Skip to content

Bay Path continues to confront change and inspire new ideas in season two of webinar series, Leading Edge Thinking in Higher Education

Bay Path University is proud to announce the premiere of the second season of its free monthly webinar series, Leading Edge Thinking in Higher Education, examining the complex changes facing higher education and the bold transformations underway. Bay Path’s Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practices (CHELIP) launched the series last year to further the discourse and confront the challenges surrounding the upheaval of traditional higher education.

The season will kick off Wednesday, October 20 with a presentation titled, “Game Changing Leadership in Times of Profound Change.” Presented by Dr. Wallace Pond, author of Leadership in the Real World: Hard Won Lessons from Twenty Years as a Chief Executive in Turbulent Times,  the webinar will trace the fault lines in higher ed’s traditional financial and operational models and demonstrate how they have led to its critical inflection point. Dr. Pond will share his vision for transformation and discuss the challenges that inhibit change and why they are so hard to surmount, along with suggestions for what leaders can do to address these challenges.

Beyond contemplating the deeply ingrained infrastructures that underlie higher education, this year’s webinars will look at the student experience, the changing values Gen X and Gen Z bring to the college selection process, high impact student recruitment practices, instituting innovation from the ground up and professional development issues faced by higher education administrators.

“The higher education sector is being transformed at a rapid and dramatic pace, creating demand for fresh, creative perspectives that can address the needs and aspirations of modern-day students and the institutions that serve them,” explains Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson, Founding Director of CHELIP and Bay Path’s doctoral program in Higher Education Leadership and Organizational Studies (HELOS). “During our first season, we heard time and again from professionals who found the webinars to be a valuable resource for exploring new ways of thinking about higher ed.”

Morriss-Olson imagines the second season will go even further in serving higher ed professionals, but she also believes the topics explored in this upcoming season will appeal to the broader audience connected to and concerned with higher education, including college and university board members, parents, alumni and donors.

“We’ve designed this webinar series to not only inspire what might be possible, but also to provide a roadmap for how to actually get it done. There is much to be learned from how the business world has used innovative thinking and entrepreneurial strategies to forge new paths,” she notes. “Given the unique organizational structures and missions at most colleges and universities, the challenge lies in learning and borrowing from other industries and making that learning fit the higher ed culture.”

The series is open to all. Each webinar is an hour long. The full schedule and descriptions are available online here. 

# # #

About Bay Path University

Bay Path University was founded in 1897. Bay Path’s enrolled population of over 3,000 includes traditional undergraduates; adult women at The American Women’s College, the first all-women, all-online accredited degree program in the country; and women and men master’s and doctoral students. Bay Path’s goal is to give students confidence in the fundamentals of their chosen field, the curiosity to question the ordinary, the leadership to show initiative, and the desire to make a difference.