fundraising is an important part of what the board does for the college, the trustees also make important contributions as volunteers, mentors, and internship sponsors.
“They have wide networks throughout Rhode Island and beyond,” said Lee, and have helped broker important workforce partnerships between the college and employers. Lee’s own company, IGT, has hired interns for its software developer program. Trustee Thomas Seewoester, a vice president of Amgen, helped start a training program for Amgen workers in partnership with CCRI. Another trustee, Maura Dunn, headed human resources for General Dynamics Electric Boat, which relies on CCRI to help train 1,000 apprentices a year for its submarine-building operation.
CCRI was named “Two-Year College of the Year” in 2019 by Education Dive, an industry news publisher, for its rapid transformation.
The pandemic thrust many students and their families into financial difficulties and posed challenges for students and instructors alike. While CCRI had offered some courses online beforehand, only half the students had ever taken one and the college counted more than 900 who had no WiFi at home or access to a laptop to work remotely.
The revitalized board has championed three core initiatives to support student success: the Comeback Scholarship provides financial support to encourage previously enrolled students to return to CCRI, the Last Mile Scholarship supports those who switch from part-time to full-time attendance, and the Student Emergency Relief Fund provides critical basic needs and technology to keep students from abandoning their studies. The board has raised more than $1 million in the past four years and set in motion a $25-million capital campaign, an audacious sum for a community college.
“Resourcing our students is the single most important challenge we have,” said Hughes. “One of the board’s best qualities is that it’s largely peopled by folks who have a bias toward action. The mind-set is: It’s time to go.”
Embracing Bold Change at the Southern California University of Health Sciences
The bedrock of Southern California University of Health Sciences (SCU) in Whittier, California, has been its century-old Los Angeles College of Chiropractic. For decades that was its sole purpose. Around 2000 it added degrees in acupuncture and Oriental medicine, but the broadening of its programs stopped there, which suited some members of its board of regents whose principal interest was chiropractic.
By 2017 the small, not-for-profit university was struggling to generate enough revenue to cover costs and its accreditor was keeping a watchful eye. Staff were laid off. Enrollment drops in back-to-back years finally convinced regents that perhaps it was time to add new academic programs. But first they had to address serious the shortcomings of their own governance structure.
In longtime President John Scaringe SCU already had a leader who was a recognized authority on higher education management and how to manage change. Scaringe has spent three decades at the university as a professor, dean, and, since 2009, as the chief executive. He also is a commissioner of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, the regional accreditor, which afforded him an unimpeded view of the changing higher education landscape, and he holds a doctorate in higher education management.
Understanding the gravity of the university’s situation and at Scaringe’s request, the board of regents engaged with the Association of Governing Boards in 2017 “to bring a clearer, more unified vision to the institution and facilitate governance changes that would more readily allow for execution of that vision,” the leadership wrote in its Nason Award application.
Scaringe had a strong ally in regent and alumnus Thomas S. Bakman, DC, who in 2018 became the board chair. Bakman is a health care entrepreneur with a record of building successful integrated practices that unite medical disciplines.
The board wound up “refreshing” the university’s vision statement and collapsing 11 unwieldy committees into 6 sharply focused on key trustee responsibilities such as mission, student success, financial oversight and risk management, and best practices of governance. The board also created three task forces to work on three projects vital to the university’s future: its relocation to a new campus in 2025, university identity and branding, and making new institutional partnerships and affiliations.
The regents, once largely older, White males, by then had several fresh faces. That was achieved mostly through normal turnover, but a couple stepped aside after deciding the new direction the university was taking was not for them, said Bakman, founder and CEO of Restoration Healthcare, an interdisciplinary healthcare practice in Irvine, California.
The old committees had mimicked the parallel of the university’s own organization, which got the regents “more into operations than strategy,” said Scaringe. “We had experienced leaders. They didn’t want to sit on this operational-type board, which had legacy policies and procedures. They welcomed the change.”
New regents brought expertise in higher education law, academic administration, university finance, marketing, and integrative health. “The board deliberately recruited diverse board members with relevant expertise in guiding changes needed for both the survival and significant growth of SCU,” it said in the Nason Award application.
“We went to a consent agenda” for board meetings, Bakman said, letting the six committees review matters and make recommendations for the board’s vote, “and then we can harness their minds for more interaction and discussion.”
It also established university-wide key performance indicators to better monitor performance and updated the strategic plan. Bakman credits Scaringe with taking the regents through “Leadership Management 101,” showing them where and how up-front investments would lead the university to a better, stronger place.
“If you take a farming analogy, you till that soil, you put the seed in, but there’s no green shoots for a while, In fact, it’s consuming resources. John was really good at showing the projection,” said Bakman. And then they started seeing green shoots.
The newly invigorated board adopted a Master Program Strategy to launch eight new degree and two certificate programs between 2018 and 2025. The university fuses modern Western medical practices with ancient Eastern techniques and offers master’s degrees in genetics and genomics as well as for physician assistants. It is launching physical therapy and occupational therapy programs as well, and sees demand growing for what it calls an integrative and holistic approach to health and well-being.
The changes have produced dramatic results. Revenue has grown 82 percent since 2017 and enrollment is up 159 percent.
The university has been looking into possible mergers, partnerships, consortia, or other joint endeavors with other health education providers, both nonprofit and for-profit. “We haven’t found the right partner yet,” said Scaringe, but they are still looking intently.
The new, larger campus will be located within a community college district, with its schools serving as feeders to SCU through articulation agreements. A high-tech building still being designed will also open new possibilities, with labs, classrooms, and other facilities for in-person, online and remote work and learning.
Scaringe said higher education boards, especially for small institutions, need to “understand that a partnership is not a bad thing for your survival. Like any partnership, whether marriage or business, there’s some give and take. But it can’t wait until it’s the last resort. You should be looking at these partnerships when you have some strength rather than someone coming in to rescue you.”
Christopher Connell is an independent journalist and former education writer for the Associated Press. He is the author of AGB’s Top Strategic Issues for Boards 2020–2021 and the forthcoming Top Strategic Issues for Boards 2022–2023.
Share on LinkedIn
