Thoughts on business, engineering and higher education

Summer Break

This marks my last post for the summer. I’ll be back online – both on this blog and on Twitter – most likely the last week of August when the fall semester starts at Lehigh, maybe the first week of September. There are a lot of things I want to get done this summer, both from a professional and a personal standpoint, in Bethlehem and beyond, and I decided to take a page from Seth Godin’s Linchpin book and try to focus my energy away from the Internet for those coming few months. If you know me personally this latest development won’t come as too much of a surprise to you. If it does... you and I really should catch up in person soon. I’ll be checking email once in a while, and that’s about it.

Those among you who need some reading in the meantime may enjoy my most viewed blog posts over the past year:

• Two Analytics Success Stories
• Solitude and Leadership
• David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech
• Innovation: Boston's Route 128 and San Francisco's Silicon Valley
• Lehigh's 2012 Commencement Speaker
• On Scientific Publishing
• On Impact Factors
• Value-Added Models in Teaching

I’m looking forward to updating all of you in three months on the things I’ve done... and hearing about the things you've done too. Talk to you in late August. Take good care.

GoodSemester, Part 2

Here is my long promised sequel to my blog post on GoodSemester – please read Part 1 if you haven’t already. There were two topics I wanted to discuss regarding this educational startup but didn’t have space for in the Part 1 post: (1) how such a site can change the way we teach and (2) how the company fits in the innovation framework developed by Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School.

My first comment is that such sites where students can upload their course materials have gained in popularity – Coursehero comes to mind, among others – and it is only a matter of time until a market leader emerges and aggregates the information disseminated between “frat files” and online accounts. GS’s high-quality design and easy-to-use interface makes it a good candidate to play that role in the near future. (This is because students can create their own groups and share documents among group members, without needing an instructor to be assigned to the course. So for instance a fraternity could get accounts for all its members and have them upload notes and materials for easy reference.)

This means that we educators have to embrace the fact that all our materials will be soon available online for many to see, even if we’d prefer to keep control over what the students have access to. This raises the following questions, and I’d be curious to know people’s thoughts on possible answers: how should we (educators) adapt the way we teach so that we continue to bring value? Should we continue to assign homework or, if students have all access to a bank of past exercises, should we only give midterms and final exams, as in my engineering school in France? Should we abolish large lectures and only have recitations where students practice without a grade, since they’ll be able to read or watch lecture materials from their dorm room? How do we use this technology to move toward more customized interactions with students and away from “one size fits all” to provide superior training?

My second purpose for this new post on GS is to discuss how it fits in Christensen’s framework on disruptive innovation. Recall that GS’s purpose is to disrupt an industry dominated by Blackboard and CourseSite, the latter being open-source. Christensen’s key idea is that newcomers disrupt incumbents when they offer a product that is good enough for the low end of the market and thus captures market share in a segment the incumbents don’t bother fighting for. (Then the product improves and more and more higher-end segments get impacted, but the incumbents retreat every time to protect the high end of their market.)

Based on the demo I’ve seen, GS appears to be a far superior product. It also seems to be directly aiming at institutional markets, which are the bread-and-butter of the incumbents, and plans to generate revenue using what looks like a fairly standard freemium model available to both individuals and institutions. In other words, its business model is apparently to go head-to-head against the incumbents to build critical mass instead of chipping away at the customer base by first focusing on, say, students who want to create their own groups (something that – to the best of my knowledge – Blackboard and CourseSite don’t offer). Admittedly, students might be unwilling to pay for the service, and the higher education sphere has its own peculiarities and inertia that might make GS’s strategy viable. But Christensen makes a convincing case in favor of competing against non-consumption (targeting a non-consuming part of the population and turning that segment into consumers) as a recipe for success for innovators.

Christensen also points out the need for many disruptive innovators to create new channels instead of using existing ones. Talking with technology services departments at universities to convince them to switch their course management software to GS is simply using an existing channel. Recruiting professors and students to use the service and spread the word on a large scale beyond beta-testing would be creating a new distribution channel. GS has many features in its favor, in particular the ease with which it supports collaborative tools – a “job” (to use Christensen’s terminology) that students are already trying to get done, but which is not supported by CourseSite or Blackboard, both of which are very one-directional in terms of information flow.

