The Politics of Public Higher Education

Planning, Policy, and Politics in Higher Education: Tools to Help Leaders Make Strategic Choices

Tom Anderes

Higher education leaders and their teams should always seek to add value to their decision-making processes. Planning, Policy, and Politics in Higher Education: Tools to Help Leaders Make Strategic Choices provides a strategic decision-making model and specific tools to help maximize the opportunities for making successful choices. The model was introduced by Dr. Anderes in the book Navigating Through Turbulent Times: Applying a System and University Strategic Decision Making Model. It is built on the use of new tools, including a planning and assessment framework, future scans, an issue analysis inventory, and decision matrix. The new tools in combination with a strong strategic planning process, transparency for all constituencies, and high quality information focused on the future and globally gives leaders the greatest opportunity to make thoughtful choices aligned with their primary goals. The strategic decision-making model consists of six components: 1) Creating an organizational mentality committed to strategic thinking, 2) maximizing the amount of high quality historical data and information for analyses to inform decision makers, 3) routinizing the use of globalized scans of the future integrated with other decision-making information, 4) supporting ongoing strategic planning processes, 5) ensuring transparency to incorporate all key constituencies in planning, and 6) implementing a planning and assessment framework that allows leaders to weigh and filter information into thoughtfully constructed strategic alternatives and action plans. The success of the model is based on the integration of all components, with strategic thinking permeating all aspects of decision making. Board, system, and university leaders and their teams will benefit from the use of the strategic decision-making model in crafting well-informed choices. They will have greater confidence in supporting those choices to the myriad internal and external constituencies they serve. The planning outcomes will be derived from a set of new and expanded resources that provide greater organizational certainty in the final choices. The certainty in the choices will be based on the exhaustive use of the tools in translating strategies into key outcomes and the increased capacity to measure success in meeting board and institutional goals.

Navigating Through Turbulent Times

Applying a System and University Strategic Decision Making Model

Tom Anderes

ᅠReaders and leaders interested in planning and leadership in higher education will receive two primary benefits from the book Navigating Through Turburlent Times........ First, a strategic decision making model that they can apply with their leadership teams in universities, systems and Boards. Second, they will be exposed to real life experiences from turbulent or unstable environments that they will likely confront during their careers. The six components of the strategic decision making model are laid out in detail and used as the focus for recognizing and resolving issues that contribute to instability. The integration of the model with the actual experiences provides leaders and their support teams with a comprehensive tool to address current and future challenges. The model components include: 1) an organizational mentality committed to strategic thinking, 2) a maximum amount of historical data and information for analysis to inform decision makers, 3) highly globalized scans of the future integrated with other decision making information, 4) ongoing strategic planning processes, 5) transparency to incorporate all key constituencies in planning and 6) a planning and assessment framework that allows leaders to weigh and filter information into thoughtfully constructed strategic alternatives and action plans. The success of the model is based on the integration of all components, with strategic thinking permeating all aspects of decision making. Ultimately leaders and leaders in waiting will be able to better anticipate and resolve problems through the use of the six major interactive components of the model. Problems (as reflected through the experiences) that create instability such as dramatic funding reductions, unanticipated leadership successions, rapidly increasing student costs, limited communications with constituencies, limited planning and strategic thinking, etc. can be considered from the outset of thoughtful, strategic planning and thinking exercises and not simply "fixed" after alternative strategies are in place.

College Students' Sense of Belonging

A Key to Educational Success for All Students

Terrell L. Strayhorn

This book explores how belonging differs based on students’ social identities, such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or the conditions they encounter on campus. Belonging—with peers, in the classroom, or on campus—is a critical dimension of success at college. It can affect a student’s degree of academic adjustment, achievement, aspirations, or even whether a student stays in school. The 2nd Edition of College Students’ Sense of Belonging explores student sub-populations and campus environments, offering readers updated information about sense of belonging, how it develops for students, and a conceptual model for helping students belong and thrive. Underpinned by theory and research and offering practical guidelines for improving educational environments and policies, this book is an important resource for higher education and student affairs professionals, scholars, and graduate students interested in students’ success. New to this second edition: A refined theory of college students’ sense of belonging and review of current literature in light of new and emerging theories; Expanded best practices related to fostering sense of belonging in classrooms, clubs, residence halls, and other contexts; Updated research and insights for new student populations such as youth formerly in foster care, formerly incarcerated adults, and homeless students; Coverage on a broad range of topics since the first edition of this book, including cultural navigation, academic spotting, and the "shared faith" element of belonging.

