Our Advisory Board
Donald W. Harward
Sally Engelhard Pingree
Adriana Aldana
Randy Bass
Joyce Bylander
Tim Eatman
Tessa Hicks Peterson
Amy Johnson
Julie Kidd
Buffie Longmire-Avital
Jonathan Metzl
Caryn Musil
Ken O’Donnell
Verdis Robinson
Philip Rous
Don co-founded Bringing Theory to Practice with Sally Engelhard Pingree in 2003 and served as its inaugural Director until 2018. He is President Emeritus of Bates College, having led Bates from 1989 to 2002. Before then, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Don holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Maryland and honorary degrees from Bates College and the College of Wooster. In addition to directing BT2P, he has served as a Senior Fellow with the Association of American Colleges & Universities and consulted widely for academic institutions, foundations, and higher-education organization. He is the author or editor of many studies of higher education, including Transforming Undergraduate Education: Theories That Compel and Practices That Succeed and Well-Being and Higher Education.
Sally is the co-founder of Bringing Theory to Practice, along with Don Harward. She is President of the S. Engelhard Center and a Trustee of the Charles Engelhard Foundation. A graduate of Trinity College, Sally’s areas of interest include health, education, and environmental affairs. She serves as a Regent for Georgetown University, where she helped to launch Georgetown’s Engelhard Project For Connecting Life and Learning and from which she received the Patrick Healy, S.J. Award for service to the university. Sally has also served on the boards of The National Geographic Society, Boston College, the Potomac School, and the Carter Center.
Adriana is a professor of Social Work at California State University Dominguez Hills. She is trained as a community-based practitioner and developmental psychologist, with an emphasis on youth empowerment. Her research examines the sociopolitical development of young people and its implications for community capacity building and anti-racist practice. As a practitioner, she has organized social justice workshops, managed a community-based youth dialogue program, and developed program curricula for multicultural training of K-12 educators and youth.
Randy is Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives and Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he leads the Designing the Future(s) initiative and the Red House incubator for curricular transformation. For 13 years he was the Founding Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), and for seven years, Vice Provost for Education. He has worked at the intersections of new media technologies and the scholarship of teaching and learning for nearly thirty years. Randy’s recent writings include Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosytem (with Bret Eynon); and "Can We Liberate Liberal Education?" in Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education).
Joyce is Interim Dean of the College at Haverford College for 2020-21. She retired from Dickinson College in 2018 after a twenty-year career that included serving as Vice-President, Dean of Student Life, Associate Provost for Academic Campus Life, and Special Assistant for Institutional and Diversity Initiatives. Before her time at Dickinson, Joyce served at Bucknell University and the College of Charleston. She holds a bachelor's in psychology and social service from Cleveland State University and a master of public administration from the University of South Carolina.
Tim is the inaugural dean of the Honors Living Learning Community (HLLC) and Associate Professor in the department of Urban Education at Rutgers University, Newark. He joined Rutgers-Newark after more than a decade with Imagining America: Artists and Scholars In Public Life, serving as Director of Research (2004-2012) and Faculty Co-Director (2012-2017). He is currently a national co-chair of the Urban Research Action Network (URBAN) and board vice chair (chair elect) of the International Association for Research on Service Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE). Tim’s research centers on public engagement and equity within higher education. In 2018, he was recognized by the University of Illinois College of Education with its 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award.
Tessa serves as the Assistant Vice President of Community Engagement at Pitzer College, director of the Office for Consortial Academic Collaborations for the Claremont Colleges, and Associate Professor of Urban Studies. Before coming to Pitzer in 2006, she worked with communities throughout Southern California on human relations and civil rights issues as Associate Director at the Anti-Defamation League and as the Youth Programs Director at the National Conference for Community and Justice. Her scholarship centers on community-based education and research, social change theories and movements, decolonization and indigenous knowledge, and prison education and abolition.
Amy M. Johnson (she/her), is assistant provost for Immersion and Experiential Learning, faculty head of Warren College and professor of practice in the College of Arts & Sciences at Vanderbilt University. As assistant provost, Johnson oversees Immersion Vanderbilt and the Offices of Immersion Resources, Global Education, and the Health Professions Advisory Office.