Finally, Christensen recommends being “impatient for profit, patient for growth.” In his words (p.290-1): “When someone tells you as a senior executive that you must endure years of substantial losses before a new business will become huge and profitable, this flags a plan to cram a disruptive technology into a sustaining role in an established market… [As for growth,] Disruption – and competing against nonconsumption in particular – requires a longer runway before a steep ascent is possible.”

Wise words that I hope GS will abide by. Its superior product deserves to win.

GoodSemester, Part 1

Two weeks ago I attended a presentation by someone at GoodSemester, a local educational start-up aiming at revolutionizing the way teachers teach and students learn by leveraging online learning tools. The idea, as I understand it, is to create a social network for learning that fosters collaboration and combines student interactions with group management software (including course management software).

From the Feature Tour page: "Open learning is built into the core of GoodSemester. We believe that people learn better when they work together and have the tools that they need for their subject to communicate any message."

The features include:  

• activity feeds (instead of "static objects full of files"),  
• courses (understood in a wide sense: "anyone, from anywhere in the world, can create a course to teach anything to anyone"),
• notes ("Take amazing notes with the built-in editor that supports rich text formatting, math formulas, musical notation, and even diagram drawing, then instantly share your notes with your course or the entire world, and everyone in your course will see them right in the notebook"),  
• assignments ("easy one-on-one submission" and "built-in group submission"),
• questions ("With just one click, anyone can second a question and be notified when someone posts a correct answer. And professors can get an amazing at-a-glance view of what topics their courses are having trouble with"),
• discussions (it "makes holding live, open-ended discussions with people in your course easier than ever before"),
• groups ("instant, live, private groups for any situation"),
• dashboards ("the do-everything know-at-all analytics tool for professors" with an array of novel features to grade and track student progress; in particular, GoodSemester has an easy-to-use interface that helps adjust grading curves and visualize student performance in a manner that seems quite revolutionary).

GoodSemester caters to several groups: course instructors (or hobbyists willing to share their expertise) can have their course hosted by GS instead of CourseSite or Blackboard, students can create their own group and use GS to work together even if the instructor has not set up a GS page. (I love using "GS" to refer to a company other than Goldman Sachs... especially a company dedicated to online education on a large scale. The 99% share initials with the 1%, in a way.) The company operates on a freemium model, with a basic version complemented by several more advanced ones that users access for a relatively small fee: GoodStudent ($5/month), GoodProfessor ($25/month), GreatProfessor ($50/month), with further deals for universities.

I was thrilled when I looked up the team page and realized GoodSemester is the local educational startup that Lehigh's Industrial and Systems Engineering very own Olajide Osanyingbemi '12 (who took my course last semester) mentioned working for, back in December. If I remember correctly, he was very proud of his work on the gradebook - and when I see the result, I can understand why.

Olajide, known as Jide for short - and in this case Jide Osan, apparently - has a keen entrepreneurial spirit, which led him to Silicon Valley during winter break as a "Lehigh in Silicon Valley" participant. You can see him in the picture in the top right corner of Lehigh's news release about the program, which is hosted by the Baker Institute for Entrepreneurship, Creativity and Innovation, and gives students "an opportunity to explore all things entrepreneurship in the heart of Silicon Valley." It is great to see him involved in the GS venture.

In addition to the impressive list of features above, I hope GoodSemester includes:

1. the ability to leave notes for students in the gradebook - the way I write "Congratulations" or "What happened?" on top of an exam, but also the way I use loose grading ranges such as "A-/B+" when I give students their "grades so far" toward the middle of the semester. CourseSite is very inflexible when it comes to grading. I'll spare you the details, but although I just want to insert a bit of text, I have to create a full new user-defined range that the file uploading system doesn't even recognize, and then input each grade by hand.
2. course rosters - by that I mean tables of reasonably-sized student pictures with their names underneath. I like learning my students' names and the list of participants in Blackboard and CourseSite is not user-friendly at all in that respect. Again, I'll spare you the details, but the short version of the story is that I have to create the roster manually myself, which requires a lot of time and effort that could be put to far better use. My mother who taught at a technical community college outside Paris for years had a course roster at the start of every semester. If the computer systems of the time allowed her Registrar's Office to make rosters, surely I can have one too. 

