A Time for Boldness: A Story of Institutional Change (review)

A recent report by Public Agenda (2002) sounds bleak for universities and colleges with traditional forms of governance, curriculum, and instructional delivery. According to the report, rapid advances in technology and distance education have resulted in an explosion of nontraditional institutions of higher education (i.e., for-profit colleges) that compete head-on with the older, traditional institutions of higher education for students, faculty, and rapidly shrinking federal and state dollars.

Changing definitions of higher education market shares exacerbate this competition. For example, traditional institutions of higher education carved out distinct market shares relative to their status as land-grant institutions, four-year liberal arts institutions, or two-year (community college) institutions. Increasingly, "market share" has come to be viewed as "the bigger the better." Two-year institutions now compete with four-year institutions. Land-grant institutions that historically focused on state and regional matters are becoming more global and less local. Four-year liberal arts institutions are increasingly advancing research agendas that were historically more characteristic of major research universities. Therefore, competition in higher education stems not only from the rapid growth of nontraditional forms of higher education but also from within and between what are viewed as more traditional institutions.

Numerous other reports address the problems associated with these competitive trends, but A Time for Boldness: A Story of Institutional Change is one of few to speak about these trends and associated problems as "opportunities." By no means a scholarly study, it relates how the newly appointed Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), Nancy L. Zimpher, worked to develop a team of faculty scholars, administrators, students, and community constituents to make the university more relevant and community focused, thus changing its negative public image. Zimpher and two colleagues are the authors of the book.

For analytical purposes, this book can be divided into two overlapping sections: (a) the groundwork-conceptual phase and (b) the operating-structure phase. The first chronicles the significance of the chancellor search process, which resulted in Zimpher's appointment and the process she used to galvanize the community around her reform initiative. According to the book, the search committee recognized that the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was virtually "invisible" in a city of at least 16 colleges and universities. It "needed to turn up the volume to hold its own in a competitive academic market" (p. 7).

When Zimpher was appointed chancellor in 1998, she seized the opportunity to connect her reform initiative at a conceptual level to the "Wisconsin Idea." Naming her initiative the "Milwaukee Idea" let people instantly connect at a conceptual level because of the public's long association of the "Wisconsin Idea" with "service to the state" as integral to the university mission.

The working structure of the "Milwaukee Idea" consisted of a full-time staff director and administrative associate and numerous faculty, student, and community committees and subcommittees. At some point in the reform planning process, planners invited input from UWM's academic deans. Their input is unclear, and the book does not do a good job of explaining the interrelationships of the array of committees and subcommittees or why so many committees and subcommittees were established.

Ultimately, seven general themes or foci emerged out of the working committees of the Milwaukee Idea: culture and education, economic opportunities, global perspectives, health and wellness, urban environment, "frontiers" of knowledge and research, and "quick wins"—activities that could be implemented with assured success.

The Milwaukee Idea office issued a request for proposals to the university community and received 245 faculty-driven proposals based on these seven foci that would have totalled $68 million. It funded 92 of them with an estimated $20 million.

A Time for Boldness: A Story of Institutional Change is a fairly good account of...