Prior to joining the provost office at Vanderbilt, Johnson served as the Executive Director of Core Curriculum and an associate professor of history at Elon University. Johnson is an alumna of Tufts University where she earned a bachelor of arts in Spanish and African Diasporic Studies. She earned her master’s and doctorate at Duke University with a focus on pre-colonial West African History, early colonial Caribbean History and comparative slave studies.
Julie has been the President and Trustee of The Endeavor Foundation since 1980. She has served on numerous Boards of Trustees in the United States and Europe, including Middlebury College, Hamilton College, Teachers College of Columbia University, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Artes Liberales Institute at the University of Warsaw, and ECLA European College of Liberal Arts (now Bard College Berlin. In her board service and foundation work, Julie is a powerful advocate for liberal education, ethical understanding, and independence of thought.
Buffie Longmire-Avital is a diversity, inclusion, and racial equity (D.I.R.E ©) scholar-educator. She is an associate professor of psychology and the inaugural director of the Black Lumen Project, an equity initiative, and the previous coordinator of the African and African American Studies interdisciplinary minor program at Elon University. Her research interests focus on how psychosocial factors and systemic injustices contribute to health inequities that impact racial and sexual minorities. Through a critical community health frame, she explores how the adoption of high impact coping responses in response to chronic minority status stressors play a part in the development of unhealthy lifestyle behaviors and mental health outcomes for young collegiate adults. As Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning (CEL) Scholar from 2018 – 2020, her CEL blogs focused on how to generate and sustain critically conscious, equitable approaches that support underserved and historically excluded students' engagement in High Impact Practices.
Jonathan is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his MD from the University of Missouri, MA in humanities/poetics and Psychiatric internship/residency from Stanford University, and PhD in American Culture from University of Michigan. Jonathan has written extensively for medical, psychiatric, and popular publications. His books include The Protest Psychosis, Prozac on the Couch, and most recently the widely-read Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland.
Caryn retired from the Association of American Colleges and Universities in June, 2020 after nearly three decades of service and leadership as Senior Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives and Senior Scholar and Director of Civic Learning and Democracy. During that time she led ground-breaking AAC&U initiatives on global learning, democratic education, and civic engagement. She served as the lead author of the A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education and released at the White House in 2012. Before AAC&U, Caryn was a member of the English faculty at Marquette University and for nearly a decade the Executive Director of the National Women’s Studies Association.
Ken is Vice Provost at California State University Dominguez Hills, leading the Provost Office’s work on program quality, faculty affairs and development, student success and engagement, and innovation. Before coming to Dominguez Hills, he was Senior Director of Student Engagement for the CSU system, leading projects to strengthen STEM education, community engagement, transfer and articulation, and general education. Ken has written and presented about the intersections between deep learning and student success, the benefits of locating college learning in real-world contexts, and the role of public universities in higher education reform. Before coming to the CSU he was a member of the screenwriting faculty and an assistant dean at Chapman University.
Verdis is a Unitarian Universalist seminarian, a consultant on community college civic learning and democratic engagement, and a family and community historian. He formerly served as Director of Community College Engagement at Campus Compact and National Director of The Democracy Commitment. Prior to this civic leadership work, he was a professor of History and African-American Studies at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York. Alongside his current studies in seminary, Verdis is an Associate of the Kettering Foundation and a fellow of the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Seminar on Citizenship and the American and Global Polity.
Philip is the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Prior to his appointment as Provost, Philip served as Dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences. As Dean, he provided leadership in creating the College’s Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment (CASTLE), which is focused on new pedagogical models for actively engaged student learning. His research is in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics, and he has contributed to the fundamental understanding of the crystallography of surfaces, the dynamics and structure of negative ion states at surfaces, and nanophysics.
Aswani joined Elon University as Provost in 2019 after serving five years as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and executive director of the Center for Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. As Dean, he expanded faculty diversity, experiential learning, and community engagement at UNCW and spearheaded the development of international partnerships, along with many other initiatives. Before joining UNCW, Aswani spent 15 years as professor of marine science and later as interim dean for the College of Arts & Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University. He holds a doctorate degree in marine science from the School of Marine Science at College of William & Mary, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in zoology from Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, India.