Pursuing Excellence in Higher Education: Eight Fundamental Challenges (review)

Higher education today is a complex, demanding, and competitive reality. Its constituents—students, administrators, faculty, and public—are drawn from diverse sectors of society. Its "arena" comprises institutions that receive decreased funding, are hounded with increased demands for accountability, and experience declining public support, recognition, and appreciation. The academy, that once-protected sanctuary of research, discovery, teaching, and learning, is now constantly threatened by the very society that once bestowed its lofty rank upon it. The results are a compendium of problems—increased tuition, crowded classrooms, outdated facilities, unprepared graduates, inaccessible faculty, and inappropriate courses—an effect exacerbated by social conversation and the popular press.

In efforts to reverse the downward trend, colleges and universities often implement market-based strategies. However, within higher education's walls and opposing the quick-fix approach, are those who hold fast to the scholarly tradition and who reject such strategies. The resulting tensions, although sometimes good, are often threatening and destructive. Whether and how institutions manage to alleviate that tension often boils down to an either-or situation: Should the scholarly tradition be retained or does higher education need to change? In Pursuing Excellence in Higher Education, Brent Ruben successfully makes the case for reconciling and positively maintaining that tension between the two, effectively answering "yes" to the question. The theme of this book is summed up in his introduction: "The conflict between the academic quality model and the marketplace capacity model [is] not so much as a problem to be solved or eliminated but . . . a potentially creative and productive tension to be better understood, valued, and perhaps even nurtured in order to propel the academy to a new and higher standard of excellence" (p. 6).

In Pursuing Excellence in Higher Education, Ruben categorizes the issues confronting higher education today according to eight critical challenges that need to be met:

• Broadening public appreciation for the work of the academy.
• Increasing our understanding of the needs of workplaces.
• Becoming more effective learning organizations.
• Integrating assessment, planning, and improvement.
• Enhancing collaboration and community.
• Recognizing that everyone in the institution is a teacher.
• Devoting more attention and resources to leadership.
• More broadly framing our vision of excellence.

He systematically addresses these challenges in the context of strategies channeled through a vision of academic, service, and operational excellence. He begins by identifying focal areas as starting points in meeting the eight challenges: (a) efforts in communication and shared dialogue, (b) institution of excellence measures in the process of becoming learning organizations, (c) integrating change and self-study in the process of assessment, planning, and improving academic and administrative elements, (d) cultivating collaborative values, (e) developing exceptional educational leaders, and (f) aspiring to excellence in every facet of the higher education institution. He offers varied and pragmatic suggestions for putting these foci into practice for the institution to reconcile the disparate views of both scholarly traditionalists and change advocates. In effect, he provides a variety of practical suggestions, pointers and answers, for academics and its constituencies alike, to the question "What must be done and how can we do it?"

These suggestions for practice are backed by narratives from 37 contributing authors whose experiences, research, or both, have enriched or found confirmation in the challenging areas. The narratives describe the hard work and commitment of the institution and those working within it to create, implement, and sustain successful programs, research, and curricula that have excellence in practice as their foundation.

The distinctive aspect of this book is Ruben's advocacy of excellence in practice, modeled upon the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program framework for organizational excellence and his adaptation of it for higher education—the Excellence in Higher Education model (Ruben, 2003). For example, in the chapter on meeting the challenge of assessment, planning, and improvement, Ruben outlines the critical components of excellence for...