kirschner
Ann Kirschner's career has been an unusual mix of the academic and business worlds, and of traditional and non-traditional forms of education. She earned her Ph.D. in English at Princeton University and worked as a lecturer there; co-founded the National Football League's Web site, which has been a huge business success; led Fathom, Columbia University's distance education venture, which was less than a huge business success; and ran a consulting company in which she advised colleges on strategy issues. Now she is taking over as dean of City University of New York's Honors College, a key part of the system's efforts to attract the best high school students and send them on to top graduate programs.
Kirschner responded to questions about her career and goals for her new job.
Q: With your consulting business and Fathom, your career of late has been focused on new models for higher education. Are you returning to more traditional higher ed? How does that feel?
A: It feels great. I started my academic career as a lecturer at Princeton, then left to pursue opportunities in media and technology. Now I’ve come full circle -- with a twist. My perspective on higher ed is rooted in the university, but is also informed by my experience in a variety of institutions and organizations as chief executive, consultant, and entrepreneur.
Q: City College was once Harvard for generations of students who didn't have money or had the wrong last names to get into Ivies. How elite do you want the Honors College to be? How is it different from CCNY's glory days or elite private colleges?
A: As a kid growing up in New York City, and a child of a Holocaust survivor, I never doubted that public education was my front door to opportunity. From K-12 to graduate school, public education was there to serve all students -- including those who aspired to the highest level of performance. That’s what drew me to the Honors College -- the continuity of CUNY’s commitment to academic excellence. We are educating the best and the brightest of New York City students, and most of our students are first generation Americans. But while we honor tradition, we are looking forward, not backwards. These future leaders are participants in a 21st century learning community.
And that’s not just an abstract idea: By the numbers, GPA and standardized test scores, these students are as talented and academically well qualified as any that have ever attended CUNY. In my subjective opinion, they are equal to any that I have ever known. Today is just as good as the “good old days” when you meet CCNY CUNY Honors College student David Bauer, who bested 1,600 high school seniors nationally to win the Intel First Place Science Award, and chose the Honors College over many competing offers. David builds on the legacy of Intel co-founder Andrew Grove, who arrived at CCNY in 1957 and went from shaky English to graduate first in his class, three years later. David’s choice is a tribute to the unique opportunities offered by the Honors College, and to the highly innovative and dedicated faculty throughout CUNY.
Q: What are your top goals for the college?
A: Since its inception just five years ago, the CUNY Honors College has set a rapid pace in the areas that I believe are most important for contemporary higher education: a flexible curriculum that fosters critical thinking, collaborative learning, interdisciplinary programs, and a global perspective. My goals are to deepen the Honors College’s performance in each of those areas. We can provide the strong and personalized support of a small college, while also taking advantage of CUNY’s tremendous resources and its outstanding faculty across seven participating universities. As you would guess from my own background, I will also be focusing on the co-curricular opportunities that I consider to be important elements in preparing our students to become lifelong learners and leaders. Medicine, media, law, sports, scientific research, the arts, and Wall Street -- New York is our classroom, and our students will work with leaders in all these fields.
Again, this is no abstraction: our first two graduating classes have set a heady pace for competitive fellowships, including Truman and Marshall Scholars, and professional success at firms such as Bear Stearns and GE. Just a few examples: Kseniya Golubets, beginning this fall at Yale Medical School; Aylana Meisel, accepted at Georgetown Law School; Jay Horowitz, completing an internship as law clerk for [N.Y.] Supreme Court Justice Mark Friedlander; Gina Moriarty, awarded an NSF grant for Undergraduates and completing research on the chemical composition of meteorites under direction of Jon Friedrich at the American Museum of Natural History.
Q: While Fathom attracted a lot of attention, it didn't take off or last in the way some originally hoped. What lessons did you take from that experience? Is any of that applicable to your CUNY job?
A: Fathom was a milestone in the evolution of higher education. The underlying trends that inspired it are irreversible: the dominance of a knowledge-based society, the need for skilled workers, the explosion in the number and diversity of college students, the ubiquity of computing and the Internet, and the spiraling cost to students and their parents of a traditional education.
Timing is everything, and we started Fathom in the days when few people had broadband connections and the iPod was just a gleam in Steve Job’s eye. The last few years have validated Fathom’s strategy, however. There are now more than 2 million students learning online, and 80 percent of institutions have online programs. Even traditional classes are usually accompanied by some online components. Networked, distributed, interactive learning is taking its place as one more educational delivery format. So we were ahead of our time, but I'm very proud to have been one of the pioneers.
That said, even technology enthusiasts recognize the irreplaceable quality of a live classroom. At the Honors College, we have the resources to educate our students in traditional small seminars, and I hope to put the Fathom experience to work as we explore how to extend and enhance those face-to-face classes with digital media and interactive technologies. In addition to free tuition and generous study grants, all of our students receive a new Apple laptop, and work with one of the Honors College’s 17 technology fellows.
Q: As a consultant, you advised many college leaders. As you become a college leader, which pieces of advice that you gave are going to be most important -- and the most difficult?
A: For the last few years, I have been advising and recommending lots of different approaches and new models in higher education, but ultimately, I was not responsible for their implementation. At CUNY, I have an opportunity to apply some of these ideas -- only this time I have to live with the results! I hope I heed my own exhortations to fear inertia more than failure, to recruit students as active partners in a collaborative learning community, and to support the role of experience outside the classroom as a critical component of higher education.
- Instructional technology / distance education
- Deans
Comments on Upwardly Mobile Academic: Ann Kirschner
What an interesting spin on Fathom.
It was, in fact, quite a resounding failure. Very highly capitalized, not introduced particularly early in the dotcom era, extremely aggressive in its marketing, and "underwritten" by a blue chip academic name. And yet, in terms of enrollment and revenue, absolutely unable to achieve any significant goals.
Yes, in a sense it was a forerunner of for-profit distance learning (in terms of timing, as well as kind of instruction offered). It sought to establish a capital structure similar to the for-profit model, in that it drew upon a separate budget, and was intended to drive revenue growth by payment per course of instruction. So perhaps the model was, roughly, a novel one.
Of course, as far as a model for offering online liberal arts courses - similar to that offered by Columbia - it failed, in that no one really wanted to take such courses on a one shot basis. Further, its successors in truly for-profit distance education (that is, not affiliated with a non-profit underlying institution) have all succeeded only in offering courses, diplomas, or degrees in technical, professional, or specialized fields (IT, management, nursing, specific professional training, etc.). In this sense, Fathom is not much of an innovative pace setter, one would say.
Moreover, its demise (alongside its peers, such as UNext et al.) was a helpful motivator, I believe, in spurring MIT and other elite institutions to begin offering their courses online - via open source, rather than under a revenue producing model. I wonder if that was the true "success" of Fathom: to encourage academic institutions to allow online courses to serve as a public good, rather than as (unsuccessful) private revenue sources.
I find Ms. Kirschner's brief but hugely self-laudatory description of Fathom, and her involvement in its trajectory, to be quite clever. Perhaps it was the start of something innovative. But (and this is a major reservation) I don't think it succeeded at all on its own terms. The best description might be to say it cleared the decks of any notion that traditional institutions might have a new chance at a "land grab" in the distance education space. In doing so, it allowed open source to become a new vehicle for course sharing. This seems a fortuitous outcome - if not the one that profit-maximizers, like Ms. Kirschner (apparently), had in mind.