Lorilee R. Sandmann
Hall of Fame Class of 1999
As the Director of University Outreach at Michigan State University and Associate Professor in Educational Administration, Lorilee Sandmann has mobilized and created knowledge resources to address critical contemporary issues in higher education. For 25 years, in administrative and scholarly practitioner roles, her vision for lifelong learning has crossed boundaries of traditional thinking and created innovative learning opportunities.
Dr. Sandmann teaches, researches, and serves as a consultant on strategic planning, institutional innovation, outreach, futurism, and program development, assessment, and evaluation. She is a leading thinker in defining and operationalizing outreach or engagement as a form of scholarship. She chaired MSU's committee on 21st Century Leadership Development and served on MSU's Provost's Committee on University Outreach. She heads MSU's Evaluating Quality Outreach Initiative and was lead author of the resulting publication, Points of Distinction. She is co-principal investigator on W.K. Kellogg-funded Documentation of Scholarly Professional Service and Outreach. Her focus on forward thinking, scholarly responses to the national agenda for knowledge application culminated in the National Resource Center for Quality Outreach, for which she serves as Director.
Dr. Sandmann holds bachelor's and master's degrees in education from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She contributes and enriches her community through leadership roles in a number of volunteer community service projects: as an example, as Chair for Rotary International of Grand Rapids, Michigan, she introduced STRIVE, an inner city scholarship, jobs, and mentoring program for high school seniors in the lower academic third of their class. Since the program's inception, more than 60 young adults have fulfilled program requirements and been awarded scholarships to the local community college. The program has spread to many other Rotary Clubs in the district. She has also served on the local Rotary International Youth Exchange Committee and on the Board of Directors of the YMCA Camp Manitou-Lin, chairing the strategic planning effort that resulted in a three million dollar lodge and year-round programming.
In retrospect, her lasting, most influential contribution of her professional work will likely be scholarly models of higher education change processes to promote the extension and application of knowledge and a process and rationale for restructuring the criteria used to define and evaluate faculty scholarship.