I have a lot more to say about GoodSemester, but it'll have to wait until next week.

The Lemelson-MIT Program

To continue this blog series on innovation, today’s post focuses on the Lemelson program at MIT. It is best known for administering prizes that honor innovators:

• The Lemelson-MIT Prize, where a mid-career innovator is awarded $500,000, in recognition for “improving our world through technological invention and innovation”. Such an innovator must have “developed a patented product or process of significant value to society, which has been adopted for practical use, or has a high probability of being adopted”.

The 2011 winner is Dr John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who “attributes his entrepreneurial success to appreciation for both science and the creative arts” (his parents are a physicist and a poet). He has over 80 patents to his name and is involved in 4 start-ups. Current interests include biointegrated electronics, with applications in cardiology and neurology, and high-performance semiconductors of relevance for sustainable energy.

He is also very active in mentoring and “manages student-driven programs that span every aspect of science, technology, engineering and math education, from summer day camps to research experiences for undergraduates.” His honors include “the MacArthur Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Engineering, and selection as one of the Top 100 Young Innovators for the 21st Century by MIT’s Technology Review.”

• The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, where a MIT senior or graduate student "who has created or improved a product or process, applied a technology in a new way, redesigned a system, or in other ways displayed a portfolio of inventiveness" receives $30,000 in addition to significant exposure in the national media, which allows him/her to connect with other inventors. The Lemelson foundation also gives prizes to student innovators at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Caltech and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The 2011 MIT winner is Alice Chen, a biomedical engineer and graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology (HST), "for her innovative applications of microtechnology to study human health and disease", including "a humanized mouse with a tissue-engineered human liver, [which] is intended to bridge a gap in the drug development pipeline between laboratory animal studies and clinical trials". She has also co-founded a biotech company called Sienna Labs (pioneering a new generation of medical pigments) with fellow MIT graduate Todd Harris.

The other 2011 student winners are:

at Caltech, Guoan Zheng for "an on-chip, inexpensive microscopy imaging technology", the applications of which include "many potential applications, including improved diagnostics for malaria and other blood-borne diseases in the developing world and rapid screening of new drugs",

at RPI, Benjamin Clough, for "a new technique that employs sound waves to boost the distance from which researchers can use terahertz spectroscopy to remotely detect hidden explosives, chemicals, and other dangerous materials",

at UIUC, Scott Daigle for "a system that utilizes automatic gear shifting to reduce the efforts exerted by wheelchair operators" (more information on the company he founded, IntelliWheels, Inc). It is worth pointing out that UIUC has wheelchair athletics teams in men's basketball, women's basketball and track, showing a positive example to youngsters with motor disabilities. 

• The Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability/Global Innovation, which awards $100,000 to "individuals whose technological innovations improve the lives of impoverished people in the developing world."

  The 2011 winner is Elizabeth Hausler, who won for her work in developing "sustainable, safe housing solutions in [disaster-prone areas of] developing countries." She is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to India as well as "a 2009 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow and a 2008 Tech Awards Laureate."

• The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams, which "are teams of high school students, teachers, and mentors that receive grants up to $10,000 each to invent technological solutions to real-world problems." This initiative is designed to "excite high school students about invention, empower students to problem solve and encourage an inventive culture in schools and communities". Current InvenTeams are working on an ergonomic bariatric rescue system, a desalination drip irrigation system, an off-shore rip current alert system and a portable medical support system, among other projects.

The Lemelson-MIT program is named after inventor Jerome Lemelson (1923-1997), funded by the Lemelson Foundation and administered by MIT's School of Engineering. The Lemelson Foundation, which was created in 1993, funds many innovation-related programs and centers throughout the world. To date it has spent $110 million in support of its mission. The application deadline for the 2012 awards has passed. Check out the program webpage in the spring to learn about the winners.

