Before becoming President of Independence Community College in 2011, he was Associate Professor of philosophy and Director of Institutional Advancement at Alfred State College, Executive Director of that college's Development Fund, and held a number of other administrative positions there. He was awarded the first system-wide Provost Fellowship in the State University of New York, and served as an Academic Policy and Planning Evaluation Associate for that system. He has published and lectured on higher education, and was the President of the New York State Association of Scholars, and President of the American Association for Learning Outcomes Assessment. From 2008-2018, Barwick was certified by CFRE International, a provider of professional certification of fundraising proficiency. In addition to his academic work, he is the former CEO of CBD Associates, LLC, a real estate holding company in New York, and was the CFO for The Well-Dressed Reader, an internet specialty company. Barwick was named by Ingram's Business Magazine as one of the "Fifty Kansans You Should Know" in 2016. In 2017, he was elected President of the Council of Presidents, the Kansas-wide group of community college presidents. During the 2017-2018 fiscal year in which he represented Kansas Community Colleges, community college funding statewide received its first increase in eight years. Also in 2017, he was named a Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow. Barwick publishes a blog on higher education issues from a senior leadership perspective, The Mortarboard Blog. He hosts a companion podcast, The Mortarboard. Barwick played a minor role as himself in the 2018 and 2019 seasons of the Netflix Emmy-nominated documentary seriesLast Chance U, which featured Independence Community College, receiving positive reviews. Barwick resigned as President of ICC in June 2019. Barwick is the author of the 2020 book Risk and Reward: How Small Colleges Get Better Against the Odds, published by ABJames. He is also the author of the 1994 book Intentional implications : the impact of a reduction of mind on philosophy, published by University Press of America. According to WorldCat, the book is held in 95 libraries. He is also the author of fourteen articles and chapters, primarily on educational administration and his philosophical interests, which include ethics, cognitive science, and metaphysics.
Educational issues
Following conflict in 2005-2006 that took place between the Alfred State College campus president Uma Gupta and the employees that attracted national coverage in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues, Barwick identified the event as the first time that social media criticism had contributed substantially to the reassignment of a public college president, publishing positively reviewed analyses in national and international publications. Barwick is a proponent of the view that a negative link between large class size, generically understood, and reduced learning outcomes has not been proven to exist in higher education, and has argued that additional funding for research is needed. An early advocate for the Mooc, he has argued that although a negative link has been established between certain types of instruction in large classes and learning outcomes, there is not sufficient experimentation with different instructional methods to determine whether large class size is always correlated with poorer outcomes. In 2013, Independence Community College became the first public college in Kansas to allow the concealed carry of handguns. As more states require public colleges to allow concealed carry, Barwick now speaks widely on the data gathered during the lengthy period since the rule was enacted, the process used to construct his campus' policy, and the insurance options for schools who choose to allow concealed carry. In 2016, Barwick was one of eight presidents who threatened to leave the Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference over concerns regarding football roster limitations. Barwick and the seven other presidents argued that the roster limitations were originally based on racial discrimination, and continued to have a discriminatory effect. The conference subsequently voted unanimously to eliminate the restrictions.
