At a small retreat in Western Pennsylvania, Dr. Consuella Lewis, assistant professor in Higher Education Management in the Department of Administrative and Policy Studies, and several colleagues all members of the Alliance of Urban Scholars, meet with student members over a weekend to develop writing skills and discuss dissertations. The writing is intense and so are the discussions. Yet during the breaks everyone gets to know each other a little more. Everyone leaves energetic and ready to face the upcoming challenges.
Beginning her career as a student affairs administrator at the University of Illinois, Dr. Lewis has served in numerous roles. As Dean of the Office of Black Student Affairs at Claremont College she developed her interest in involvement theory and its relationship to student persistence. She worked as a consultant with the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and participated in the Management Development Program at Harvard University.
Dr. Lewis was awarded an Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) dissertation fellowship and served as a Research Associate with the Southwest Regional Laboratory (WestED). She was also awarded a fellowship to participate in the California Policy Fellows Program, with the Institute for Educational Leadership.
Recently, Dr. Lewis was selected to be a Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Policy Fellow and Consultant where she conducted a policy analysis research project on student financial aid for the State Policy Inventory Database Online (SPIDO). Dr. Lewis was selected to attend the Association for Institutional Research/National Center for Educational Statistics (AIR/NCES) Summer Data Policy Institute and in the fall of 2002 was awarded the Inaugural Sylvia Taylor Johnson Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Educational Testing Service, where she conducted research using the restricted NSF/SESTAT data. Her study examined the effects of post-baccalaureate cultural capital accrual on persistence through the doctorate in science and engineering for minorities and women.
Dr. Lewis is the co-editor of the book, "Intersections: Race, Gender, Organizational Culture and Leadership in Higher Education", a project of the African American Women’s Research Collective. In addition she is a member of the editorial board of the National Association of Student Affairs Professionals Journal.
She is a Policy Associate with the National Center on Public Policy and Higher Education. Further, she was invited to present a research paper at the National Research and Policy Conference at the Claremont Graduate University. In the summer of 2006, Dr. Lewis was invited by the Fellows of the Society for Values in Higher Education to chair a presentation on "Creating Democratic Classrooms as Spaces Which Engender Human Agency".
