Higher Education Challenges
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Nancy Schrom Dye Lecture Hall
Event video
Eugene M. Tobin is the Senior Program Officer for Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His grantmaking responsibilities encompass the areas of faculty and curricular development, presidential leadership, and institutional collaboration.
Mr. Tobin spent 23 years at Hamilton College as a faculty member, department chair, dean of faculty, and as the eighteenth president (1993–2003). Prior to joining the Hamilton faculty in 1980, he taught at public colleges in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, was a National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University, and held visiting appointments at Miami University (Ohio) and Indiana University, Bloomington. His research focuses on late 19th and early 20th century American political history and the history of American higher education.
Mr. Tobin earned his undergraduate degree in history from Rutgers University and his master’s and doctoral degrees in the history of American Civilization from Brandeis University. He is the author of Organize or Perish: America’s Independent Progressives, 1913–1933 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); co-editor (with Ann Fagan Ginger) of The National Lawyers Guild: From Roosevelt through Reagan (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1988); and co-editor (with Michael H. Ebner) of The Age of Urban Reform: New Perspectives on the Progressive Era (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977).
Since joining the Mellon Foundation in 2003, Mr. Tobin has co-authored (with William G. Bowen and Martin A. Kurzweil) Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), winner of the 2006 American Education Research Association’s Outstanding Book Award. His essay, “The Modern Evolution of America’s Flagship Universities,” appears in William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). More recently, his essay, “The Future of Liberal Arts Colleges Begins with Collaboration,” can be found in Rebecca Chopp, Susan Frost, and Daniel H. Weiss, eds., Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). In spring 2015, Princeton University Press will publish Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education, co-authored with William G. Bowen.
Mr. Tobin has served as a member of the Board of Governors of Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts (1998–2003) and is concluding a term as a member of the Board of Directors of Sweet Briar College.
