Register Now for Equity Institute 2023!

The Summer Institute is an annual event that brings colleges and universities from across the United States together to tackle the most complex challenges to equity in the academic experience on their campuses.

2023 Provocation Speakers

Olufemi “Femi” Ogundele

Paul Le Blanc

Amelia Parnell

In his capacity as Associate Vice Chancellor of Admissions & Enrollment, Femi provides vision, strategy and leadership in the recruitment and evaluation of California’s public flagship. His vision and leadership in undergraduate admissions outreach initiatives targeting the state’s, underrepresented, undocumented, underserved and first-generation students have resulted in four consecutive years of the most ethnically and geographically diverse classes of students to Berkeley in 3 decades. Femi’s been successful at building outreach and evaluation processes that have resulted in greater diversity at Stanford University, Cornell University, University of Delaware, Ithaca College, and now University of California, Berkeley. He sits on national college access boards and has done work to establish higher education pipelines for students and educators throughout sub-Saharan Africa. With degrees from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and Ithaca College, Femi remains committed to the scholarship of equity in education as he is also currently pursuing a doctoral degree at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc is President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and author of Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education and Broken: How our Social Systems are Failing Us. Under the 18 years of Paul’s direction, SNHU has grown from 10,000 students to over 175,000 learners and is the largest non-profit provider of online higher education in the country. Paul immigrated to the United States as a child, was the first person in his extended family to attend college and is a graduate of Framingham State University (BA), Boston College (MA), and the University of Massachusetts (PhD). From 1993 to 1996 he directed a technology start up for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, was President of Marlboro College (VT) from 1996 to 2003 and became President of SNHU in 2003.

Amelia Parnell is vice president for research and policy at NASPA – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, where she leads many of the Association’s scholarly and advocacy-focused activities. Amelia writes and speaks frequently about topics related to student affairs, college affordability, student learning outcomes, and institutions’ use of data and analytics. Amelia’s policy and practitioner experiences include prior roles in association management, legislative policy analysis, internal audit, and TRIO programs. Her research portfolio includes studies of leadership in higher education, with a focus on college presidents and vice presidents. She is the author of the new book, You Are a Data Person: Strategies for Using Analytics on Campus, and host of the podcast, Speaking of College. Amelia currently serves on the board of directors for EDUCAUSE and is an advisor to several other higher education organizations. She holds a Ph.D. in higher education from Florida State University and masters and bachelor’s degrees in business administration from Florida A & M University.

Provocation Titles

Monday, June 5, 2023:

Olufemi Ogundele

Tuesday, June 6, 2023:

Dr. Paul Le Blanc

Wednesday, June 7, 2023:

Dr. Amelia Parnell

Check back again soon.

Our scaled systems of care – K12, healthcare, mental health, and yes, higher education – have it backwards, using technology, efficiency, and productivity as drivers of scale, often seeking to minimize the centrality of human relationships to any transformational experience in any of those systems.  As a result, we pay too much for dismal results.  We need to flip the script, starting with relationships and holding them at the heart of the work, while scaling the heck out of everything else. 

In 2018, Parnell wrote a thought piece to expand the discussion of how colleges should define student success. She suggested that in addition to retention, persistence, and graduation, college professionals and others should consider four key indicators of students’ progress. Higher education has experienced myriad changes and challenges over the past five years and in this provocation, Parnell will propose an updated set of descriptors of students’ most important milestones.