President Woo to speak at ITHAKA’s Next Wave conference on innovation in higher education

Sweet Briar College president Meredith Woo will speak at ITHAKA: The Next Wave 2017 on Wednesday, Nov. 29, in New York City. The conference will tackle “Innovating and Adapting to Address Today’s Higher Education Challenges.”

Access to education, declining public support and increasing income inequality are three of those key challenges. The Next Wave 2017 will bring together leaders from academic libraries, publishing, technology and higher education to reflect on innovations and collaborations happening across higher education and on how existing frameworks must continue to adapt to address higher education’s overarching challenge: getting more people educated at lower cost.

Having just announced a tuition overhaul at Sweet Briar — where she is now working with faculty to revamp the College’s liberal arts and sciences curriculum — Woo can speak from experience. She will co-host the panel “At the Leading Edge: Transformation and Innovation,” joining Gordon Jones, founding dean of the College of Innovation and Design at Boise State University, and Michael Koby, associate dean of international and graduate programs at Washington University Law.

The conference will kick off with registration and a light breakfast at 8 a.m., followed by a welcome from ITHAKA president Kevin Guthrie. This year’s master of ceremonies is writer and researcher Will Fenton, a teaching associate at Fordham University and contributing editor at PC Magazine. Bestselling author and New York University faculty member Clay Shirky will follow with a keynote address.

For more information, please email Heidi McGregor, vice president for communications at ITHAKA, at heidi.mcgregor@ithaka.org. For a full schedule, visit the conference website.

ITHAKA is a nonprofit organization that works with the global higher education community to advance and preserve knowledge and to improve teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies. In two decades, ITHAKA has launched three of the most widely used services in higher education: JSTOR, Portico and Ithaka S+R. Recently, the nonprofit’s strategic alliance with Artstor has allowed ITHAKA to improve access to its services for researchers, teachers and students worldwide.