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2008 ICCCA Conference Resources

Keynote Speakers

Thursday, November 20: Reflections on the Illinois Community College System: 'Community is our Middle Name' by Bill Kling

Bill Kling, a professor, attorney and policy expert will reflect on the community colleges' holistic role. Bill will consider the importance of leadership development in creating a unified and vibrant system, and will explore the pillars of success: teaching students, engaging faculty, serving community and responding as entrepreneurs. Bill will give concrete examples of why community colleges are such an integral part of our State's public infrastructure-- and provide perspectives from his inside and outside experiences.

Bill is a Clinical Assistant Professor and Senior Research Scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Public Health, where he teaches policy and leadership. He has been an educational law and policy practitioner for 20 years advising many community colleges across the state, including 6 years as in house counsel at Waubonsee Community College. He was a founding member of the Illinois Community College Center for Policy Development, and served as legislative liaison to the Council of Presidents. Like you, he shares a passion for creating education and workforce development opportunities.

Luncheon Speaker for Thursday, November 20: Charles R. Novak

Charles R. Novak is President Emeritus of Richland Community College in Decatur, Illinois where he served for thirteen years until his retirement in 2001. During his career he served twenty three years as a community college president and a number of other years as a continuing education officer, a chief financial officer and a chief academic officer.

From 1997 until 2003, Novak served as the Statewide Chair of the Illinois Leadership and Core Values Initiative. The purpose of the Initiative was to engage Illinois’ forty-eight community colleges in serious discussions about the leadership behaviors which support the consideration of values and ethics in the workplace.

Although retired, Novak has returned to work on many an occasion to help the community colleges. He now has over twenty five years experience as a community college president after serving in several interim roles. In 2006 the Illinois Community College Trustees Association awarded him the Certificate of Merit for his service to the community colleges of Illinois.

Photo: Rushworth Kidder

Friday, November 21: Dr. Rushworth M. Kidder

President and Founder - Institute for Global Ethics

Rush Kidder’s calling is to help people make better, more ethical decisions in every aspect of life. Through his lively, compelling, real-life stories, he illustrates the fact that our toughest choices are not matters of right versus wrong but of right versus right. Using a robust, straightforward framework for discussing ethics, he brings an uncommon clarity to the complexities of ethical decision-making. In books, lectures, seminars, and frequent news commentary, he gives us a common language and a methodology for analyzing situations where two values are in conflict. The goal is to develop Ethical Fitness®—a term so particular that he has had to have it registered.

Kidder’s seminal 1995 book, How Good People Make Tough Choices, provides practical tools for tough decision-making. President Jimmy Carter described the book as “a thought-provoking guide to enlightened and progressive personal behavior,” and former Xerox CEO and Chairman David T. Kearns called it “a prescription important to everyone’s well-being.” Of an earlier book, Shared Values for a Troubled World: Conversations with Men and Women of Conscience, Bill Moyers wrote, “only Rush Kidder would have made this odyssey, and only Rush Kidder could have returned with such a valuable cargo of insights.” In Moral Courage (2005), Kidder discusses moral courage as the bridge between talking ethics and doing ethics. Describing this book, David Abshire, former US Ambassador to NATO, writes that “Character is tested in moral dilemmas, and Rush Kidder brilliantly deals with the perilous pathways where moral courage is absolutely required.”

Dr. Kidder has worked for more than seventeen years to refine his guidelines for ethical decision-making through his Institute for Global Ethics, a non-profit, non-partisan think-tank headquartered in Rockland, Maine. Through extensive, around-the-world, research-based interviews, surveys, and focus groups, the Institute is finding that, despite different cultures, religions, and political systems, people worldwide tend to agree on five core, shared values: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion.

Through its offices in Maine, New York, London, and Vancouver, the Institute has developed ethics training programs for corporations, nonprofits, government entities, and even prisons. It also runs an active character education program focused on secondary schools. Global corporations are now using its computer-based ethics modules for broad-based employee training, and U.S. citizens continue to use the Institute’s field guide to clean campaignsto help raise the ethical standards of political campaigning. With funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Institute is developing sophisticated evaluation vehicles for assessing the ethical progress of individuals and organizations.

Prior to founding the Institute, Dr. Kidder was an award-winning senior columnist and foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. A graduate of Amherst College with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, he continues to write weekly commentaries for Ethics Newsline®, the premier online source for news and information on ethics and current events, published by the Institute and circulating to subscribers in more than 120 countries. He also places op-ed pieces in such periodicals as the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe.