Former Astronaut Lands at Boise State ... Academic Named Leader of Conservative Think Tank ... New President Plans Cross-Pollination at Art Institute of Chicago

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By PAULA WASLEY, DAVID GLENN, and ALLIE GRASGREEN

SPLASHING DOWN: Call it one small step for Barbara R. Morgan, and one giant leap for Boise State University.

Ms. Morgan, the teacher-turned-astronaut who was the backup for Christa McAuliffe for NASA's Teacher in Space program, has announced that she will retire from space exploration to take an educator-in-residence position at Boise State.

Ms. Morgan, 56, was recruited by NASA in 1985 for the Teacher in Space program. After the Challenger disaster, she returned to teaching elementary school in McCall, Idaho, but maintained her ties with NASA and eventually joined the agency full time in 1998 to train as a professional astronaut. Last August she spent 13 days aboard the space shuttle Endeavor, operating the robot arm to install portions of the International Space Station.

Her new mission will begin on August 18. Ms. Morgan has a joint appointment in Boise State's colleges of engineering and education, and she will represent the university in policy development, fund raising, and advocacy for science, technology, engineering, and math education. As an educator-in-residence, she will also do outreach work in nearby school districts and give guest lectures at the university on NASA and space exploration.

"It's really hard to leave the work that I'm doing here," says Ms. Morgan. But she was drawn to Boise State, she says, after visiting the campus and seeing the laboratory and science facilities. "It's transitioning from a teaching university and keeping its teaching, which is important, but also becoming very strong in research," she says. "It's very much like NASA in that people are trying some very challenging things, with a great can-do attitude."

ENTERPRISING MIND: The United States will welcome a new president in January, and so will the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank with many ties to the present White House. The institute has tapped Arthur C. Brooks, a professor of business and government policy at Syracuse University, as its next leader, starting on New Year's Day.

Mr. Brooks, 44, succeeds Christopher C. DeMuth, who has led the institute since 1986. Mr. Brooks is perhaps best known for his 2006 book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism (Basic Books), which argued that conservatives at all income levels are more likely than liberals to make charitable donations. He has also written about the economics of happiness and about the financing of arts organizations.

With an annual budget that approaches $25-million, the institute is one of the best-financed and most-connected policy centers in Washington. Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly gone there to make pronouncements about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During those visits, he might have stopped by the office of his wife, Lynne V. Cheney, a senior fellow there.

"I've always thought that I wanted to do something that was oriented toward the ideas of a lot of other smart people instead of just focusing on my own," says Mr. Brooks, who has been a visiting scholar at the institute since last year. "And this is the best opportunity I could possibly have been offered."

Mr. Brooks will teach two courses at Syracuse this fall before moving to Washington. He says he hopes to bring to the institute some of the energy that Nancy Cantor, the university's president and chancellor, has demonstrated in developing new research centers. "That really super-entrepreneurial academic model is working well at Syracuse," he says. "There are a few other campuses where it's happening, but at SU it's really popping."

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BIG DESIGNS: Wellington Reiter's knack for cultivating cross-disciplinary programs should come in handy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has been appointed president.

Mr. Reiter, who will take over the position on August 25, has made such programs a priority at Arizona State University, where he is dean of the College of Design. In addition to shaping a new urban campus in downtown Phoenix, he helped create InnovationSpace, a collaboration among the schools of design, engineering, and business that teaches the marketing of environmentally sustainable products.

The Art Institute has not fully embraced its potential for cross-disciplinary programs, Mr. Reiter says, despite the fact that many individualized art and design departments share a roof. "I'm not sure they take advantage of that adjacency in a way that they could," he says. "For students the advantage is parallel course work, cross-pollinating new technology for projects that were inconceivable a decade ago."

The Akron, Ohio, native is also looking to raise the profile of the Art Institute so that Chicago residents become as familiar with the school as they are with its art museum.

Previously, Mr. Reiter taught in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's architecture department and at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has won many design awards.