Dr. Matthew Reed is a seasoned college administrator, a longtime champion of equity and fairness, and a national figure in the conversations around public higher education.
He received his Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University, and has taught at Rutgers, DeVry, Kean, and the County College of Morris. He has served as a dean at DeVry and CCM, and as an academic vice president at Holyoke Community College and Brookdale Community College. This academic year he is serving as Senior Executive Officer in Residence at the New Jersey Council of County Colleges, leading the Council’s efforts on state and federal policy as well as course and program approval. He is also the author of the “Confessions of a Community College Dean” blog at Inside Higher Ed, and of the book Confessions of a Community College Administrator (Wiley, 2013), which has been taught in graduate programs in higher education leadership.
Dr. Reed has improved student success rates and graduation rates through sustained attention to campus climate and processes. He has championed Universal Design for Learning, Open Educational Resources, and support for student basic needs, all in the service of reducing barriers to student success. He has amended campus hiring processes in successful efforts to improve both the quality and the diversity of faculty and administration. He has supported reform efforts around remedial education, including the implementation of directed self-placement in English at Brookdale. When COVID hit and campus communication suffered in the summer of 2020, he established a well-attended weekly virtual town meeting – “Mondays with Matt” – to ensure that everyone had access to the same information at the same time.
Dr. Reed has maintained a public presence in both the profession and the community. He has spoken to graduate classes at NJCU, Ball State, Memphis State, the University of Maryland Global Campus, and Harvard. He has appeared on numerous podcasts, as well as in the documentary Fail State, about for-profit higher education. He has been a keynote speaker at statewide community college conferences in Arkansas, Michigan, New Hampshire, and New Jersey, as well as at the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship and the Chairs Academy. He even has a well-received TEDx talk to his credit. He serves on the Boards of the Monmouth Museum and the National Humanities Alliance, and has worked with groups as various as the First Lego League, the Jersey Shore Debate League, and the Agawam Techno Trot. He and his wife, Carolyn, live in a newly-empty nest in Freehold, New Jersey, while their son attends the University of Virginia and their daughter attends the University of Maryland.
