Jeton McClinton

In this book, Dr. Jeton McClinton chronicles, highlights, and profiles Stevenson's life and career in a uniquely qualitative journey. Through and from narratives, she captures much of his lived experience by connecting it to the growth of the Civil Rights Movement during Joseph's human growth, development, accomplishment, and achievement as a "quintessential" academician. In the HBCU community, Joseph is often identified as the dernier cri and apogean American academic. Joseph's early exposure to higher education from the HBCU space in the mid 1950s through the 1960s ignited, incubated, and initiated the development of his lived experiences of serving as academician, author, artist, and activist in higher education for social justice. These roles included serving as a provost seven times, in multiple deanships, and as an Eminent Scholar at Florida International University and Distinguished Scholar at Jackson State University. Readers interested in higher education will appreciate this intellectual biography of a man who grew out higher education and is the Founding and Emeritus Provost for the Global Digital Academy and the Distinguished Scholar and Senior Dean for Arts and Sciences at Wilberforce University, America's first private HBCU. In every position held by this noted Scholar, his personal core values centered and from early on embedded concerns for elevating social justice through higher education leadership. Joseph's alma mater, the University of Oregon, recognized his leadership in this profound regard, and the Thurgood Marshall Fund awarded Joseph the "Outstanding Leadership in Higher Education" Certificate for his founding of the nation's first Executive Ph.D. (EPhD) program in urban higher education leadership for aspiring HBCU leaders. Joseph was the first and still only African-American male to graduate with the Ph.D. degree in higher educational policy and management. Still committed to lifelong learning, Joseph takes classes at his neighborhood community college and studies human brain and hand neurology at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University

Higher education is undergoing profound change at an unprecedented pace in today’s academic marketplace. This accelerating and precipitating change has motivated these distinguished authors – passionate observers of academe – to read well-chosen publications about meeting demands and responding to needs among our nation’s historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). We have captured the essence of expediting the critical analysis to confront the challenges of academic administration, finance, student life, technology, and other areas in the academic enterprise. Today’s administrators and academicians must be able to make balanced decisions based on a methodology that is compendious, intelligible, unambiguous, clear, and credible. The authors have provided this methodology based on their collective experiences in perhaps the toughest sector of the marketplace – the HBCU sector.The timing of this savvy book could not be better. Given recent media coverage of controversial and debatable decision-making at institutions of higher learning, this book can serve as a resource for meeting institutional challenges, approaching them with sequential structure, involving stakeholders in analytics (patterns) & informatics (processes) and formulating recommendations for future arbitration. The active research process for making these tough decisions provides a collaborative convergence to advance the process from a collegial examination of facts and issues. This process supports widespread advocacy in higher education for fostering organizational learning, leveraging human capital, institutionalizing human empowerment, and growing learning communities of practice for success.