Managing the Learning University (review)

Among books about higher education is the distinctive genre written by retired or widely experienced university presidents, professors, consultants, or education officials. These pundits presumably write to pass on their accumulated wisdom to current or younger, soon-to-be leaders at colleges and universities. This is one of those books.

Chris Duke has been a teacher, university head, trustee, professor of lifelong learning, member of international associations, and consultant in England and Australia. So he has observed universities and their occupants from many perches. In this book he dispenses his mature views on campus culture, government relations, research, how to use the new communications technology with integrity, entrepreneurialism and raising money, faculty, partnerships with other organizations, and more. There are some sage observations within these covers.

Duke also gives us his idiosyncratic and strongly felt opinions about what he calls "managerialism." He hates it, claiming that a university "cannot be managed" (p. 149). He also dislikes talk of restructuring, productivity, human resources, and marketing. He confesses to a "hostility" toward strategic planning and consultants, and believes that the future of on-line learning is not promising. Duke prefers universities to be a genial "mess," in which a family-like faculty has maximum autonomy, lots of encouragement to "learn," and much nurture and empowerment. As he proclaims, "In a successful learning university management is shared universally. All are managers" (p. 154).

At the same time, Duke acknowledges that we live in an era of turbulent changes, with "big changes in life and the social order" (p. 24). He recognizes why more college and university executives "are expected to excel as change managers." He urges universities today to develop more "vision" and a clearer sense of how they will respond to the new kinds of knowledge, increased globalism, the Internet, different demographics, and growing competition. Duke is no crotchety troglodyte.

Rather, he is a person deeply divided, admitting, "I find myself pulled between two tendencies" (p. 31). He lucidly sees the need for universities to be less exclusive, "more relevant and valuable to their societies," and more committed to lifelong learning, research, and a wider array of students. But "on the other hand the forces already changing universities may sweep away the essential good characteristics which make universities important: their contribution as a community and a place, somewhat apart from while yet embedded within modern complex society" (pp. 31-32). In a way, Chris Duke has written less the "anti-management book" that he boasts of and more of a poignant self-portrait of an ex-scholar and vice chancellor who is both sentimental about the loss of comfortable, unperturbed university life with few and deferential administrators and also prescient about the urgency of somehow changing university life, behavior, and structures in the face of radically novel conditions.

Still, I wish he had included some data and statistics in the book to back up his advice and opinions and had not totally neglected the troublesome issue of financing the still-expanding and enlarging number of universities.