Amid the global pandemic, community colleges nationwide found themselves challenged like never before. More than 21 million Americans lost their jobs in March and April. How would this economic collapse affect college revenue streams, or fall semester enrollment? Would campuses even be open in the fall? Would students continue to register for…

When contemplating a major change to public higher education governance, state leaders should bear in mind several guiding principles. Such principles can ensure that current and future students will have access to an affordable, quality postsecondary education. They can also help ensure that the state's system of higher education meets public…

School leaders rightly tend toward collaboration and consensus-building when it comes to important decisions affecting students. But there are moments when, perhaps to their own surprise, they may find themselves willing to "go to the mat" on an important decision, whether consensus has been reached or not. Smith, a professor and chair…

Leading a long-established LLC as an Interim Director poses particular challenges and rewards. Uncertainties abound for the program and for the individual. Professionally speaking, taking on the hybrid role of faculty/ administrator can be both difficult and exciting. Ultimately, the solutions are in the details. Listening carefully to students,…

The contestability of ideas is at the heart of a healthy academic institution. As a result, administrators face the challenge of making and implementing difficult decisions in an environment that is designed to explicitly create thoughtful discord. We argue that procedural fairness--explaining how and why important decisions are made--is an…

Today organizations have adopted a corporate university model to meet their training requirements, a model that adds value to the business in terms of revenue and profit, improvement in customer retention, improved employee productivity, cost reduction and retention of talented employees. This paper highlights the radical change and an evolution…

This document is the result of the Australian Minister for Education and Training's request to the Higher Education Standards Panel for advisement of options to improve the transparency of higher education student admission policies, while minimizing regulatory impact. The Minister intends to improve the accessibility and comparability of…

It is not a surprise that presidents of American colleges formed an association. What is cause for wonder is why it took them so long. By 1869, there were 563 colleges in this nation. Yet not until 1914 did a handful of presidents feel the need to band together and found the Association of American Colleges (AAC). The Association of American…

The academic profession in Russia, represented by the personnel of scientific institutes and by university instructors, is going through difficult times. On the one hand, there are ongoing serious debates and discussion concerning the future of the Russian Academy of Sciences and directions in its reform; on the other hand, education reform and…

In today's world, managing a campus crisis poses special challenges for an institution's governing board, which may operate some distance removed from the immediate events giving rise to the crisis. In its most challenging form, a campus crisis--a shooting, a natural disaster, a fraternity hazing death, the arrest of a prominent campus…

This report argues that requiring faculty members to sign confidentiality agreements as a requirement to serve on university committees is in most cases inconsistent with widely accepted standards of shared governance and with the concept of serving as a representative. This argument does not apply to faculty serving on promotion and tenure…

All higher education institutions are struggling with a rapidly changing market and financial landscape. Here is a management-centered analysis of what happened when a college president, recognizing the need to make a radical adaptation to those changes, tried moving a campus community to a new organizational model, without collegial consensus,…

This paper explores one practitioner's learning development work with PhD students in a changing university context in which managerialism and financial stringency have combined. It questions how learning development practitioners can maintain their professional goals while negotiating issues arising from managerialism, financial stringency,…

This article begins by raising issues around the way in which ethical approval for research is managed in university settings, where committees often base their assumptions on a principlist approach making a number of assumptions that we consider to be contestable, such as a neat separation between researcher and researched. However, collaborative…

Scarcely a week goes by without a headline about the unsustainability of higher education as we know it, under threat from new models, for-profits, or online education. Most threatened are small liberal arts colleges--with commentators predicting the demise of colleges with fewer than 1,000, or even 1,500 students. Are these trends inevitable, or…