Ivory Tower Meets Difference Makers

June 1, 2021

Professors are a rarified breed given our unusual opportunity to work at something for many years without risk of job loss. That is what we call ‘tenure’. I should know, since my main area of research is job insecurity…wrote my dissertation on the topic in 1997. To be job insecure is to not know how long you might be able to keep a job that provides for you and your family. I’ve been very fortunate as a professor at St. John’s University where I could serve as professor of management, rising in the ranks from assistant to associate and then to the highest rank, full professor. One thing I never really wanted was to be an ivory tower academic and I’ve have had my hands in consulting and entrepreneurship because I like being connected to the business and local communities. The main reward is that you get to pick your projects…so there is a lot of flexibility as a professor. This brings me to Difference Makers. I founded the program in 2016 at Susan E. Wagner High School on Staten Island where I began teaching high school students one of the key pedagogies at St. John’s University—Academic Service-Learning (AS-L). The idea of AS-L is to learn by doing through engagement with very serious not-for-profit organizations who are addressing some of the city’s most challenging problems. AS-L has helped students to build new skills and thereby improve their college profile. They learn leadership, collaboration, comfort with diversity, commitment to life-time service, and they persist in college. In five years, we have conferred 314 certificates of completion and have raised $10,452 dollars which were donated 100 percent to our NFP partners. The Difference Makers was just retained by the New York Center for Interpersonal Development (NYCID) to go to our fourth school, Port Richmond on Staten Island. This blog is going to present a range of topics about my plans to grow Difference Makers to 15 high schools. I’ll sometimes drift into unrelated topics simply because passions don’t have to be constrained to a single area of interest. You will likely hear about tennis and gardening along the way. Underlying all of this is a profound commitment to doing more good with the kids we are helping get ready for college. We want high schoolers to not only get to college, but also to graduate with careers.