Administrators Rendered Powerless

As administrators within this system, we too find ourselves rendered powerless either by those above us in the organizational structure or by our own policies and procedures. How many times has a department head delivered unpopular information to his or her department with the only explanation being “I have no power to change this” or “This is out of my control”? How many times has a dean been presented with an innovative idea by a faculty member only to respond, “That’s a great idea but our system can’t accommodate it”? How many times do academic administrators find themselves modifying or accepting less than optimal conditions for learning because of policies or decisions made by other divisions within the institution, whether it’s the custodial crew determining classroom arrangements or the computer software system driving curriculum configurations? From our experiences at varying levels of administration in multiple institutions, we would answer, “too often.” In part, this sense of powerlessness has arisen from a rise in professionalization of nonacademic functions within the university. The American Association of University Professors (2008) describes this movement:

For most of the history of U.S. higher education, faculty members performed the key administrative functions. The college president, dean of faculty, dean of students, and director of admissions were professors who simultaneously wore faculty and administrative hats. The bird’s-eye view of the institution’s different functions that faculty administrators had gave them an advantage in understanding the pedagogical consequences of administrative decisions, and their institutions benefited from the broad base of knowledge. In the post–World War II years, however, college and university enrollments grew dramatically, and specialization increasingly characterized professional administrative staff positions. This movement away from generalists and toward specialists has accelerated during the past twenty years, creating a disconnect between administrations and academic progress. As a result administrators sometimes do not appreciate the effects their decisions will have across other parts of the institution.

Working Habits in the Instructional Paradigm

Senge’s (1990) characterization of controlling organizations mirrors the values of the instructional paradigm. In his preface to the revised edition of The Fifth Discipline, Senge quotes Edward Deming: “Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn and joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and go on up through the university. . . . We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system” (xii–xiii).

Among the elements of traditional or controlling organizations that Senge (1990) identified were managing by fear, which results in focusing first on pleasing the boss (or teacher); dualistic thinking regarding right versus wrong answers, which results in overemphasis on technical problem solving; predictability and controllability evidenced in the belief that managing is controlling; and a recognition that excessive competitiveness leads to distrust—all of which leads to organizational fragmentation. Senge (1990) sees that leadership in traditional, controlling organizations is predicated upon a belief in people’s powerlessness, their need to be directed and led. This characterization of the traditional, controlling organization all too accurately describes the workplace governed by the instructional paradigm, the system that Deming claimed has destroyed our people.

A Paradigm of Isolation

The industrial model of the instructional paradigm is driven by competition, and this emphasis on competition fosters isolation. Students compete against one another within classes for grades. The competition among students for seats in certain high-profile programs exacerbates an overemphasis on grades and test scores at the expense of learning, encouraging students to take safe and easy choices in order to achieve the highest GPA. The same competition is fostered among faculty, who are judged in isolation for tenure, promotion, and merit by systems that, more often than not, privilege solo scholarship over collaborative works. And if faculty do collaborate, the hierarchy of lead author undercuts the concept of true collaboration. There may be no one more isolated than The industrial model of the instructional paradigm is driven by competition, and this emphasis on competition fosters isolation.

Students compete against one another within classes for grades. The competition among students for seats in certain high-profile programs exacerbates an overemphasis on grades and test scores at the expense of learning, encouraging students to take safe and easy choices in order to achieve the highest GPA. The same competition is fostered among faculty, who are judged in isolation for tenure, promotion, and merit by systems that, more often than not, privilege solo scholarship over collaborative works. And if faculty do collaborate, the hierarchy of lead author undercuts the concept of true collaboration. There may be no one more isolated than In the instructional paradigm, when a faculty member makes the transition to an administrative position, he or she, as well as others, often perceive the transition as moving to a different world and worldview. Faculty members often joke with their peers who move into administrative posts, saying things like “You’ve gone to the dark side,” in spite of the reality that most academic administrators retain their faculty status or hold tenure in an academic department. Stephen Brookfield (2006) examines what he labels “cultural suicide” in relation to adult learners who find themselves questioning their learning process because their family, peers, and social group act as if they have betrayed them by their choice to be a student, by making the choice to change. Although Brookfield’s discussion is related to students from minority groups or working class backgrounds, there is a strong parallel here to the faculty member who moves into administration. The person who makes this choice is sometimes seen as betraying the values and culture of his or her professional community. Brookfield describes students in this situation as feeling that their identities have been challenged, that they have become alienated from their families and social group.

