Among Comings and Goings, Pennington Leaving Gates Foundation; New Ed Commish in Conn.

Hilary Pennington, who has led the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success efforts for the past five years,  emailed her colleagues that she was leaving the foundation. Before joining Gates, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and CEO of Jobs for the Future, which she co-founded. Inside Higher Ed reports that Tom Dawson, a senior policy offi...

New England Works: NEBHE to Convene Leadership Summit on Bridging Higher Ed, Workforce

NEBHE will bring together hundreds of New England higher education, government and business leaders on Monday, Nov. 7, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to discuss the role of higher education in preparing the highly skilled workers that will drive innovation in the region.Presenters and panelists at the New England Works conference will explore: What projections say about the gap between ...

URI Fall 2011 Honors Colloquium to Feature Talks by Inventor Kurzweil, other Futurists on Technologies

The University of Rhode Island's honors colloquium will address technological advances expected over the next 20 to 30 years and their impact on humankind.Talks will take place Tuesday evenings, at 7:30 p.m. from September through December 2011, at Edwards Auditorium on URI's Kingston campus. The complete season line-up follows:Tuesday, Sept. 13Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil on exponential g...

Filmmaker Michael Moore to Speak at Bunker Hill CC

Academy Award-winning filmmaker  Michael Moore will speak at Bunker Hill Community College's Health & Wellness Center Gymnasium on Thursday, Sept. 15, from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Moore's latest book, Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life, is scheduled to be released in mid-September. The event is free but seating is limited....

Salman Rushdie to Open ECSU Arts and Lecture Series

Award-winning author Salman Rushdie will open Eastern Connecticut State University’s 11th Annual Arts and Lecture Series on Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 7 p.m., in the university's student center. Rushdie is the author of 10 fictional novels inspired by his homeland of India, including The Satanic Verses, which led the spiritual leader of Iran to issue a fatwa calling for Rushdie's execution.Other sp...

New Chiefs of NH Community Colleges, Connecticut Regents, COA, Maine Think Tank

J. Bonnie Newman, the former interim president of the University of New Hampshire, was named interim chancellor of the New Hampshire Community College System, succeeding Richard Gustafson, who is retiring as chancellor of the seven-campus system. Newman was executive dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, an assistant to President George H.W. Bush, president of the Business and...

Conn. Gov. Malloy to Speak at Conference on Growing Economic Divide and Implications for Ed

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy will be among speakers at “To Have and Have Not: The Growing Economic and Social Divide and its Implications for Educational Leaders,” a conference scheduled for Monday, Oct. 3, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., at Boston University’s Metcalf Trustee Center.The conference sponsored by Concord, Mass.-based Maguire Associates will also feature Barry Bluestone...

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: NEBHE Collaborates with New England HERC to Introduce Constantly Refreshing “Joblink” for Higher Ed

As part of its mission to tie higher education to the economic well-being of New England, NEBHE has partnered with the New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (NE HERC) to provide access to recruitment and employment resources to address faculty and staff hiring needs.The mission of the NE HERC, which was founded in 2006, is to advance the efforts of member institutions to recruit ...

Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan, O.J. Lawyer Scheck, Globetrotter Meadowlark Lemon Among Speakers in Fairfield U 2011-12 Series

Connecticut's Fairfield University announced the roster for its  2011-12 Open VISIONS Forum at the university’s Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts.The complete season line-up is as follows:Monday, Sept. 19, 2011, at 8 p.m.Chuck Todd: “State of the Nation: Polling the Mood”Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, at 8 p.m.Lara Logan: “Apartheid to Afghanistan, Reporting from the Front Li...

DC Shuttle: Debt Deal Boosts Pell Grants

The debt-ceiling deal signed by President Obama last week will cut over $900 billion in federal funding over the next 10 years. Yet even in an extremely budget-conscious atmosphere, members of Congress singled out the Pell Grant program for an increase in funding to guarantee college access for low-income students. Under the terms of the new law, the Pell program would receive $10 billion in FY 20...