Tournaround Leadership for Higher Education, by Michael Fullan and Geoff Scott, starts tartly with a barb: “it has been observed that elementary school teachers love their children, high school teachers love their subjects, and university professors love themselves.” Powerful words. If only the authors had maintained that critical distance the book would warrant an in-depth review. Instead, the authors’…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
Organizational Culture and Higher Education
Edgar H. Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010), now its fourth edition, is one of the most important works in explaining organizational culture as well as defining the field. The title is today much more than a course in an MBA; it rates a wikipedia site and can be its own degree program at…
Innovation and Differentiation
Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s The Innovative University is an important book. Christensen is the Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Eyring is a long-time administrator at Brigham Young University-Idaho. Bringing them together are shared ties with Harvard and BYU-Idaho, two very different institutions who have charted different paths towards success. Despite a baffling…
Common Sense School Reform
Deborah Meier’s The Power of Their Ideas: lessons for America from a small school in Harlem focuses on the common sense innovations, policies and leadership decisions that made the Central Park East Elementary School and Secondary School (CPESS) a nationally-known success story. A founding co-principal and a driving force in the school’s development, Meier recounts…
Organizational Change in Higher Education – a summary review of the scholarship
Adrianna J. Kezar, an associate professor at University of Maryland and an ERIC higher education editor, summarized a raft of recent scholarship on organizational change in Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations. The title is a mouthful, and while accurate, an even more precise description would emphasize that…
Academia’s Dilemma
Important and interesting questions are often difficult for higher education to digest. Michael Pollan raises just such a vital question in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The book has reached into America’s public intellectual consciousness in a thoughtful and profound way. It is related, perhaps, to a similarly provocative…
Career Advice Can Appear in the Strangest Forms
Career development centers are hot spots on college campuses. Prospective students and their parents inspect them, faculty seek their perspective on student success and failure in the world of work, employers liaise with them to find talent, and alumni offices partner with them to keep graduates engaged. In a world that demands outcomes, higher education…