About this Collection & K. Patricia Cross
This archive contains 250 speeches by Dr. K. Patricia Cross and seven Cross papers commissioned by the League for Innovation in the Community College. The speeches are organized by decade beginning in the 1960s and ending in 2001, and within each decade they are placed chronologically. Viewers can also access the speeches by theme: the Learning Society, Community Colleges, Libraries, and Learning Assessment. Each speech is about twenty pages long, double-spaced, and all of them can be downloaded.
The value of this collection for both researchers and practitioners lies in Dr. Cross’ capacity for synthesizing the relevant research and practice for each of her topics. She spoke in clear prescient terms to a wide audience of teachers, students, policy-makers and researchers about the issues facing higher education and their potential implications. This archive will be especially useful for the generations of doctoral students and researchers who began their careers after Dr. Cross retired in 1997.
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K. Patricia Cross is Professor of Higher Education, Emerita at the University of California at Berkeley. Cross has had a distinguished career as a university administrator (Assistant Dean of Women, University of Illinois and Dean of Students at Cornell University), researcher (Distinguished Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service and Research Educator at The Center for Research and Development in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley), and teacher (Professor and Chair of the Department of Administration, Planning, and Social Policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Professor of Higher Education (David Pierpont Gardner Endowed Chair, University of California, Berkeley).
The author of eight books and more than 200 articles, monographs, and chapters, Cross has been recognized for her scholarship by election to the National Academy of Education, receipt of the E.F. Lindquist Award from the American Educational Research Association, the Sidney Suslow Award from the Association for Institutional Research, and the Howard Bowen Distinguished Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
She was voted one of “the most influential voices" in higher education in a Change Magazine poll in 1975, and when the poll was repeated in 1998, she was again selected as a national leader. Elected Chair of the Board of the American Association of Higher Education twice (1975 and 1989), she has received many awards for her leadership in education, among them the Leadership award from the American Association of Community and Junior colleges, the Outstanding Service Award from the Coalition of Adult Education Organizations, the award for outstanding contributions to the improvement of instruction from the National Council of Instructional Administrators, and the Academic Leadership Award from the Council of Independent Colleges. She has been awarded 15 honorary degrees and is listed in Who’s Who in the World, Who's Who in America, International Who’s Who of Women, and Who’s Who in American Education.
Cross has lectured on American higher education widely in the United States and abroad in England, France, Denmark, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Holland. Her interests are primarily in changing college student populations, adult learning, and the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education.
Cross received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from Illinois State University and Master's and Ph.D. degrees in social psychology from the University of Illinois.
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