Dr. Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy Executive Director, NASPA

Opening Keynote Speaker
Thursday, June 11, 2009, 1:20 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Dr. Richard Keeling Chairman and Executive Consultant, Keeling & Associates, LLC

Richard P. Keeling, MD leads Keeling & Associates, LLC (K&A), an independent higher education consulting practice in New York City. K&A helps colleges, universities, and professional associations in higher education develop and implement strategy, promote student success, improve student learning, strengthen programs and services, and enhance organizational effectiveness.

Dr. Keeling is Co-Chair and Co-Founder of the International Center for Student Success and Institutional Accountability, formed through a partnership of K&A and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). He also is Senior Fellow for the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement and a Senior Scholar of the American College Personnel Association (ACPA); he is serving his second term on the Board of Directors of the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS). He has been President of the American College Health Association, the Foundation for Health in Higher Education, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and the International Society for AIDS Education. He served two terms as Editor of the Journal of American College Health, is Co-Editor of Science Education and Civic Engagement: An International Journal, and is a member of the editorial boards of three other professional journals.

Morning Plenary Panel: Voluntary System of Accountability
Friday, June 12, 2009, 8:30 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.

Dr. Christine Keller Director of Research and Policy Analysis Executive Director of the Voluntary System of Accountability Association of Public and Land-grant Universities

Christine M. Keller is the Director of Research and Policy Analysis at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the executive director of the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA) project.

As Director of Research, Christine provides leadership in the development of research, analysis, and information services to support APLU strategic initiatives and advocacy efforts. As the director of the VSA project, she oversees the implementation and support of the VSA project. Her current areas of focus include the design and application of national models for tracking student progress and success in postsecondary education and the measurement of student learning outcomes.

Before joining APLU, Christine was the Assistant Director of Institutional Research and Planning at the University of Kansas. At KU, her project responsibilities included regional and specialized accreditation self-study reports, academic program review, faculty salary equity analyses, state performance measures, integrated marketing research, and a campus-wide initiative to improve undergraduate graduation rates. She also served as a KU representative to the AAU data exchange.

Christine holds a Ph.D. in Educational Policy and Leadership from the University of Kansas, a MBA from the University of Missouri, and a bachelor's degree in marketing from Missouri State University.

Dr. George S. McClellan Vice President for Student Affairs, Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne

Dr. George S. McClellan serves as the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). Prior to joining the IPFW community, McClellan served as Vice President for Student Development at Dickinson State University, Interim Director of Assessment and Research for Campus Life at the University of Arizona, and Director of Graduate and Off Campus Housing at Northwestern University.

McClellan is co-editor of The Handbook for Student Affairs Administration (3rd ed.), In Search of Safer Communities: Emerging Practices for Student Affairs in Addressing Campus Violence, Ahead of the Game: Understanding and Addressing Campus Gambling, and Serving Native American Students in Higher Education. In addition, he has authored or co-authored numerous articles and chapters on subjects including theories and models of practice for student affairs, facilities management, college gambling, the impact of computing and computer-mediated communication on higher education organizational structures, the AISP model and its application in various institutional contexts, supporting Native American student success, internationalizing a campus, internationalization of the student affairs profession, and the future of student affairs.

Dr. McClellan is a frequent presenter, speaker, and consultant on a broad range of issues in student affairs including assessment and research, application of theory to practice, gambling behavior, graduate and professional student services, and supporting the success of Native American students and working with tribal communities. In addition, his more than 25 years of professional service to students at a variety of institutional types includes experience in partnerships between student affairs and academic affairs, residential life, housing, food service, facilities planning and operations, diversity issues, internationalization, building campus community, campus crisis response and crisis management planning, intramurals and athletics, assessment, developing and enhancing professional development programs, and student affairs administration.

Dr. Lori E. Varlotta, Ph.D. Vice President for Student Affairs California State University, Sacramento

With 24 years of experience in higher education administration, a decade of senior leadership positions, appointments to national task forces, a prolific research agenda, and a demanding national and international speaking schedule, Dr. Lori Varlotta exemplifies the administrator/scholar role.

Dr. Varlotta currently serves as the Vice President for Student Affairs at California State University, Sacramento. In this role she leads a comprehensive campus life and enrollment management division that includes over 300 staff and 20 departments. Prior to Sacramento State, she held directorships in student activities (University of Pittsburgh), service-learning and leadership (Miami University), and the first year experience (Chatham College). She then went on to assume more senior-level positions as a Dean of Students at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater and an Assistant Vice President at the University of San Francisco.

