Mark your calendars for Tuesday, November 19, 2024, from 1:00–3:00pm, and register today for the Dallas Herring Lecture, annually presented by the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research.

This year, the lecture features Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart, chancellor of the Austin Community College District, who will provide the address on “Transforming Higher Education: Loving Our Students to Success Through Intentional, Courageous, and Systemic Leadership.”  

Dr. Lowery-Hart, known as a community college leader who challenges higher educational institutions and employees to “love students to success,” will share how higher education can infuse love into policies, processes, classrooms, instruction, services, partnerships, and spaces and how doing so allows us to walk in partnership with our students and one another.

“Leading with love requires moving beyond our feelings to action, building structures and systems and leveraging data to actively love our students,” says Audrey Jaeger, the executive director of the Belk Center.

All nine of the previous lecturers have been invited back for the anniversary, and this year President Pamela Senegal at Piedmont Community College and President Scott Ralls at Wake Technical Community College are delivering the responses to the lecture.

It’s a bigger than usual celebration for the Belk Center, which is not only celebrating 10 years of the Dallas Herring Lecture, but also the 5th anniversary of the founding of the Center and 60th year of North Carolina State University’s doctoral program on community college leaders.

In case you missed it, the Belk Center and Achieving the Dream recently released this important guidebook on “Building Capacity & Supporting Educators at North Carolina Community Colleges.”