Marvin Peterson
Marvin Peterson has fashioned a career of rare distinction.
For someone whose work in higher education has been largely focused on organization, administration and planning, Peterson’s own career has been, as he himself puts it, serendipitous. The strapping farm boy from rural Illinois majored in engineering and math at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., because they were subjects he did well in and enjoyed. After completing his bachelor’s degree, he then enrolled in Harvard Business School. Ironically, his experience there eliminated a business career from contention.
While fascinated by planning, management, personnel administration and the like, “I never found an area of business in which I wanted to make my life work,” he says. Perhaps because, as he puts it, “they did not want to have an unemployed graduate,” the school offered him a position as Assistant to the Dean. Within a year, he was an Assistant Dean, deeply involved in activities that had barely been named: institutional research, advancement, strategic planning.
At a chance meeting with University of Michigan Professor Robert Kahn, who was on sabbatical at MIT, he learned that he could study both higher education and organizational behavior in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education’s relatively new doctoral program. That was in 1966. Michigan has now been his intellectual home for 0 years, half of them as Director of the Center where he earned his doctorate, but the last thing he could be called is “set in his ways.”
“Outspoken” is closer to the mark.
Although he was one of the first to earn a higher education PhD and a leader in developing the field itself, he now decries hiring only faculty with such degrees. “If you take a look at executive officers these days, you find almost none of them read the higher education literature. A lot of the problems that institutions and leaders have to deal with are broader and more complex than the research can really address in a timely manner.”
Although recognizing that new areas of concentration and research have evolved as the field has matured, he now expresses concern over what he sees as its fragmentation. “There is a difference,” he says, “between differentiation which adds to our understanding yet is still part of our comprehensive study of the field, and fragmentation which makes these new areas specializations that are only loosely connected to that comprehensive understanding.”
The scope of his own interests continues to
broaden. He urges more consideration of
how higher education’s responses to such
external forces as globalization, information
and communications technology, and diversity
are moving it toward a postsecondary
knowledge industry.
“Institutions need to be willing to consider redesigning themselves by redefining the industry in which they operate and the role they want to play,” he says. “We are now 25 years into a postsecondary era that expanded the definition of institutions which delivered and learners who sought education beyond high school. Clearly, traditional institutions still serve the bulk of students attending directly from secondary school, but there is a huge world of postsecondary education to which our programs, our research and our professional association give little attention.”
He has been a visiting faculty member or consultant to the government in Brazil, Qatar, China, Hungary, Portugal, Russia, Uruguay, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Kyrgyzstan, enriching his work on the relationships between governments and institutions. “When our interest broadened from traditional higher education to post-secondary, it was all within the North American context,” he says. “Now there’s a great deal of interest in what’s happening in higher education outside the U.S., kind of an internationalizing.”
His eyes have always been on the big picture,whatever his role at any given moment, but there was one occasion when he manifestly, even historically, missed it.
“The year I was finishing up at Harvard, they initiated a new program, asking small companies to campus to interview,” he says. “I got invited to Palo Alto, and since I had never been west of Iowa City, I went and spent the day wandering about this little series of brick buildings around a dirty quadrangle. At the end of the day, they gave me $100 to go to San Francisco for dinner and an extra night on the town.”
Two weeks later, he got a letter offering him a job. It was signed by a Mr. Hewlett and a Mr. Packard. “The only information was the title and the salary,” he says. “I decided it was a sort of fly-by-night operation, and declined the offer.”
In this case, the serendipity flowed in the other direction. H-P’s loss was U-M’s gain.
This profile appeared in the Fall 2006 edition of Innovator
