Education
The Race/Class Bias of College Rankings
This op-ed was originally published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald on Sunday, November 21st, 2016. It’s college rating season, which means that it’s the time of year administrators scroll through US News and World Report, Newsweek, Forbes, The Princeton Review, and the Wall Street Journal to see how their institutions...
On the Importance of Travel
For many families, summer is the time when the car is packed, coolers are filled with sandwiches and drinks, and the entire clan squeezes into the vehicle to travel. In this part of the country, many families travel west to see Mt. Rushmore, the Rockies, Yellowstone Park or the Pacific...
Lessons from a Seattle Fishmonger
About fifteen years ago, a book titled Fish! A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results took the country by storm. Like most books of its kind, it was light on specifics but important inasmuch as it began to focus attention on the importance of organizational culture. As I...
The Virtue of Hard Things
“The Virtue of Hard Things” is a title taken from a recent Wall Street Journal review of the book Grit, by Angela Duckworth (May 4, 2016). Duckworth is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and has spent the past decade studying why some people have extraordinary success and...
A Letter to My Children About Student Debt
Originally Published by the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, May 15th, 2015 Before I became President, I was the new Dean of our theological seminary. One of the first students I met was a graduate who was groaning about his student debt. After I listened to him talk about his situation I...
Accountability
ac-count-a-ble (1) required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsible: government must be accountable to its citizens. See note at re-sponsible. ac-count-a-bil-i-ty/n. It is impossible to lead other people without internalizing the virtue of accountability. Of...
Authenticity
Those of you who read this blog but aren’t from Iowa may not realize that we have been in a Presidential election cycle for nearly a year. Because Iowa is the first state in the nation to hold a Presidential primary—what we know as a caucus—we have been inundated with...
“Some Luck” by Jane Smiley
First, a primer about Iowa culture. Culture and Iowa aren’t necessarily concepts that fit together for most people. When I asked one well-known presidential candidate his impression about our state he commented, “The corn. The corn. I can’t get over how nearly every field for miles on end is filled...
Poverty
Over the next several months, in addition to the topic of leadership, I’ll be writing about several topics that require the very best that leaders have to offer within what James Davison Hunter calls in To Change the World our “sphere of influence.” The first topic that I want to...
Discipline
In their extensive study Leadership that Works, Barbara Wheeler and colleagues set out to discern “…the ingredients of executive leadership that make institutions both durable—as in fit for the long haul—and visionary—that is, moving forward in ways the future is likely to require.” Four common character traits were identified that...
