As we move past the shortest day of the year, my thoughts turn to the eventual return of languid summer days. This column about how universities could make better use of their facilities and faculty during the summer months first…
Each person’s head and heart, the twin seats or our identity, lie just eighteen inches apart, about a cubit. The connection between them is being stretched to the breaking point by universities and other institutions that have tried desperately to…
Increasing costs, lavish loans, low performance standards, the absence of merit, and a lost sense of mission contribute to the diminishment of the effectiveness of public higher education. But most loathsome and detrimental is an organization hell-bent on deflecting every…
Universities must change dramatically to meet the evolving needs of their students and the workplace. But, in the process, they must not abandon their roots as places that develop the human capacity for thinking and taking action for the betterment…
Current events related to intercollegiate athletics leads me to post a story this week that was originally published on July 27, 2010. The cost of low integrity programs and poor executive decision making is the highest cost to bear, even…
There is real work associated with the purpose of the university. Work focused on changing the way people think, and changing the way a society operates. Work building a productive economy. Work that creates enlightened action. It is never…
The separation of private beliefs and public expression of those may be acceptable in many settings (though I am not convinced that is the case) but it is absolutely unacceptable for university leadership. University leadership is private morality expressed publically.…
Universities must change if we are to continue serving our students. Evermore frequently, universities will be called to meet the specific needs of each student in a unique fashion. If it is properly integrated into the curriculum, distance education gives…
Universities, one hopes inadvertently, are training generations to avoid responsibility for their actions. This is shameful. Such training breeds an expectation of entitlement that undermines initiative, industry, courage, self-reliance, community, and discourages students from exercising one of the greatest benefits…
Museums bridge the gap between study and reality and, as in universities, the relationship between communities and the meaning of the things they have produced can both be confused and confusing at times. James Clerk Maxwell, the 19th century Scottish…
There is a shameful trend in higher education and other quarters of society that treats success as something to be considered with suspicion. Some accuse The Occupy Wall Street crowd of holding this position, but achievement and greed are not…
Seventh and final in a series on state funding for higher education Value in higher education will make more thoughtful and careful students out of those in attendance. People will be asking why ever more frequently. Leadership better have good…
Sixth in a series on state funding for higher education If we measure the value of an educational institution solely by the number students enrolled, the number of degrees produced, the research dollars garnered, the books written, the paintings or…
Fifth in a series on state funding for higher education Chester Dunning, an acquaintance of mine, understands the value of faculty work in a free society. He is quoted in a WSJ piece, Putting a Price on Professors: Mr. Dunning…
Fourth in a series on state funding for higher education The human drive to create profit, the Internet and other technologies, are endeavoring to transform higher education. And in part, they have. But digital interaction alone will never be a…
Third in a series on state funding for higher education Addressing how the Monetary Assistance Program (MAP) is affecting the students of Illinois, the IBHE Task Force observed: The first issue is the increasing demand for financial aid. More students…
Second in a series on state funding for higher education Historically, while state contributions to the total operating budgets of universities have increased as a percentage of all spending, tuition has remained a roughly stable percentage of all operating costs. …
First in a series on state funding for higher education A fear held by many is that decreasing state support will lead effectively to privatizing state universities. And while a few million dollars is a pittance to a large research…
Fearless, confident leadership is required in our universities. Leaders focused on academic excellence and student success will eventually prevail, but it may not be pretty between now and then as fearlessness is a scarce commodity in the face of subvention…
States universities should revisit the history of Performance-Based Funding of higher education. A uniform approach will not work well. Instead, there must be as many performance models as there are universities in a state. While attainable, this is an especially…
Universities must take responsibility for screening those students who are borrowing money for college. Tell the truth. Give potential students the odds. “With this high school GPA, this test score and class rank, the probability of finishing the degree at…
The only result of whining is to push people with purpose from addressing real problems. The tendency to whining and complaining may be taken as the surest sign symptom of little souls and inferior intellects. Lord Jeffrey ___________________________________________________________________ Recently the…
Universities need to change over time. Change comes from leadership, as organizations resist it by nature. Interim Chancellor Robert Easter, who oversees the Urbana-Champaign campus, praised the program’s “long and prestigious history as a leader in aviation education” but said…
Leaders learn, or leaders fail. The basis of all effective leadership is as powerful as the Boy Scout Law. Its simplicity and timelessness do not diminish its value. Ward doesn’t add to it, but strengthens it. “We must be silent…
Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times Opinionator online July 11, 2011, comments extensively on the relationship of tenure, academic freedom, and current university life in response to a book by Naomi Schaefer Riley entitled, “The Faculty Lounges: And…
