In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education by Kristin G. Esterberg, John Wooding
  • Dana L. Gillon
Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education. By Kristin G. Esterberg and John Wooding. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013. 179pp. Paperback, $27.95.

Kristin G. Esterberg and John Wooding utilize in-depth interviews with faculty members and senior administrators to examine the forces that prevent public universities from innovating, taking risks, and engaging in transformation, especially in light of recent financial crises and a general decline in the availability of tenure track positions for new faculty. Divided Conversations, then, is a book that contributes mainly to the literature on organizational change and behavior, [End Page 221] one that specifically focuses on transformation in higher education. Esterberg and Wooding are primarily interested in institutional culture; they seek to understand better the “divided conversations” between faculty and administrators in public higher education. As they note in the opening to the book, “The cultures on our campuses too often frustrate change and innovation, deny access to talented potential students (and faculty), and fail miserably to keep struggling students in college when financial, emotional, academic, or family pressures make it difficult for them to continue” (1). By exploring the life stories of faculty members and their relationships with university administrators—both key groups who contribute to and shape the culture of higher education—Esterberg and Wooding provide insights into these divided conversations, conversations that prevent those in the academy from solving the serious problems facing universities.

The authors interviewed thirty sitting presidents, provosts, deans, department chairs, and faculty members using chain-referral sampling techniques; the relationship between these interviews and oral history is quite minimal. Esterberg and Wooding used interviewing simply as a method to capture the differing thoughts among the university administrators and professors about the structures and cultures currently present in higher education and those needed for future growth and change; there is no discussion in Divided Conversations about oral history methodology or its practice. Esterberg and Wooding tend to focus on issues in higher education that are commonly referred to—constantly increasing tuition costs, the questionable value of research, the increasing use of adjunct faculty, and the tendency to expand programs and courses. While the authors do not include full interviews or interview summaries, they do occasionally include excerpts from their interviews. These excerpts create an easy-to-follow layout for their thoughtful analysis of the breakdown between faculty and administrators. The interview excerpts reveal the clear disagreements between administrators and faculty members, and it is these divided conversations that have led to the difficulty in implementing organizational change in higher education.

Interestingly enough, there did seem to be some variation in who was quoted directly in the book and who was not. While the authors do weave in some dialogue from their interviews with faculty members on the topics of hiring, prestige, and promotion with published research as well as from their interviews with newly-minted doctorate degree recipients on the challenges they faced, there were fewer direct quotes from these two groups on the whole; Esterberg and Wooding provide more of their own thoughts than those of their interviewees. In direct contrast, there were more direct quotes from university administrators on career mobility and stability in the academy and fewer of the authors’ own thoughts and reflections on the topic. This may be simply because the administrators were more open to being interviewed, which may in turn be a [End Page 222] matter of power dynamics in play. Esterberg and Wooding have a personal stake in the construction of this text: they are current administrators and former faculty members, and as such, they base the veracity of their indirect interview statements on their own familiarity with such views and on how often their interviewees made similar statements, rather than providing the reader documented evidence of the statements. The silence of the faculty seems to reflect the culture of the faculty, and the consistency of the administrators’ answers seems to reflect their shared culture, though it would have been good to allow readers to judge for themselves.

Aside from the issue of oral history and...

pdf

Share