Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education

Preface

vii Preface A Public Higher Education Laments about the crisis in higher education are nearly as old as colleges and universities themselves. Faculty lament the quality of students , who are never, it seems, as bright either as the faculty themselves were at that age or as bright as the last generation of scholars. Administrators lament the intractability of faculty. And everyone involved in the academic enterprise laments the paucity of resources. These complaints are part of a near universal script about the crisis in higher education, a crisis represented in multiple ways: as arising from the corporatization of higher education, as a failure of the “business model” of universities and colleges, as a repudiation of the ideals and standards of higher education, and, always, as a crisis of cash. We have experienced this crisis directly, and it is a central concern for all the voices presented in this work. But the lack of resources is not the only story. For those of us engaged deeply in public higher education, the real issue is how we can ensure that public institutions serve a public purpose. How can public institutions of higher learning continue to meet the needs of students, the local communities in which they are embedded, and the states for which they provide the vast majority of an educated and informed citizenry? How can institutions of higher learning transform themselves in this time of persistent economic uncertainty, when higher education is ever more critical, yet when the demands placed upon our institutions are greater than ever? viii Divided Conversations Crisis? What Crisis? Is the university actually in crisis, as sociologist Craig Calhoun asked a few years back (Calhoun 2006)? Are universities encountering a true structural transformation, or is the current state of affairs simply more of the same, Chicken Little declaring that the sky is falling yet again, as Peter Wood rejoins in the same symposium (Wood 2006)? We argue that whether or not one is convinced that a true crisis is afoot, it is clear that the environment in which colleges and universities find themselves has changed radically. A number of large-scale demographic, technological , political, and economic trends have converged to alter the educational landscape. Funding for public higher education has become more uncertain , just as higher education has expanded to allow for an increasingly diverse student population, in historic numbers, to enroll. At the same time, the field of higher education has become increasingly competitive, with institutions rushing to climb the prestige hierarchy and attract top students, and spending billions on research, technology, and student services. As higher education becomes more universally available—more necessary—to a broader array of students, the field itself has become more stratified, with some institutions facing crumbling infrastructure, low prestige, and a far more complicated teaching context. For all, costs are rising, and pressures for accountability loom. The landscape shaping higher education has clearly altered, yet universities and colleges have not adapted to this changing context. They are, as Peter Eckel and his colleagues remind us, change-averse, “untidy” organizations with fragmented and dispersed decision-making structures (Eckel, Cook, and King 2006). Cathy Trower describes universities as glaciers. “Universities do move,” she argues, “but they move so slowly that change is almost imperceptible; they move only of their own accord and en masse; and they pursue the path of least resistance” (Trower 2006, 149). Campus governance structures have changed little over the last decades, and despite the entrance of many universities and colleges into the world of online learning and the development of often robust continuing studies divisions , schools are still fundamentally structured around a two-semester (or occasionally three-trimester) year, broken up into fifty- and seventy-fiveminute blocks, with summers off. Despite the increasing diversity of the students we teach (and the growing evidence of the effectiveness of more varied teaching methods), we professors use essentially the same teaching Preface ix methods we learned in graduate school, with only minor tinkering around the edges. And the organizational forms of universities—the structures of departments and colleges, of faculty senates and councils—have changed very little. The sheer complexity of the educational environment has grown, with colleges and universities competing in an increasingly aggressive (and increasingly global) marketplace. This environment places enormous pressures on institutions, as states provide less funding for public higher education along with greater pressure for public accountability. The result is an increasing mismatch between...