On Arts Education

Since my previous post had an art theme, I figured I might as well continue on this path for today's post, on arts education and the funding cuts it is experiencing. For starters, I'll mention a great post by Angie Villa on her artwork blog. Angie, an artist and public school teacher, provides a lesson plan for elementary-school students based on the book Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold, and makes a strong case for the use of art as a way to teach across the curriculum. For instance, young children drawing a cityscape learn about math (2D vs 3D, proportions), architecture/geography (because of the buildings in the Ringgold book and similar buildings in the children's environment that they can relate to), history (because the Ringgold book is set in the late 1930s), and many other concepts. 

Because of the economic situation, funding for arts education has come under increased scrutiny for decision-makers looking for budget cuts. As an example, last May "the PA House of Representatives passed its version of the budget bill with a 70% cut to the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA), reducing the PCA's grants to the arts budget down from $8.4 million in FY2010-2011 to $2.5 million in FY2011-2012."

The Americans for the Arts blog provides information for the funding situation at the federal level, for instance about the amendment sponsored by Rep Tim Walberg to reduce the NEA's endowment to its lowest level in 16 years - this amendment was thankfully defeated in July - and about the "Setting New Priorities in Education Spending Act" (HR 1891), which "was introduced for the purpose of eliminating 43 existing federal education programs" and on which a vote is expected by Thanksgiving.

Although times of fiscal difficulty certainly call for sacrifices, it is not clear cutting art by such a large amount is the right way to proceed, especially when school administrators continue to be hired at a significantly higher salary than a lowly art teacher. While art education is a "nice thing to have" for children in middle- or upper-middle-class families whose parents can expose them to art outside school, it is important for schools serving mostly underprivileged students to offer their charges an education in art so that they can find their own voice and express themselves while learning about creativity and discipline.

While it is hard for late-bloomers in science, math or English to catch up, students can take up art at any age. It is also an egalitarian field, where the honor's roll students who shine in traditional courses might struggle with art, trying to find the exactly right answer when there is none. Art, one might argue, is an excellent way to counterbalance the tendencies to teach to the test and to produce students who ace the SATs and crumble when they have to show independent thinking. It can also help disenfranchised members of society feel less alienated and express their "outsider-ness" in a productive fashion.

I would argue that many professional artists feel like outsiders in some way. (If you are happy with the mainstream, you rarely feel the urge to give it your own personal twist.) They - especially through the program Arts in Education, which has recently come under threat - can thus serve as role models for struggling students who would otherwise retreat from school. Of course, not all underprivileged students will become artists, but art teaches skills such as patience and planning (through visualizing and creating a painting) that are useful in a wide range of career paths. In addition, art is a good way to engage at-risk students who would otherwise feel left behind and might then slide into a life of petty crime.

This is not feel-good fantasy: the impact of arts education on criminality was analyzed in "A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Arts Education for At-Risk Youth" by Tony Silbert and Lawana Welch, who argue that "by implementing strong arts programs for at-risk 4th to 12th graders, the state [of California] can recover one and a half times its investment through savings to the criminal justice system and increased tax revenue", in a report they wrote for their Master of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Because the report dates back from 2001, it would be interesting to see if these numbers can be updated, and also if similar numbers also apply to other states. Those numbers do suggest arts education deserves far greater respect and support from legislators than it has been getting so far in this budget cycle.

Painting: Lehigh-IE316-Fa10

Above is a thumbnail of a small painting (6x8 on canvas) I made during Snowtoberfest 2011, aka the most severe power outage I hope to ever witness. Since I didn't have electricity and the battery of my laptop stopped working a long time ago from overuse, I painted and graded exams until it became too cold for me to stay. I got the idea for the painting from strolling through the de Kooning retrospective at MoMA, especially his black-and-white work in the 1940s - because of the curved shapes, not because of the colors, obviously. I've also always very much loved Map by Jasper Johns, in MoMA's collections, and Report from Rockport by Stuart Davis at the Metropolitan Museum for its bright colors - generally speaking, I like abstract expressionism, fauvism, post-impressionism the most.

