Description
Many of the systems built to serve people instead do more harm than good.
In Broken, Dr. Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, draws on his experience working in one such system—education—to reconnect us to the human facets of serving people. In doing so, he charts a course for rebuilding and reinhabiting better systems across education, healthcare, criminal justice, government, and more.
The United States spends enormous sums on helping people—$3.8 trillion on healthcare, $182 billion on prisons, and $604 billion on higher education—and yet these systems routinely fail us.
When we seek to improve how they function, our efforts focus on policy debates, technical solutions, funding, and data. But if these systems are to truly improve, we have to start with the human values that fuel decision making.
Broken explores the deeply human dimensions we must consider—aspiring, discovering, mattering—if we want to rebuild the policies, technologies, processes, and, most importantly, the heart we use to serve people.
Over the course of 25 years as a college and university president and higher education innovator, Paul LeBlanc, PhD, has encountered innumerable wonderful people who want to do the right thing for students but whose efforts cannot overcome the shortcomings of the system. Now, he shares what he’s learned, and continues to learn, about the opportunities and necessity to put humanity and care at the center of all our systems.
With Broken, LeBlanc outlines the distinctly human questions that education—and all systems that serve—must start asking to reframe what is broken in order to make lasting repairs and to better care for those they serve.
About the Author
Dr. Paul LeBlanc is President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Since 2003, under Paul’s leadership, SNHU has grown from 2,800 students to more than 180,000 learners and is the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the country. Paul served as Senior Policy Advisor to Undersecretary Ted Mitchell at the US Department of Education, working on competency-based education, new accreditation pathways, and innovation. He served on the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) and on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Higher Education and Workforce (and served on its Committee on Quality in Undergraduate Education). He also serves on the American Council on Education Board, various corporate boards, and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences. His book Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education won the 2022 Phillip E. Frandson Award.
Paul immigrated to the United States as a child, was the first person in his extended family to attend college, and is a graduate of Framingham State University (BA), Boston College (MA), and the University of Massachusetts (PhD). From 1993 to 1996, he directed a technology start-up for Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, was President of Marlboro College (VT) from 1996 to 2003, and became President of SNHU in 2003. His wife, Patricia, is an attorney and they have two daughters, Emma and Hannah.
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