2-Year-Transfer Help in Texas; Worcester Poly Picks a Provost; Pomona Lands a Modernist Scholar

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By EUGENE MCCORMACK, AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE, and RICHARD BYRNE

TWO INTO FOUR: The University of Texas has created a position designed to increase the number of students who transfer from the state's community colleges. Not surprisingly, the person selected to fill the post has several years of experience working for the state's two-year institutions.

Martha M. Ellis will become the system's first associate vice chancellor for community-college partnerships. Ms. Ellis has been president of Lee College, a two-year institution, since 2002. Previously she was president of Texas State Technical College at Waco, and before that worked at Collin County Community College District in a number of different roles, including provost.

Although the numbers have slowly crept up over the years, most students in Texas who spend two years at a community college do not immediately go on to a four-year institution. According to figures from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, in 2007 only 20.5 percent of the state's community-college students who attempted at least 30 credit hours transferred to four-year institutions.

Ms. Ellis, who starts her new job on July 1, says several things can be done to raise the number of students transferring to University of Texas campuses from community colleges, such as creating more scholarships for nonfreshmen, helping community-college students with the student-aid process, and reducing social barriers for transfer students.

"Many of the things you have for freshmen, like orientation and an introduction to student groups, you don't have for transfer students," says Ms. Ellis. "Community-college students should feel that when they transfer to a university, they will have a social network to support them."

First-generation college students especially need assistance, she says. "Those students with no one in their family to help them are really navigating it independently," she says, "and it can be a little bit frightening for them."

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CLOSE TO HOME: After what Worcester Polytechnic Institute called an "intense, yearlong, nationwide search," it turns out that the best person to be the college's new provost and senior vice president is a longtime employee there.

John Orr, who has served as interim provost for the past year, was appointed to the post permanently last week, effective immediately.

Mr. Orr began his career at the college 31 years ago, when he was named an assistant professor of electrical engineering. He later became head of the electrical- and computer-engineering department and was named the dean of undergraduate studies in 2003. Before coming to Worcester, his professional experience included a stint at Bell Laboratories.

The institute, said Mr. Orr in a written statement, "is far more than a place of employment for me; it is a home."

Mr. Orr replaces Carol Simpson, who left the university on sabbatical and then became provost and vice president of Old Dominion University in January.

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MODERNIST MATCH: Kevin J.H. Dettmar first visited Pomona College three decades ago, as a prospective freshman.

"My father told me: Don't apply. We can't afford it," recalls Mr. Dettmar, who indeed was accepted, but ended up going to the University of California at Davis instead.

Now Mr. Dettmar is returning to Pomona, but this time as a professor of English and chairman of the department. He will leave his position as a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale at the end of this semester. Mr. Dettmar also taught at Clemson University, where he served as associate dean of Clemson's College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities before arriving at Carbondale.

Mr. Dettmar, a scholar whose interests include the now-burgeoning field of modernism and popular music, is a past president of the Modernist Studies Association. He is also an editor, with Mark Wollaeger, an associate professor of English at Vanderbilt University, of a new series on modernism (Modernist Literature and Culture) to be published starting in November by Oxford University Press.

Mr. Dettmar says he wants the series to become the "first-choice, go-to place" for monographs in that field. "The field is so revitalized," he says. "But there was no press doing a focused series on modernism."