"Education Celebration" with New College Pres. Donal O'Shea plus MUCH MORE!!
New College President Donal O'Shea (Harvard AB'74) on "Opportunities & Threats To Liberal Arts Education." ALSO-->THANK Financial Aid & Principal's Fellowship Donors! + WELCOME New Harvard Freshmen! + ELECT Officers for 2013! + EAT Michael's Great Food!
About Donal O'Shea, AB'74
HERALD-TRIBUNE By Christopher O'Donnell
April 15, 2012 SARASOTA - Math attracts many academics for its certainty — its reassuringly definitive answers that court little controversy. But not Donal O'Shea.
New College of Florida's president-in-waiting is a mathematician who explores the outer edges of certainty, where complex algebraic equations falter, where math becomes the language of dreams. "It allows you to talk about things you can't see," O'Shea said recently. "It's a way into other universes."
That attitude may explain one of the lingering questions about O'Shea's recent appointment as the fifth president at New College: Why would a top liberal arts college known for creativity and free-thinking, where graduates dress in period costumes and strange get-ups as they matriculate, choose a math man to lead it into an exciting yet uncertain future?
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Yet those who know O'Shea and his career arc say he is a perfect fit for New College, where he takes over on July 1, 2012. Not only is he a brilliant academic, many say, but he is as adept at discussing higher education funding and charming college benefactors and trustees as he is at working complicated mathematical equations.
Joanne Creighton, former president at Mount Holyoke College, where O'Shea is leaving to come to Sarasota, said he possesses a combination of passion, warmth, enthusiasm and brilliance that wins people over. "Sometimes he's so bubbling over with ideas, he starts many sentences and doesn't finish them, but he has a charm in that process," Creighton said.
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Plus, O'Shea, 59, has a look that should mesh well with the relaxed campus on North Tamiami Trail in Sarasota. His bald pate nested in the center of a fluff of unruly white hair is reminiscent of the eccentric but intelligent "Doc" Emmett Brown from the "Back to the Future" movies. The internationally renowned mathematician admits he is "clothing challenged," not noticing if his shoes are scuffed and sometimes forgetting when he needs to wear a jacket and tie.
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But the leadership style of the Canadian-born academic is likely to usher in major changes at New College, with O'Shea keen to grow enrollment and possibly add traditional classes to the school whose hallmark of no grades or prerequisite classes has made it a mecca for wildly independent students. While some, including Gov. Rick Scott, have questioned the relevance of some liberal arts degrees, O'Shea is passionate about the education that colleges like New College offer, arguing that the creativity they inspire produces not only academics but entrepreneurs and CEOs.
"It would be a terrible tragedy if that was to disappear; it would hurt the United States very badly," O'Shea said. "New College is very central to that." To Read More Of The Herald Tribune Article CLICK HERE.
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