Concerns that college costs are spiraling out of control are well placed. However, painting institutions capable of garnering support for their mission as greedy, risks killing the incentive to improve is misguided. Private wealth of a philanthropic sort is also…
Bachelor’s degrees at community colleges are not a good idea. Articulated transfer is a better answer but both community colleges and universities must be more responsive to the needs of student and state. Pascarella and Terenzini suggest, in Studying College…
The quality of the educational experience and the earning power of degrees attained are the purview and responsibility of each student and family who enter the educational marketplace. It is a marketplace where ideas of value (hopefully) are exchanged for…
The words of the popular early twentieth century song I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles may reflect the spirit of the challenges in the housing and education sectors of the U.S. economy better than most twenty-first century economists – I’m dreaming dreams,…
Universities must change. The culture of college needs to evolve, particularly with regard to “perverse institutional incentives” that reward colleges for enrolling and retaining students rather than for educating them. “It’s a problem when higher education is driven by a…
Who cares about students as higher education becomes big business? The Justice Department plans to intervene in a whistle-blower lawsuit charging that one of the nation’s largest for-profit college companies, the Education Management Corporation, defrauded the government by illegally paying…
From any perspective performance should be central to the work of faculty. Not performance judged by administration, but performance judged by peers. Nothing else ensures relevancy and quality of judgment. From the time of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, academic…
Unions have helped create positive working conditions in this country that would have been unimaginable 100 years ago. One needs look no further than the history of the development of the Fair Labor Standards Act for proof. Every major advance…
Costs are always relative and secondary to value. Governments cannot make universities by enactments of laws: Nor corporations by erections of edifices: The church cannot create them under the authority of heaven: The flattering eulogies of orators cannot adorn them…
University leaders who politicize intention and talk about public benefit and public purpose as primary mission show a complete lack of understanding of institutions and learning in a free market. We exist to tirelessly serve students. Here is an inconvenient…
Our University: Great Expectations In a New York Times piece on February 18, 2009, by Max Roosevelt entitled Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes, James Hogge, associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University is quoted.…
On our university campuses the complexities of political activity to create accountability in public resource allocations abound as performance based funding measures evolve. If handled poorly, and without strong faculty leadership, these good intentions will be for naught, at best. …
The Congressional Record, August 1985, provides a revealing perspective held by Albert Shanker, former President of the United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1984 and President of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997, regarding his job…
Universities have a duty to help create a more effective republic. While this purpose has remained constant over the centuries, the means and methods necessary to accomplish that purpose must continually evolve to keep up with an advancing society. In…
Universities must compete for students through excellence and quality. There is no substitute for competition in creating excellence, and it should be the highest priority for any institution of higher education. Governments cannot make universities by enactments of laws: Nor…
A shared vision for a university energizes people. Students must be partners in that vision casting process because theirs is the most fundamental experience that defines whether we have succeeded as an educational institution, and, more importantly to institutions in…
Eighth and final in a series of who our students are and how they perform. Appreciating different perspectives diminishes neither loyalty nor purpose, but enriches both. Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not…
Our University – Race, Ethnicity and Other Forces Seventh in a series of who our students are and how they perform. The factors that influence ethnic and racial diversity in universities are many: wealth; preparation; ability, whether innate or learned;…
Sixth in a series of who our students are and how they perform. Quality transfer students can bring positive characteristics to the university, not the least of which is a willingness to work. Avril Thorne, Professor of Psychology at U.C.…
Fifth in a series of who our students are and how they perform. The role of every professor, in every classroom, guiding every student, is to challenge that student to a level at which he or she has never before…
Fourth in a series of who our students are and how they perform. The title of an anthology of stories by and about nontraditional students complied by Donna S. Talarico may say it best, and may say it all: Kids,…
This column, in a slightly modified form, originally ran in August 2008. Walter Wendler Universities provide a key ingredient for the foundation of a free society. They help create, through active faculty and engaged students, the fabric of informed economic…
Third in a series on who our students are and how they perform. International students are a reliable predictor of U.S. institutional success in a global market for higher education. I am not confident that American postsecondary institutions will retain…
Second in a series on who our students are and how they perform. Great universities help people come into their own. Intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and moral development is always a personal matter but good learning environments are catalysts for the…
First in a series on who our students are, and how they perform. The precariousness of balancing opportunity, access and excellence will be addressed in the coming weeks as the face of the university intersects the faces of students. An…
