Behavior Expert Seizes Chance to Run an Ambitious Minerva Project Experiment in Higher Education - Peter Monaghan, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Many administrators at traditional colleges might hesitate to step up to lead a brand-new institution whose founders proclaim that it will be "a top-tier university" designed to provide "what an Ivy League education should be about," and a for-profit one at that. But that does not seem to daunt Stephen M. Kosslyn, 64, founding dean of the Minerva Project, which plans to open in the fall of 2015. Minerva plans "a kind of academic boot camp," online and in the classroom, beginning with cornerstone courses that alert students to content in later courses while instilling core skills in negotiation, rhetoric, human motivation, learning, and memory. Minerva will encourage students to rotate through designated housing in four of its seven base cities, only two of them in the United States. It will sponsor such extracurricular activities as tours of cities' cultural institutions as well as provide standard extracurricular offerings: student newspaper, clubs, sports. http://chronicle.com/article/Behavior-Expert-Seizes-Chance/138375/