Peter Eckel, Ph.D.

Senior Fellow

Higher Education Division

Director of Leadership Programs, Penn AHEAD

Co-Director, Penn Project on University Governance

Peter Eckel, Ph.D., is Senior Fellow and Director of Leadership Programs in AHEAD at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. His expertise focuses on managing and governing colleges and universities and building institutional capacity. He consults widely with university leaders and boards in the US and internationally. Recent engagements include the University of British Columbia, The University of South Carolina, The University of Scranton, and Portland State University. 

He is the managing partner on a multi-year project focused on university governance and autonomy in Kazakhstan and part of a team with others from Penn GSE and Cambridge University (U.K.) developing a new research-intensive graduate school of education at Nazarbayev University. He has served as a World Bank consultant in Moldova on a $40M loan project. He is lead on a leadership development program for Indian university administrators. He recently became engaged with the University of Fallujah (Iraq) on an institutional transformation effort. 

His latest book is Practical Wisdom: Thinking Differently About College and University Governance (with Cathy Trower). He has written/edited six other books, including Changing Course: Making the Hard Decisions to Eliminate Academic Programs; Privatizing the Public University: Perspectives from Across the Academy (with Christopher Morphew); and Taking the Reins: Institutional Transformation in Higher Education (with Adrianna Kezar).

Before Penn, he was the Vice President for Programs and Research at the Association of Governing Boards and worked for 16 years at the American Council on Education. 

EMAIL: eckelpd@upenn.edu