Blind Side

Evolution Of A Game

Michael Lewis

The author examines the phenomenon of the high value of the left tackle in football, using as his example an underprivileged youngster from Tennessee.

Universities and the Future of America

Derek Curtis Bok

Former Harvard president Bok asks what universities can do to promote higher levels of ethical responsibility and help the nation address its urgent social problems and its competitive international position.

The Crimson Letter

Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture

Douglass Shand-Tucci

In a book deeply impressive in its reach while also deeply embedded in its storied setting, bestselling historian Douglass Shand-Tucci explores the nature and expression of sexual identity at America's oldest university during the years of its greatest influence. The Crimson Letter follows the gay experience at Harvard in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing upon students, faculty, alumni, and hangers-on who struggled to find their place within the confines of Harvard Yard and in the society outside. Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde were the two dominant archetypes for gay undergraduates of the later nineteenth century. One was the robust praise-singer of American democracy, embraced at the start of his career by Ralph Waldo Emerson; the other was the Oxbridge aesthete whose visit to Harvard in 1882 became part of the university's legend and lore, and whose eventual martyrdom was a cautionary tale. Shand-Tucci explores the dramatic and creative oppositions and tensions between the Whitmanic and the Wildean, the warrior poet and the salon dazzler, and demonstrates how they framed the gay experience at Harvard and in the country as a whole. The core of this book, however, is a portrait of a great university and its community struggling with the full implications of free inquiry. Harvard took very seriously its mission to shape the minds and bodies of its charges, who came from and were expected to perpetuate the nation's elite, yet struggled with the open expression of their sexual identities, which it alternately accepted and anathematized. Harvard believed it could live up to the Oxbridge model, offering a sanctuary worthy of the classical Greek ideals of male association, yet somehow remain true to its legacy of respectable austerity and Puritan self-denial. The Crimson Letter therefore tells stories of great unhappiness and manacled minds, as well as stories of triumphant activism and fulfilled promise. Shand-Tucci brilliantly exposes the secrecy and codes that attended the gay experience, showing how their effects could simultaneously thwart and spark creativity. He explores in particular the question of gay sensibility and its effect upon everything from symphonic music to football, set design to statecraft, poetic theory to skyscrapers. The Crimson Letter combines the learned and the lurid, tragedy and farce, scandal and vindication, and figures of world renown as well as those whose influence extended little farther than Harvard Square. Here is an engrossing account of a university transforming and transformed by those passing through its gates, and of their enduring impact upon American culture.

College Football

History, Spectacle, Controversy

John Sayle Watterson

Ultimately, however, Watterson concludes that the history of college football is one in which the rules of the game have changed, but those of human nature have not.

Revolutionary Generation

Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence

Conrad Edick Wright

What was life like for the young men who came of age in late eighteenth-century New England? How did the American Revolution and its aftermath shape their outlook and experiences? This book offers a collective biography of the 204 members of the Harvard College classes of 1771 through 1774, men whose lives intersected with the War for Independence and the other formative events of the founding years of the American Republic. The names of a few of these men are still familiar, including painter John Trumbull and Congressman Fisher Ames, but this study's principal importance lies in these schoolmates' shared experiences?experiences that were also common to a much wider group of youths who reached adulthood in the 1770s. Conrad Edick Wright draws on extensive research on the classes that graduated from Harvard immediately before the start of the war to follow their members as they passed through life's common and predictable events from birth and childhood through youth to maturity, careers, marriage, the increasing civic and family responsibilities of midlife, old age, and death. He is also sensitive to his subjects' thoughts and feelings. Unusually articulate and frequently reflective, the men of the Harvard College classes of 1771 through 1774 often revealed their ambitions and concerns through their letters and diaries. Revolutionary Generation provides the most sustained application of life course and life cycle analysis to be found in any study of late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century America. At the same time, it shows on a personal level through the lives of its subjects many of the most important consequences of the War for Independence.