The perceived divide between faculty and administration is at the very core of the problems we witness with the instructional paradigm. In the instructional paradigm, the faculty member who leaves the faculty position to become an administrator abandons the role of faculty and presumably adopts a new a set of values and ideals that are perceived to be in conflict with those previously held as a faculty member.

The overemphasis on competition and control in the instructional paradigm betrays a lack of respect for, as well as a fundamental distrust of, the individual. A colleague once described his institution as a place that valued jobs but not the people in them. Individuals at this institution typically became more embittered as the years passed because of the processes and decision making that perpetuated a climate of disrespect for all employees, faculty and staff alike. In places like this, rules and policies predominate; fear of legal reprisal governs decision making. At this institution legal counsel was so powerful that the university counsel sat next to the president on the stage at commencement. The prevailing attitude in the instructional paradigm is that students, faculty, and staff need to be controlled by rules, processes, and practices, which is demoralizing and limits creativity and innovation.

Ownership of Knowledge

This instructional paradigm views knowledge as a quantifiable commodity that can be isolated, identified, and controlled. In the traditional division of units, departments, and colleges according to academic discipline, the knowledge is owned by the discipline. Tagg (2003) writes that faculty as the core of educational institutions have been replaced by departments and that their influence on student learning is exercised through academic departments: “At most colleges, academic departments hire faculty members, and academic departments in the Instructional Paradigm college derive their power from their role as depositories for classes. Administrations, to the extent they are involved in undergraduate education, are largely structures for organizing and channelling the activities of departments” .

This ownership of knowledge dictates various processes within the university, among them hiring, promotion and merit, and curriculum development. The very concept of shared governance has at its roots ownership of discipline knowledge.

The core belief of shared governance is that faculty, because of their academic expertise and their long-term commitment to individual institutions (as opposed to academic administrators and governing board members whose terms at institutions are often relatively short in comparison to that of faculty), should govern the academic functions of their institutions, including the regulation of academic standards and curriculum and the hiring of faculty and staff. The purpose of shared governance is to maintain academic integrity by preventing political or commercial interests from influencing institutional decision making. One of the safeguards against outside pressure is the individual academic’s responsibility to maintain standards set by his or her discipline-specific professional organizations. The adherence to academic standards established by discipline, rather than by individual institution, was intended to provide balance and integrity of standards across institutions. While we would never argue against the importance of shared governance, shared governance within the instructional paradigm has contributed to a mindset that has fostered unnecessary divisiveness and fragmentation. As Vartan Gregorian writes, “Schools should not be treating each other as isolated silos, because the strength of the university is in its totality” (quoted in Hersh & Merrow, 2005, p. 94).

We can see the effect of this belief that knowledge is both owned and distributable in the curriculum review process; in some instances, professors are asked to delineate how many minutes per semester will be devoted to individual topics within the course out line, or accrediting bodies ask for the number of hours per semester devoted to specific knowledge. Tagg (2003) referred to this as educational atomism: “In the ‘educational atomism’ of the Instruction Paradigm, the parts of the teaching and learning process are seen as discrete entities. The parts exist prior to and independent of any whole; the whole is no more than the sum of the parts, or even less. The college interacts with students only in discrete, isolated environments, cut off from one another because the parts—the classes—are prior to the whole. A ‘college education’ is the sum of the student’s experience of a series of discrete, largely unrelated, three-credit classes”.

This view of knowledge and education cannot keep pace with the incredible rate of change in the twenty-first-century workforce. Many fields now cannot accelerate the transfer of information to students fast enough to keep up with the rate of change in the knowledge of the discipline. It is estimated, for example, that by the time engineering graduates walk across the stage with their diplomas, nearly half of the knowledge of their discipline is obsolete. When the focus is on knowledge rather than on learning, obsolescence is inevitable.

A Paradigm of Control

The instructional paradigm is a paradigm of control. It is not supportive of leadership and innovation. In it, everyone is controlled by someone. Students are controlled by professors who hold the power of the grade. Learning is an assimilative process whereby the professor, the owner of knowledge, dispenses it to the students. The professor holds power and control over the students, who must meet the expectations of the professor whether or not those expectations were clearly delineated or articulated. Students are discouraged from collaborating in this competitive environment. They are judged on their individual abilities in competition with the others in the class. The teacher is not a facilitator or mentor but, rather, a judge and, often, a gatekeeper.

