Seth Pollack
Dr. Seth Pollack is Professor of Service Learning, and the founding faculty director of the Service Learning Institute at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). CSUMB is recognized as a national leader in the field of service learning and civic engagement, and is the only two-time recipient of the prestigious White House President’s Award for Community Service in Higher Education (2006, 2010).
For the past 17 years, Seth has provided overall leadership for the Service Learning Institute at CSUMB. In 2005, he received the Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning, recognized as the nation’s outstanding faculty in the field of community service and civic engagement. The award recognizes his contributions to institutionalizing service learning in higher education, and his work in integrating issues of diversity and social justice as a core component of service learning courses.
Seth comes to his work in civic engagement after a decade working in grassroots rural development in West Africa, South Asia and Central America. In 2008-09, he served as a Fulbright Scholar in Cape Town, South Africa, where he worked with the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape to strengthen their service learning and community engagement.
Seth earned his PhD in International Development Education from Stanford University and his MA in Organizational Sociology, also from Stanford. His BA is in International Affairs from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Seth grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and is an avid cyclist, outdoors enthusiast and traveler. He speaks German, French, Bamanankan and some Hebrew, and has a deep passion for world music.
Kent Glenzer
Associate Professor Kent Glenzer was appointed dean of the Graduate School of International Policy and Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in January 2015. Glenzer serves as the academic leader overseeing the school’s degree programs in Business Administration (MBA), International Education Management, International Environmental Policy, International Policy and Development, Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies, and Public Administration (MPA), as well as a variety of related non-degree programs. In this role, he also serves as a member of the Institute’s senior leadership team.
Kent is most passionate about transforming higher education so as to better prepare young professionals to work on complex, wicked problems. This would require rethinking and reinventing relationships between public, private, and nonprofit enterprises to connect disciplinary silos and expertise in new ways, and adopt transformative andragogical approaches in our programs. What the world doesn’t need is more competent, obedient, rule-following technocrats. What it does need is feral professionals who can transform systems and reconfigure long-standing relationships of power.
Before coming to MIIS, Kent spent 25 years working with nonprofit agencies focused on international development. He came to MIIS because he wanted to help students avoid the mistakes his generational colleagues and he made. He wanted to do so in a post-graduate institute that put high value on practical tools, approaches, and both personal and team strategies. He looked for a place with a commitment to praxis and interdisciplinarity. And he found MIIS, which satisfied all these standards. He gets very excited when, in working with graduate students at MIIS, they find ways to connect with external clients, deliver high value for money, and so enhance a program, a project, a strategy, or an organization.
Carolyn Taylor Meyer
Ms. Carolyn Taylor Meyer is Director of Professional Immersive Learning and Special Programs in the Graduate School of International Policy & Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. She manages semester-long immersive learning programs such as the International Professional Service Semester (IPSS), DPMI International Development Practicum (DPMI Plus), and Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) fellowship. In addition to working with the Institute’s credit-bearing internship programs, she helps design and manage specialized short trainings open to participants who are not currently enrolled at the Institute but are looking to learn new skills related to MIIS degree programs.
She advises MIIS graduate students interested in participating in a semester-long immersive learning program/fellowship/co-op while also building a network of international and domestic internship opportunities at field and headquarter locations within the security, environmental policy, conflict resolution, social enterprise, and development sectors.
Carolyn has extensive experience working with academic communities, both as a faculty and staff member. She worked on staff at Butler University’s Office of International Student Services and in the creation of the Monterey College of Law’s Mandell-Gisnett Center for Conflict Management. Prior to joining the Institute in 2006, she served as a public relations consultant for educational institutions in Monterey County, worked as a legislative analyst for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Washington, DC, edited online content at the Indianapolis Star, and worked in publishing at the American College of Sports Medicine. She has also served as a regular adjunct instructor in International Relations and Politics of Developing Countries at the Monterey Peninsula College since 2006.
Carolyn has traveled to over 30 countries and has spent time living in Spain and working in Mexico. Recent work trips include participation in a human capacity-building project with the Rumicocha Foundation in Quito, Ecuador, coordination of a project management training at Partners in Health in Rwanda, and co-design of a social entrepreneurship certificate program in India.
Mitch Winick
Mitchel L. Winick currently serves as President and Dean of a three law school system including Monterey College Law, San Luis Obispo College of Law, and Kern County College of Law. He began his tenure with the law schools in 2005.
Dean Winick has always believed that there are many interesting things that can be done with a law degree . . . and only one of them is practicing law.
During his more than thirty-year professional career, his experience has been a mix of law, legal education, and business. In law and legal education, he has served as an Assistant Attorney General of Texas, Assistant Dean at Texas Tech University School of Law, and Executive Director of the Texas Center for Legal Ethics and Professionalism. He has taught law courses at the University of Houston, University of New Mexico, Southern Methodist University, Texas Wesleyan University, Naval Postgraduate School, and the U.N. University for Peace. In business, he has served as vice president of a publicly traded company, partner in a management-consulting firm, and founder of a venture capital firm.
Dean Winick is also the co-host of a weekly radio program called Wagner & Winick On the Law. The legal talk-radio program is nationally syndicated on the VoiceAmerica.com Business Channel and can be heard on nine local AM and FM radio stations across the central coast and central valley.
Dean Winick is a 1978 graduate of the University of Houston Law Center and was granted his Bachelor of Arts from the University of the Pacific in 1976.
Netta Avineri
Dr. Netta Avineri is TESOL/TFL Assistant Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). She serves as the MIIS Intercultural Competence Committee Chair and co-founded the MIIS Intercultural Digital Storytelling Project (sites.miis.edu/idsp). She also teaches Service Learning and Teacher Education courses at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). Dr. Avineri is passionate about building community partnerships through critical service-learning and narrative. She is committed to collaborative environments in which societal inequities can be both explored and resisted, through the inclusion of diverse voices and ways of knowing.
Netta earned her BA in Anthropology, MA in Applied Linguistics/TESL, and PhD in Applied Linguistics from UCLA. She is an applied linguist and linguistic anthropologist who teaches Anthropology, Education, Intercultural Competence, Linguistics, TESOL/TFL and Service-Learning courses. Previously she taught at UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, CSU Long Beach, and Pierce College. Dr. Avineri has co-developed curricula for service learning in TESOL, international internships, Spanish-English tandem learning, and intercultural competence for practitioners. In addition, Netta has served as coordinator, consultant, and trainer for writing centers and language assessment programs. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate for the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies Service-Learning Program.
Dr. Avineri’s research interests include critical service-learning and interculturality, language and social justice, and heritage and endangered languages. Recently, she has co-written about topics including the “language gap”, sports team mascot names, bilingual education, the confederate flag, silence in social justice movements, and professional precarity in academia. Her individual and collaborative research has been published in various media outlets (including Huffington Post, Anthropology News, American Anthropological Association Blog), academic journals (including International Multilingual Research Journal, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language and Communication, Language Policy), and books (publishers including Common Ground Publishers, Equinox, Routledge, and Springer). Her book Research Methods for Language Teachers: Inquiry, Process, and Synthesis was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2017. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Language and Social Justice: Case Studies on Communication & the Creation of Just Societies with Routledge Publishers. She has presented at local, regional, national, and international conferences in a range of interdisciplinary fields.
In 2014 Dr. Avineri was awarded Russ Campbell Young Scholars Award in Heritage Language Education and in 2010 she received the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award. Netta previously served as Core Member of the American Anthropological Association’s Language and Social Justice Task Group, and currently serves as the American Association for Applied Linguistics Public Affairs and Engagement Committee Chair.
The Community Solutions Lab 