Dr. Eddie Genna

Eddie is the Interim Senior Vice Chancellor of External Affairs for the Maricopa Community Colleges. He started his higher education career as an adjunct faculty member at Phoenix College in 2003. He formerly served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs, as Associate Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs and Collaborative Governance, as president of the Maricopa Community Colleges Faculty Association, and as a tenured professor of philosophy and political science at Phoenix College. Eddie played a central role in introducing interest-based negotiation to the Maricopa Community Colleges’ meet-and-confer processes, mediation services, and leadership training programs, and he is the founding director of the mediation and facilitation services center that provides internal training, consulting, and mediation and facilitation services. He served as a founding chair of the systemwide Committee on Academic Freedom and a chair of the Shared Governance Task Force that created our Shared Governance Blueprint. He has trained various institutions in shared governance and interest-based negotiation / problem solving, and he regularly facilitates negotiations and group-decision making using these processes.

Eddie earned his law degree (JD) from the UC Berkeley School of Law, where he served as Editor in Chief of the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law and an Executive Editor of the California Law Review. He studied political and legal philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center (MA) and both political science and philosophy at ASU’s Barrett Honors College (BS/BA). His doctoral degree in political science (PhD) from ASU focused on the relationship between deliberative democracy and conflict resolution. Prior to his career in teaching and facilitation, Eddie worked as a Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow at Community Legal Services in Phoenix advocating for the employment rights of low-wage workers.