American Higher Education, Leadership, and Policy: Critical Issues and the Public Good (review)

As the fiscal crisis in the United States persists, a dominant view held among policymakers and the general public is that higher education’s primary role is to enhance the nation’s economic position. This perspective posits that private benefits incurred through education will ultimately benefit the nation as a whole.

In her timely and informative book, American Higher Education, Leadership, and Policy: Critical Issues and the Public Good, Penny Pasque challenges this conventional framing of higher education, offering an expanded lens from which to view higher education’s role in society. The main contribution of her book is to consider how multiple voices and perspectives—many of which have been marginalized in society—may help to shape the national dialogue about higher education as a public good.

Pasque’s work employs discourse methodologies and social identity lenses to analyze dialogues emanating from a national conference series convened in the early 21st century. The purpose of the conference series was to facilitate a national conversation on strengthening the relationship between higher education and society. Conference participants included leaders of national foundations and associations, state legislators, university presidents, faculty, student affairs administrators, graduate students, community partners, and a few undergraduate students.

To guide her analysis, Pasque introduces four cognitive processing models conceptualizing higher education’s relationship with society: (a) private good, (b) public good, (c) public and private goods as balanced, (d) public and private goods as interconnected and advocacy. It is through these frames that Pasque articulates conflicting visions regarding the relationship between higher education and society. The discussion of these four frames is among the most important contributions of the book since it provides readers with comprehensive and nuanced perspectives about higher education’s relationship with the public. Seasoned scholars and new students of higher education will equally benefit from Pasque’s thoughtful presentation of these models, as they provide conceptual and analytic distinctions among narratives that inform national policy debates.

In Chapter 3, Pasque presents a carefully crafted research design that infuses discourse methodologies (e.g., critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, conversation analysis) with social identity lenses (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class). She gives careful attention to the trustworthiness of the data, providing a detailed discussion about techniques such as triangulation, member checking, and reflexivity that are appropriate to her research design.

The most gripping discussion begins in Chapter 5 with her description of the dialogue process and content emanating from two “peak” sessions from the conference series (i.e., those sessions generating the most conversation among participants). Incorporating analytic tools from communication theory, Pasque presents a sequence of performance moves initiated by attendees, analyzing how these moves shaped the outcomes of the series. In this section, the reader observes how persuasion, face-threatening acts, humor, politeness, references to social identity, and various agenda-setting strategies isolate power and control among various participants. The reader is transported to a dynamic and emotionally charged discussion on the issue of strengthening higher education’s relationship with society.

Pasque’s central findings are that perspectives representing the advocacy cognitive processing model (emphasizing grassroots organizing, inequity, and social injustice in the context of race, gender and class) were devalued, silenced, and rejected in peak sessions. Such perspectives were often advanced by members of target identities (disenfranchised, exploited, victimized), while agents (members of dominant social groups) sustained the original framings of the problem. In chapter 5, Pasque introduces feminist theory to analyze how women’s comments were reframed, redefined, or silenced in the dialogues.

She also highlights strategic bridging moves that allies employed to reconcile contrasting views. Through this analysis, Pasque makes the case that omitting voices from target identity groups systematically eliminates alternatives for educational change. In the end, she proposes a “tricuspid model of advocacy and educational change” that focuses on how to connect knowledge and action among diverse groups of participants.

A primary contribution of Pasque’s...