Review of Disrupt with Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World
Roger Spitz’s Disrupt with Impact provides a systematic exploration of disruption and offers practical advice on enhancing foresight and decision-making so that people and organizations can navigate a rapidly changing and uncertain world. Although helpful for everyone, the book is especially relevant for preparing leaders to engage with the future as response-able, agile architects (this […]
Review of: How Colleges Change: Understanding, Leading, and Enacting Change
Internal and external forces continue to push for change in higher education. Political leaders, the public, and foundations advocate for lower tuition and higher quality; boards of trustees and accreditors also serve as catalysts for change. Additionally, administrators, faculty, and staff seek better ways to promote student learning and more effectively accomplish their institution’s missions. […]
Review of: The Undergraduate Experience: Focusing Institutions on What Matters Most
The Undergraduate Experience: Focusing Institutions on What Matters Most identifies successful practices in undergraduate education worthy of adoption by others. The foreword, written by Freeman A. Hrabowski III, President of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, highlights two overarching ideas that serve as the foundation for the book’s six themes. The first is that successful institutions […]
Review of: Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success
It is not unusual to hear a member of the faculty and staff claim that many of their students are not ready for college. High schools, socio-economic conditions, parents, and students themselves are blamed for this problem, even as there is debate as to what college readiness means or whether career readiness should be prioritized […]
Review of: Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education
The idea that higher education reflects and is a significant contributor to a country’s well-being is a key assumption of Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education. The book’s authors, Michael G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson, argue that American higher education ‘needs to do much better than it is doing at […]
Review of: Realizing the Distinctive University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture
AT A TIME WHEN COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES are competing for declining numbers of high school graduates, receiving reduced state support, being criticized for high tuition, and facing a public that questions the value of higher education, Mark William Roche presents his thoughts on how institutions can thrive in this environment. He argues, “For a university […]
Review of: Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessments for the 21st Century
Arum, R., Roksa, J., and Cook, A. Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessments for the 21st Century. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 2016. Improving Quality in American Higher Education: Learning Outcomes and Assessments for the 21st Century documents the work of the Measuring College Learning (MCL) Project, an initiative coordinated by the […]
Review of: The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World
Students are often discouraged from studying liberal-arts disciplines by people who think it will be difficult for them to find jobs in a world dominated by technology. Scott Hartley, a venture capitalist and former researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, bucks that trend in The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts […]
Review of: Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Aoun, Joseph E. Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data will radically change the nature of work. Predictions on the impact of these advances range from the elimination of many types of jobs to the automation of a significant number of […]
Review of: College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World
Gallagher, Chris W. College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. High tuition and resulting the resulting loan debt, along with low completion rates and concerns about how much students are actually learning in college, have led critics to call for the unbundling of higher education. Unbundling higher […]
Review of: Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education
Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education. Bryan Alexander. Johns Hopkins University Press (January 14, 2020). Baltimore. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought institutional preparedness to the forefront as many campuses are discovering that they could have been better prepared to do such things as shift to remote teaching, transition employees to telework, provide support for […]
Review of: The Next Rules of Work: The Mindset, Skillset, and Toolset to Lead Your Organization through Uncertainty
Gary Bolles, Chair for the Future of Work at Singularity University and a partner in the strategy consulting firm Charette LLC, suggests that “humans have worried about the future of work since the dawn of machines” (1). This worry has only intensified over the past two years as the pandemic has accelerated changes to how […]