EAD805

Taking EAD805 Higher Education Administration was a great start for my graduate work. I made strong connections between the material and my professional work. Birnbaum(1998) provided four excellent lenses into the dynamics of a higher education institution. I was able to frame the way departments and faculty peer-groups operate differently then operational wings of the university. These ideas were most useful in committee and project work where more than one social form is in play at once.

My career changed directions in November of 2003 when my unit's director reclassified my position to include the responsibilities of an Assistant Director. Up until that point I had been primarily an information technologist, although working for MSU's Virtual University Project had exposed me to a wide variety of issues within the enterprise of higher education. I had been supervising a technical team since 2001 and provided unit-wide technology leadership as the Virtual University's Lead Programmer.

I selected EAD805 Higher Education Administration as my first course since the course description matched my curiosity in how a university worked. At the time I was more concerned with developing mental models and social theories that would help me to better grasp what I was already percieving at work. I joined MSU's Virtual University within two years of it's founding. As part of a startup unit at a university that is charged with implementing a new university wide-initiative we had a tendency to move very fast.