Daniel Seymour
Daniel Seymour is a university professor, consultant, and author. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, he used the G.I. Bill to receive an A.A. from Lane Community College and B.A. from Gettysburg College. He then went on to attain an M.B.A. in management and economics from the University of Oregon followed by a Ph.D. in marketing and quantitative methods.
His first teaching position was as an Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary and then received tenure and the rank of Associate Professor at the University of Rhode Island where he also served as Assistant to the Professor. As a business professor, Seymour published two industry books—Marketing Research: Qualitative Methods for the Marketing Professional and The Pricing Decision: A Strategic Planner for Marketing Professionals.
While serving as a Visiting Professor at UCLA, he formed a consulting firm—QSystems—and began working with health care organizations and higher education on the application of process design quality improvement practices to the service industry. He has worked for more than 30 colleges and universities, including longer-term assignments at Claremont University Center, Mt San Antonio College, Antioch University, and, most recently, at Ventura College.
His two American Council on Education books on the subject—On Q: Causing Quality in Higher Education and Once Upon a Campus: Lessons for Improving Quality and Productivity in Higher Education—were best sellers and continue to be authoritative resources on the subject. During that time, he also served as a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality award senior examiner and edited a two-volume set of books—High Performing Colleges: The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award as a Framework for Improving Higher Education. Seymour’s interest in quality practices have also extended to K-12. He has co-authored two popular books—Kidgets—and other insightful stories about quality in education and America’s Best Classrooms: How Award-Winning Teachers are Shaping our Children’s Future.
With his consulting practice, he developed a keen interest in community colleges and accepted an assignment as Executive Dean of Institutional Advancement at Los Angeles City College where he also served as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles City College Foundation. His major impact was in the areas of strategic planning and the development of an institutional effectiveness model that linked planning and budgeting. His involvement with community colleges continued with an assignment as the Vice Chancellor for Planning and Institutional Effectiveness at Houston Community College where he was responsible for a planning, enrollment management, institutional research, communications, program review, and the HCC Foundation. Again, his key contributions were the development of systems that linked planning and budgeting as well as the design and implementation of a comprehensive institutional effectiveness model. During this time he wrote a book, Noble Ambitions: Mission, Vision, and Values in American Community Colleges (American Association of Community Colleges), which is a critical examination of community colleges’ collective ambitions and their linkage to strategic planning.
He recently returned to the classroom to teach in the M.B.A. program at California State University, Channel Islands with Rowman & Littlefield publishing Momentum: The Responsibility Paradigm and Virtuous Cycles of Change in Colleges and Universities in 2016. It is a specific antidote to the continuing calls for “holding higher education accountable.”
His new Fieldbook series began in 2016 published by Olive Press. The series is formatted as a workbook but with many illustrations and extended research material—“relentlessly pragmatic.” Fieldbooks were released in 2016 and 2018 with the newest released in 2023.
Dr. Seymour lives in Palm Springs, California, with his wife, Rhonda. and their two rescue dogs, Bridgette and Blanche.