MSI Aspiring Leaders is a three-day forum and two-year mentoring program that connects prominent Minority Serving Institution (MSI) leaders with mid-career aspiring leaders from the education, non-profit, and business sectors to prepare the next generation of MSI presidents.
“Right now we’re seeing a decline in leaders hoping to become college and university presidents,” said Marybeth Gasman, CMSI executive director and Samuel DeWitt Proctor Endowed Chair in Education. “We hope to reinvigorate the incoming generation and prepare them for success as they navigate the road to presidency.”
Rehn is the director of the Whittier Scholars Program and leads the Digital Liberal Arts Program (DigLibArts) at the College, which she founded in 2013 to support both faculty development and curricular renewal focused on empowering students from diverse backgrounds to become flexible learners who thrive across virtual and physical spaces. She has been a recipient of an NEH Summer Institute Fellowship and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grants totaling $1.45 million to foster digital scholarship and liberal arts curriculum renewal. She is also a HERS leadership institute alumna, and her publications include articles on Conrad, Kipling, Austen, and digital pedagogy.
Funded by the Kresge Foundation and the ECMC Foundation, the forum will include a variety of sessions on topics such as presidential fit, fundraising, mentoring strategies, trustee relationship management, and crisis communication and media management. Additionally, MSI Aspiring Leaders will have the chance to focus on real case studies to learn firsthand what it’s like to lead an institution.
Following the forum, Aspiring Leaders and their presidential mentors will participate in a one-on-one relationship over two years, managed by CMSI. CMSI will provide benchmarks to be completed at various points throughout the mentoring relationship.
The Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions brings together researchers and practitioners from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander Serving Institutions.