So, putting everything together, I came up with the idea of making a painting about last year's IE 316 class (Fall 2010) in the form of a puzzle, where everybody would fit in his or her own particular way. I'm at the bottom right corner (AT) with IE316-10 written beneath (10 is for 2010); the Teaching Assistant is to my left (RD). Then the 40 students are listed according to their initials. When two students had the same initials, I also included the second letter of the last name to distinguish them. 

I've got to take a better-quality picture of the painting but the lighting was awful so I thought I'd just post a thumbnail until I'm happy with the photograph. That makes the letters harder to read than they are in reality. Here is the name plan (I tried to group students who sat/worked together but that was not always possible... sorry to the alumni who are not next to their friends):

From top to bottom and left to right:

1. BR-JF-KW-MS-MB-KF-FR
2. RG-WH-GH-BH-ESh-MD-KA
3. ESm-RS-DL-DG-ER-AB-LD
4. DM-DP-PF-AZ-PM-CC-YJ
5. TR-TF-LCa-KGH-JP-LF-SZ
6. LCh-BS-JA-RR-RA-RD-AT

Initially I wanted to color the pieces in such a way that two pieces of the same color never touched each other, even by a corner. I had found several ways to achieve that goal, which I had saved in Excel on my computer. Of course when the power outage happened I couldn't look up the file anymore and although no two pieces of the same color never touch each other along their sides, there are a few orange pieces that do touch by a corner. I view it as a lesson on not trying to control things too much.  

Lehigh's 2012 Commencement Speaker

Last week Lehigh University announced that Saudi Minister of Petroleum and Natural Resources His Excellency Minister Ali bin Ibrahim Al-Naimi will deliver the Commencement address on May 21, 2012. Not only was Al-Naimi named on the list of TIME magazine's 100 most inspiring people in 2008 ("Al-Naimi is well regarded in the oil industry, a very articulate and thoughtful minister who is as concerned about Saudi Arabia's energy future as he is about the current situation"), but he serves as Chairman of the Board at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which focuses on graduate research and education - all in English - since it was founded in 2009 and is the first mixed-gender university in Saudi Arabia.

Al-Naimi is a 1962 graduate of Lehigh University (and a 1963 graduate of Stanford University, where he received a Master's in geology), and will also attend the 50th Reunion of his class during Reunion Weekend. A champion of education, he "grew up in the desert, living there with his Bedouin family until the age of 8. At 12, he joined a training program offered by the Arabian American Oil Co. He rose through the ranks, serving as a foreman, assistant superintendent, superintendent, and manager, before moving into the exploration department in 1964 to work as a geologist and hydrologist." (Source: Lehigh press release).

It is wonderful for Lehigh to attract someone of the caliber of Al-Naimi - and an alumnus no less. He will also receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Lehigh. He is already the recipient of several honorary degrees, including from Seoul National University (2008), Peking University (2009) and Akademia Gorniczo-Hutnicza University of Science and Technology in Poland (2011). A KAUST news release about the honorary degree he received in Poland is available here. "In his acceptance speech, Minister Al-Naimi expressed great pride in receiving the degree. He explained that future relations between Saudi Arabia and Poland are linked by three main elements: education, energy and the environment." Also, "AGH-UST Dean of Drilling, Oil and Gas praised Minister Al-Naimi's keen interest in the academic exchange between KAUST and AGH-UST."

Lehigh has already links with KAUST: President Gast is a member of the President's International Advisory Council and a current KAUST faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering used to be on the faculty at Lehigh. But Al-Naimi's visit to Lehigh in May 2012 should be a wonderful opportunity to hear more about two important topics in the twenty-first century: energy and education. I am looking forward to his speech.

David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech

A few weeks ago I discovered thanks to Elizabeth Collins the 2005 Commencement speech of writer David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. The speech deserves mention not only because it is very good (more on that later), but also because it is one of the very few public speeches Foster Wallace gave before committing suicide in 2008.

