How to Change Institutions with Purpose

LACOL 2020 Consortium Workshop


Matthew Rascoff, Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation, Duke University

Emily J. Levine, Associate Professor of Education, Stanford University

Keynote: How to Change Institutions with Purpose
Date and Time: June 30, 2020, 1:00pm-2:30pm Eastern Time
Online Location: Zoom webinar
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In February 2020, the coronavirus crisis forced Duke Kunshan University’s students and faculty to scatter across the globe and move online.  Duke University, DKU’s US partner, was soon to follow as the arrival of the global pandemic triggered a near universal pivot to remote instruction. Matthew Rascoff whose digital innovation team guided the institution through both these rapid transitions noted:

Even as educational institutions are threatened, learning continues. And perhaps even grows. But it does so in new spaces.

In the LACOL 2020 closing keynote How to Change Institutions with Purpose, Matthew Rascoff (Duke University) and Emily Levine (Stanford University) will draw on their research collaboration into the history of education and innovation to probe how mission-driven liberal arts institutions can adapt and change in the face of extraordinary challenge.

Education has borrowed the language of disruptive innovation from the business world but disruption does not account for the complexity of how to make change in mission-driven contexts. While Silicon Valley cheers as startups take on incumbents, in academia institutions play vital roles in communities. Their longevity is a value shared by many stakeholders. What happens when the value of higher education is so commonly called into question? How can colleges maintain their values and sustain themselves in the face of a crisis of affordability? 

Education needs new frameworks to make the case for change. In this talk, Emily Levine and Matthew Rascoff will propose a model of innovation drawn from the history of education innovation. They will describe a four-step cycle of founding, hybridization, complexity, and simplification. This cycle describes how educational institutions have evolved and offers strategic lessons for academic leaders seeking to direct that evolution. Speaker Bios

E. J. LEVINE: Dr. Emily J. Levine comes to Stanford from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was Associate Professor of Modern European History. Dr. Levine received her PhD in History and the Humanities at Stanford and her BA from Yale, where she later returned as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. She is the author of Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize by the American Historical Association for the best book in European history from 1815 through the 20th Century. Levine has published in The New York Times, the LA Review of Books, Foreign Policy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as in top scholarly journals. She recently completed A New Currency for the World: The History of the Modern Research University, which was supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in fall 2020.

M. RASCOFF: Matthew Rascoff is the Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation at Duke University. He was previously Vice President and founder of the Office of Learning Technology & Innovation for the University of North Carolina system.

In 2012-13, Matthew launched JSTOR’s first international office in Berlin, where he was also a Fellow of the Bertelsmann Foundation and a strategic advisor to the Robert Bosch Foundation. He previously led product management teams at Wireless Generation, an education technology company. 

Earlier in his career Matthew helped launch the strategy group at ITHAKA, an incubator of higher education technology ventures (now Ithaka S+R). Matthew’s experience includes Google, where he worked on the Book Search operations team, and Katzenbach Partners, a strategy consulting firm. After undergraduate studies at Columbia University he did graduate work at Bogazici University in Istanbul on a Fulbright Scholarship. He also earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and represented the state of North Carolina as a German Marshall Memorial Fellow in 2013.