Between Citizens and the State

The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century

Christopher P. Loss

This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.

What's Public about Public Higher Ed?

Halting Higher Education's Decline in the Court of Public Opinion

Stephen M. Gavazzi, E. Gordon Gee

"This book uses survey data to examine public sentiment regarding higher education, focusing on such critical issues as how universities spend taxpayer money, the pursuit of national rankings, student financial aid, and the interplay of international activities versus efforts to create "closer to home" impact. Building on their previous book Land-Grant Universities for the Future, the coauthors unflinchingly present a no-holds-barred exploration of what citizens really think about their public universities"--

The Still Divided Academy

How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education

Stanley Rothman, April Kelly-Woessner, Matthew Woessner

The Still Divided Academy is a wonderful examination of the academic community that shows their inner workings by addressing a broad range of issues including: academic politics, tenure, perceived and real political imbalance, academic freedom, and diversity. Administrators, professors, and students have very different priorities, values, and expectations and therefore, often have conflicting opinions on these issues. Drawing on data collected in a specially commissioned public opinion survey as well as other recent research on higher education, Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner, create an incredibly readable presentation of both the similarities and differences between those running our universities and those attending them. The authors manage to remain impressively neutral; instead they give us a fuller perspective of the people on our college campuses.

When Colleges Lobby States

The Higher Education/State Government Connection

Leonard E. Goodall

An overview of the process of university participation in state politics is provided, including the way in which a university interacts with the governor's office and the way it competes with other universities and other agencies for budget dollars. The following 23 articles are included: "The Influence of State Constitutional Conventions on the Future of Higher Education" (Samuel K. Gove and Susan Welch); "State Constitutions--An Update" (Leonard E. Goodall); "Constitutional Autonomy for Universities: The Current State of Judicial Opinions" (Richard B. Crockett); "Governors and Higher Education" (Samuel K. Gove); "University Reorganization in Wisconsin" (Allen Rosenbaum); "The State Story: Administrative Centralization" (Malcolm Moos and Francis E. Rourke); "Legislators and Academicians" (Heinz Eulau and Harold Quinley); "Lobbying for Limited Resources" (John W. Hicks); "How To Play the State Capitol Game" (Dan Angel); "Public Universities and the New State Politics" (E. Terrence Jones); "Long-Term Expectations for Financing Higher Education" (M. M. Chambers);"State Tuition Policies and Public Higher Education" (Allan W. Ostar); "The Management of Universities of Constant or Decreasing Size" (Richard M. Cyert); "Should States Support Private Colleges--Yes!" (Steven Muller); "Should States Support Private Colleges--No!" (Bill J. Priest); "The Public-Private Debate" (Frank H. T. Rhodes); "Trends in Statewide Planning and Coordination" (Patrick M. Callan and Richard W. Jonsen); "Ambiguities in the Administration of Public University System: An Organizing Perspective" (Lawrence K. Pettit); "Who's Afraid of the Statewide Board?" (James A. Norton); "The Point of the Discourse" (M. M. Chambers); "Memo to a Multicampus Trustee from a Flagship CEO" (Barry Munitz); "The Future of the Land-Grant University" (Malcolm Moos); and "State Colleges: An Unsettled Quality" (Robert Birnbaum). References included with each chapter. (KM)

Politics and Higher Education

John David Millett

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From Campus to Capitol

The Role of Government Relations in Higher Education

William McMillen

From Campus to Capitol takes a comprehensive look at how governments affect institutions of higher learning, in the process illuminating the role of the government relations officer. All institutions of higher learning, from large state universities to community and private colleges, benefit from strong relationships with local, state, and federal governments. This book examines the importance of government relations officers and discusses how they can most effectively negotiate a tangled web of political entities—from community associations to mayors to lobbyists—while ensuring that their institution's best interests are met. In an era of declining state appropriations, increasing economic instability, and surging enrollments, successful interaction with government representatives is crucial. Whether securing a million-dollar federal earmark or helping to support the local economy, the government relations officer's influence is essential, both where it shows and behind the scenes. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience, William McMillen offers an insider's account of this major player in American higher education. Anecdotes and interviews with other government relations officers illustrate the challenges they face on and off campus.