Said Sewell, Lincoln University's provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, will be spending part of his summer at Harvard University.
He has been selected as a 2016 Fellow for Harvard's Institute for Educational Management (IEM) program in July.
An LU news release describes the institute as "an intensive, total-immersion experience that provides a rare opportunity to assess one's leadership skills, renew their commitment to higher education and develop tangible strategies for long-term institutional success."
Officials expect the skills developed through the program will help college and university leaders develop and explain "a compelling institutional vision that fosters meaningful and enduring institutional change," according to the release.
Because senior leaders in higher education face a daunting set of challenges - fiscal constraints, heightened accountability, new competitors, emerging technologies, substantial demographic change and questions about the relevance and effectiveness of higher education, the news release said, IEM helps them focus on the challenges of organizational change while providing opportunities for personal renewal.
Sewell said in the news release that his experience at Harvard "will be critical as we begin to develop Lincoln University's 2025 Master Plan. I am humbled to have been selected from presidents, provosts, and vice presidents from around the nation to be a part of Harvard University's IEM."
Sewell expects to to learn from, and work with, higher education scholars and both current and former university presidents from around the nation.
"I am looking forward to meeting, developing university partnerships," he said, "and learning how my fellow cohorts are seeking to transform their universities."
Sewell, a Houston, Texas, native, joined Lincoln University in 2014, after serving as the assistant provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College of Undergraduate Studies at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio.
He previously was executive director of the Academic Success Center (a position similar to an assistant Academic Affairs vice president) and associate professor of political science at the Fort Valley State University.
Sewell has had faculty appointments in either the Social Science or Political Science departments at Fort Valley State, the University of West Georgia, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Nebraska, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College and Albany State University.
He's the founding executive director of the Center for African-American Males: Research, Success, and Leadership, which is a research and modeling center for the advancement of African-American males.