The speech is, broadly speaking, on life, work and adulthood or, in the words of a writer for the New York Times, "the essential lonesomeness of adult life". It starts with a parable about an old fish and two young fish (who are so conditioned to be in water they don't realize what it is, which leads Foster Wallace to a definition of liberal education as learning how to think, i.e., recognizing the water around us).

I also liked his take on the "Capital T-Truth", the description of after-work grocery shopping (!) and his comment that "[t]here happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration."

I imagine these words have only gained accuracy in the 6 years since Foster Wallace made his speech, since more and more well-trained and eager college graduates find themselves under-utilized - their earning power possibly diminished for years to come - due to the economic situation. (I have taught many good students over the years, most of whom find jobs without too much difficulty, and even then I always wonder whether the companies that hire them will give them enough of a chance to display the range of their talents.)

Most importantly, the "conscious decision about how to think" provides graduates with some guidelines on how to deal with these feelings. The solution sounds trite, but as Foster Wallace explains, choosing to believe in alternate, kinder scenarios about the people you see at the store - the people who delay you at the store when you're tired and want to get home and eat and sleep before yet another day - is the first step in the never-ending quest to remain grounded and fight disillusionment in spite of the (occasional? repeated?) dreariness of everyday life. And hopefully every day becomes a good one once people have learned that the only thing that matters is the way they react to what happens to them, although Foster Wallace is not quite as positive.

In DFW's words: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."

Solitude and Leadership

I recently came across an essay entitled "Solitude and Leadership" by William Deresiewicz, which has been named a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the category Essays and Criticism (winners will be announced next week). The article, published in the Spring 2010 issue of American Scholar, is the transcript of a lecture the author gave at West Point in October 2009. I thought I'd mention a few of the points Deresiewicz - who taught English at Yale until 2008 - makes about leadership:

• Although a large part of the American elite ("the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our major institutions - senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth") comes from Ivy League institutions or West Point, Deresiewicz had difficulty viewing his students as leaders, and he argues that exceptional achievement does not equate leadership. ("Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn't mean they're leaders.")
• He discusses the number of extracurricular activities that high school students must have on their resume to be viable candidates to the top colleges (hint: six is not enough), and describes the students who do get admitted as "great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers" or, in the words of a student herself, "excellent sheep". It seems that universities' goal has become to "educat[e] people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about." This, of course, has little to do with leadership.
• Here comes the best part of the article - the discussion of Heart of Darkness, the novel by Joseph Conrad - set "in the Belgian Congo three generations before Vietnam" - which inspired the movie Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola. More specifically, Deresiewicz discusses the bureaucracy angle to the story. Make sure you read the quote of Conrad's novel that starts with "He was commonplace in complexion" and later the paragraph by Deresiewicz that begins with "That's really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things - the leaders - are the mediocrities?"
• I also enjoyed learning more about the career path of General David Petraeus, who apparently annoyed his supervisor when he "develop[ed] the strategy he would later formulate in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual" because he "was way ahead of the leadership" and was assigned what was regarded as a dead-end job. "But he stuck to his guns, and ultimately he was vindicated." 
• I loved the part about researchers at Stanford who have shown students, contrary to what they believe, do not actually multitask effectively. I completely agree - I am a big proponent of doing only one task at a time, and also taking breaks from technology (especially cell phones and email) for increased focus. "[Researchers] found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter... they were worse at... "mental filing"... their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks."
• Deresiewicz then completes the lecture by elaborating on his original point of introspection, the sort of independent thinking made possible by solitude, which is necessary now to, later, "find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy" - in the same way, I think, that you want to have made a plan for action in the face of emergencies before they arise, Deresiewicz urges West Point plebes to consider dilemmas now "so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise."

"Solitude and Leadership" was an outstanding read. It is in competition for the National Magazine Award with several other excellent magazine articles such as "The Hot Spotters" by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker, so it is difficult to guess the lecture's odds of winning, but we would all benefit from reading it - and examine what we can do to help students become future leaders.