Biography

Beginning with civic engagement at Lock Haven University—a midsize, rural, public university in Central Pennsylvania—Eric Hartman has made a career out of investigating and advancing the public purposes of higher education. These efforts have produced a book, nearly 100 academic and popular articles, and consultancies with a range of universities deepening experiential learning—including Cornell University, Elon University, Harrisburg Area Community College, and the University of Dayton, among numerous others. His faculty and administrative roles have spanned American politics, education, global studies, history, human rights, international development, leadership studies, public administration, and sociology at a similarly diverse array of institutions, from the Community College of Allegheny County to Providence College and Kansas State University before, most recently, Haverford College.

In addition to his B.A. in political science from Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Hartman holds an M.A. in political science, focusing on American politics and public policy, from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, as well as a Ph.D. in public and international affairs, specializing in international development and public administration, from the University of Pittsburgh. As he completed his Ph.D. on global citizenship development, he was named executive director of a global nonprofit organization connecting students, faculty, and community leaders in collaborative learning and justice work around the world (then called Amizade, now AllPeopleBeHappy). His own research, and the kinds of opportunities he has enabled at the intersections among community-driven development and applied academic learning, spring from challenges identified by stakeholders most affected by those challenges. This orientation toward critically analyzing systems through deep (quantitative and qualitative) dialogue with and among people impacted by those systems informs his approach to the Penn Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management.

Dr. Hartman is a co-founder and served for many years as editor, then co-director, of the Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative, a network that advances community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities. He now serves on the Collaborative’s Advocacy Council. Additional leadership in recent years includes serving as president, then vice president for higher education, with the Pennsylvania Council for International Education (PACIE). Across his career, Hartman has demonstrated increasing interest in public commentary on critical issues at the intersection of higher education and public purposes, including recent op-eds in the Philadelphia Inquirer (on campus speech and international student inclusion), as well as The Pennsylvania Capital-Star some years earlier (on the place-making and historical value of regional public universities).

Dr. Hartman is a Coach with the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Cycling League (PICL) and an active member of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, campaigning for healthy, safe, and fun street and community infrastructure for all. He is fortunate to be married to an amazing wife, Shannon. They are raising three daughters together.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Hartman is currently considering two areas of research inquiry: (1) how student and faculty push and pull factors may contribute to ideological diversity or monoculture in respect to various campus types, and (2) the specific relationship of civic knowledge and (small-d) democratic institutional understanding to speech and civic action on campuses and in communities. However, he is presently most interested in and consumed by the incredible range of applied research inquiry among the faculty and students in the Executive Doctorate Program, and he is excited to learn through this range of inquiry among this community.