Higher Education Resource Services
The New England branch of Higher Education Resource Services (HERS), an independent organization established in 1972 at Brown University, has been housed at Wellesley College in the Center for Research on Women since 1976, developing and directing programs to improve the status and opportunities of academic professional women. HERS was originally a referral and placement service for faculty and administrative position, serving both academic women and institutions of higher education during a period when few other useful links existed between the two communities. Although no longer active in its original form, this project served to establish a national network of academic women.
HERS, New England now provides an unusual in-service model of administrative training - The MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE FOR WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION. In this program the three general instructional areas are woven through the five sequential seminar weekends so as to take full advantage of homework and to encourage immediate application of newly acquired skills in the interval between sessions. The instructional areas are Fiscal Management, Managing in Organizations, and Professional Development. Participants in the institute typically carry such titles as administrator, coordinator, director, assistant to the president, comptroller, registrar, chair, assistant and associate dean - less typically dean or vice president. Our policy of accepting faculty women who are department chairs or who have had extensive committee work and are moving into administration distinguishes us from most other administrative programs. Our participants also include women in academic affairs administration or institutional planning who have responsibility for curriculum and faculty development. We seek to prepare women for deanships and other senior administrative posts. Last year women from almost 40 institutions participated in the program. Ninety-six percent of last year's participants were financed, in whole or in part, by their home institutions.
We are closely affiliated with HERS, Mid-America, which sponsors the SUMMER INSTITUTE FOR WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION ADMINISTRATION, a 3 and 1/2 week residential program on the Bryn Mawr College campus offering women faculty and administrators intensive training in educational administration, with emphasis on current issues and on the growing diversity of the student body and the work force; with NACWAA/HERS, THE INSTITUTE FOR ADMINISTRATIVE ADVANCEMENT, a week-long residential program, also at Bryn Mawr College, for women coaches and athletic administrators; and with NAWE, The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR WOMEN IN EDUCATION.