Dr. Varlotta has earned a BA in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame (IN), an MS in Cultural Foundations of Education from Syracuse University, and an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Philosophy, Education, and Women's Studies from Miami University in Oxford Ohio. As a first generation college student herself, she often tells students and parents that her proudest achievement was getting accepted into college in the first place, making her way through, and walking across that stage to receive her diploma.

Afternoon Plenary Speaker
Friday, June 12, 2009, 1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.

Clifford Adelman Senior Associate, Institute for Higher Education Policy

Dr. Clifford Adelman taught at Roosevelt University, the City College of the City University of New York, and Yale University, and served five years as Associate Dean and Assistant Academic Vice-President at the William Paterson College of New Jersey before coming to the U.S. Department of Education in 1979. He managed higher education issues for the commission that wrote A Nation at Risk (1983) and conducted the research on which its high school curriculum recommendations were based. In addition, Dr. Adelman designed, managed, and served as amanuensis for the higher education follow-up to A Nation at Risk, the Involvement in Learning report (1984), which has been cited as responsible for kick-starting the assessment movement in higher education. His also conducted studies of assessment and testing in the late 1980s, then took on the task of editing and analyzing the major national longitudinal studies data bases. Adleman uthored restricted data files for three (3) national longitudinal studies of the National Center for Education Statistics, and wrote nine monographs in the course of this effort, the best known of which are Women at Thirtysomething: Paradoxes of Attainment (1991); The Way We Are: the Community College as American Thermometer (1992); Women and Men of the Engineering Path (1998); Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns, and Bachelor's Degree Attainment (1999), Moving Into Town-an Moving On: the Community College in the Lives of Traditional-age Students (2005), and The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion from High School Through College (2006). Added A Parallel Postsecondary Universe: the Certification System in Information Technology in 2000, the first study of IT certification. Also produced the companion reference volumes Principal Indicators of Student Academic Histories in Postsecondary Education, 1972-2000 (2004) and The Empirical Curriculum: Changes in Postsecondary Course-Taking, 1972-2000 (2004).

Dr. Adelman left the Department of Education in the fall of 2006, and is now a Senior Associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington, DC, with principal responsibilities for its Global Performance Initiative. In that capacity, he has produced the monograph, "The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction (May, 2008), and "Learning Accountability from Bologna: a Higher Education Policy Primer (July, 2008). Three more products from this project will be published by the Summer of 2009.

He is the recipient (2005) of the Sydney Suslow Award from the Association for Institutional Research for career contributions to the practice of institutional, system, and national research on postsecondary education. In addition, Dr. Adelman is the recipient (2001) of the Special Merit Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Dr. Adelman holds Bachelor's degree from Brown University, and both Master's and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Morning Keynote Speaker
Saturday, June 13, 2009, 8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.

Dr. Richard Hersh Past President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Trinity College (Hartford)

Dr. Richard Hersh has served as President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Trinity College (Hartford), and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The University of New Hampshire and Drake University. He also served as Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Oregon and was Director of the Center for Moral Education at Harvard University. In his early career he was a high school teacher, professor and dean of teacher education.

Dr. Hersh was a member of the Association of American Colleges & Universities GREATER EXPECTATIONS panel and for the past seven years has served as Co-Director of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA) projects that have developed an innovative "value-added" approach to assessing student learning at the college and high school levels. The journal PEER REVIEW devoted its Winter 2002 issue to this project including commentary from leading researchers from around the nation and the November 2005 issue of THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY features an article by Dr. Hersh, "What Do Colleges Teach?" about measuring student learning.

Dr. Hersh's research has focused on teaching and learning in public schools and higher education. He has written extensively and consulted widely with regard to K-12 effectiveness and was co-author of the book, THE STRUCTURE OF SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT. He has written much about the importance of a liberal arts education in the 21st century with his 1999 DAEDALUS article "Generating Ideals and Transforming Lives" and his book PROMOTING MORAL GROWTH in use on many campuses. Dr. Hersh appeared in the recent two-hour PBS documentary "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk" and co- edited the accompanying book by the same title (Palgrave Macmillan publishers) that examines the nature and quality of undergraduate education in the United States.