José Antonio Bowen

José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Southampton (UK), then as a dean at Miami University and SMU and as President of Goucher College (voted a Top 10 Most Innovative College under his leadership). Bowen has appeared on five continents as a musician and has performed with Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Liberace, and many others. His compositions include a symphony (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1985), and music for Jerry Garcia. Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford University (in Chemistry, Music, and Humanities) has written over 100 scholarly articles, is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Conducting (2003), and an editor of the 6-CD set, Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology (2011). He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and has three TED talks. In 2010, Stanford honored him as a Distinguished Alumni Scholar.

His books on teaching include Teaching Naked (2012), winner of the Frederic W. Ness Book Award for outstanding contributions to the understanding and improvement of liberal education, Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience and Reflection (2021), and, with C. Edward Watson, Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (2024).

Bowen was given a Stanford Centennial Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 1990 and he has presented keynotes and workshops at more than 400 campuses and conferences in 46 states and 20 countries around the world. He has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes,The Wall Street Journal,The Chronicle of Higher Education, PBS NewsHour, and on NPR. 

In 2010, Stanford honored him as a Distinguished Alumni Scholar and in 2018 he was awarded the Ernest L. Boyer Award for significant contributions to American higher education. He lives in Dallas and also does innovation and inclusion consulting for a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies.
 

Areas of Expertise

• Course, curriculum, and general education redesign
• Cultures of change
• Educational research
• Faculty development
• Higher education leadership
• Institutional change