Elaine Maimon has been an executive leader at three public universities, including Governors State University, south of Chicago, where she served as president from 2007 until 2020.  She’s a forceful advocate for the educational needs of “new majority” students: working adults, veterans, students from low-income backgrounds and communities of color.  But unlike some other thought-leaders, she insists that these students—like all undergraduates—need and deserve an education that integrates the arts and humanities, civic engagement, and meaningful preparation for work.  At Governors State, Maimon led a series of curricular and institutional changes that modeled this vision, even as the university faced the Great Recession, a budget-cutting debacle in the Illinois higher-ed system, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this conversation, we talk about the needs of new-majority students, the imperative of melding liberal and career-oriented learning, and how to move “from triage to transformation,” as Maimon puts it, in the face of crisis.

Elaine Maimon’s book, Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation, offers a rich account of her experience and values as an academic change-maker.  Her recent essay, “Higher Ed Will Never Be the Same Again,” touches on many of the themes of our conversation.

The Way Forward is a production of Bringing Theory to Practice; to learn more about our work, visit us at www.bttop.org.  Send us your thoughts—and suggestions for future episodes—at info@btop.org.  The podcast is produced by Jabari Butler, and Dan Rudin composed our music.