Senior Consultant

Dr. Richard Hersh has served as President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Trinity College (Hartford), and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The University of New Hampshire and Drake University. He also served as Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Oregon and was Director of the Center for Moral Education at Harvard University. In his early career he was a high school teacher, professor and dean of teacher education.

Dr. Hersh was a member of the Association of American Colleges & Universities Greater Expectations panel and for the past seven years has served as Co-Director of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA) projects that have developed an innovative "value-added" approach to assessing student learning at the college and high school levels. The journal Peer Review devoted its Winter 2002 issue to this project and included commentary from leading researchers from around the nation. The November 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly featured the article by Dr. Hersh, What Do Colleges Teach?, an article about measuring student learning.

Dr. Hersh's research has focused on teaching and learning in schools and higher education. He has written extensively and consulted widely with regard to K-12 effectiveness and was co-author of the book, THE Structure of School Improvement. He has written much about the importance of a liberal arts education in the 21st century with his 1999 Daedalus article "Generating Ideals and Transforming Lives" and his book Promoting Moral Growth is in use on many campuses. Dr. Hersh appeared in the two-hour PBS documentary "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk" and co-edited the accompanying book by the same title (Palgrave Macmillan publishers). The book examines the nature and quality of undergraduate education in the United States.