2015 Innovation Celebration

Richard Light is the Carl H. Pforzheimer Professor of Education. His Ph.D. is from Harvard in Statistics. Light has been asked by four Harvard presidents over the past twenty years, Derek Bok, Neil Rudenstine, Larry Summers, and now Drew Faust, to explore ways to improve the undergraduate experience both at Harvard and also for a diverse group of other, quite different colleges. To accomplish this he created the Harvard Assessment Seminars, a consortium of leaders from 25 colleges and universities, with the common goal to carry out research on enhancing college effectiveness.  One of Richard Light’s special interests is to work on strengthening the connections between high schools and success for students as they start colleges of all kinds. This includes many college campuses that are very different from a campus like Harvard.

 

The Harvard Assessment Seminars has led Light to create and co-chair four additional projects. One is The Young Faculty Leaders Forum, which invited 30 young faculty from sixteen universities across the country to work together to enhance imaginative ideas for education. A second has been the “Forum for Excellence and Innovation in Higher Education.” This five year activity brought together three leaders from each of thirteen campuses to try innovations and to rigorously assess their impact on students’ learning. A third new activity is a collaborative effort Light currently is organizing with colleague Howard Gardner to explore the topic of “Liberal Arts for the 21st Century.” This project is expected to run 2013 through 2017. Fourth and most recently Light has organized campus leaders from Harvard, Brown, Duke and Georgetown to work collaboratively, to develop a new project designed to explore and enhance the experiences of First Generation Students at highly selective campuses. This effort will focus on enhancing First Generation student success both inside and outside of the classroom. It is now underway with remarkable cooperation across the four campuses, and it also is expected to continue through 2017.

 

Light is author of Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds (2001). This book won The Stone Award for best book on education and society. It has become one of the three best selling books in the 98-year history of the Harvard University Press. He is coauthor of Summing Up: The Science of Reviewing Research with David Pillemer, 1984); and he is co-author of By Design: Planning Research on Higher Education (with Judith Singer and John Willett, 1990), both published by Harvard Univ. Press.  He has been Chairman of the Panel on Youth for the National Academy of Sciences, elected President of the American Evaluation Association, and has served as a member of the National Boards of the U. S. Government Accountability Office and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. Light is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of The National Academy of Education. Light has won the Paul Lazarsfeld Award for distinguished contributions to science, and has been named by Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor’s Lecture Series as one of America’s great teachers.