Junior faculty find themselves in a similar situation as they begin becoming acculturated into the system. The Harvard Study of New Scholars (Trower & Bleak, 2002), a study of the dissatisfaction that junior faculty experience, reported that junior faculty are increasingly discontented in this authoritarian environment in which there is one way of knowing, one way of conducting research, one way to assimilate into a department or unit, one way to demonstrate success, and one way to achieve tenure and rank.

It’s interesting to think about what it means to administer in the traditional paradigm. The synonyms of the word administer in the thesaurus provide an interesting view of our perceived function: manage, direct, run, order, control, oversee, and our favorite, do paperwork. This list of synonyms illustrates the definition of the perceived role of the administrator in our current paradigm.

The Instructional Paradigm

The values, attitudes, and biases inherent in the instructional paradigm are predicated upon an industrial model of human learning. This factory model of education values quality control, which is ironic since higher education is currently under such intense scrutiny to be accountable for the quality of graduates. Concern over the business/factory influence on higher education is certainly not new. John Jay Chapman wrote in 1909, “The men who stand for education and scholarship have ideals of business men. . . . They are, in truth, business men. The men who control [universities] today are very little else than businessmen running a large department store which dispenses education to the millions” (quoted in Lucas, 1994, p. 192). Most of the critics of the growing bureaucracy in higher education admitted that it could not be eliminated, but still decried its current form which had a tendency to “dehumanize collegiate life” (Lucas, 1994 p. 193). A more recent criticism in a report issued by the American Association of University Professors (2008) placed the factory analogy in contemporary perspective as U.S. colleges and universities “are embracing the operating strategies of for-profit corporations with growing fervor. . . . [C]olleges and universities increasingly conceptualize higher education as a commodity and attempt to provide it at the lowest cost. They do so by reorganizing themselves as ‘knowledge factories’ in which a variety of internal functions (for example, dining services and facilities maintenance) are outsourced to for-profit contractors who pay their workers minimum wages and in which the central teaching and research functions are outsourced to legions of poorly paid nontenure-track adjunct faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students” . Similarly, Dolence and Norris (1995) described the transition from the industrial age to the information age, noting that the factory model that characterized education in the industrial age was insufficiently flexible and focused on outputs and processes rather than on learning.

In this factory model, students’ potential is determined by ACT, SAT, HSGPA, and sometimes other quantifiable measures. Depending upon our institutional standards, students are deemed to be the acceptable quality of raw material for our product. Quality control is especially evident in the freshman year, during which the weaker material is sorted out. The Wingspread Group on Higher Education (1993) charged that “Our education system is better organized to discourage students—to weed them out—than it is to cultivate and support our most important national resource, our people”. Students are directed to take a prescribed collection of courses in a prescribed sequence in order to assure quality control over the exiting product, our graduates. This model devalues the individual. In the mass production mentality that this model represents, students assimilate information at equivalent rates with equivalent responses, thus creating like products. This assembly line of education presupposes a sameness to individuals, so that regardless of prior learning, individual differences, or extracurricular experiences, each student following a like path will emerge from the assembly line like all the others.

Rewards of Administrative Work

What are the rewards of administrative work? We asked a number of our colleagues that question, and it was a surprisingly difficult one for them to answer—their initial response was usually either sarcasm or a contemptuous snort. Some who had been involved with building renovation or procurement of necessary equipment commented on the satisfaction they felt because they had created something tangible, a physical manifestation of the work accomplished, something that people could see. So much of our work is unseen and somewhat abstract that one can lose sight of its consequences. Although a revised transfer policy affects students and the institution in many significant ways, the written document does not reflect the tremendous amount of time, energy, and negotiation it took to create it, at least not in the way that a multimilliondollar library or a newly renovated student center does (Cullen, 2007).

In pondering this question ourselves, we agreed that for us, the greatest rewards have come from the individual students, faculty, and administrative colleagues whom we were able to support or promote in some way, such as reengaging someone in the department, publicly acknowledging someone’s work or success, or assisting new members in their transition to our academic community. Regardless of the role we play within our academic community, the difference that we can make in the lives of those around us, maximizing their potential for success, will always be, for us, the most rewarding part of our work. Of the many accomplishments that we could list, our most rewarding have all dealt with situations that supported community building, collaboration, and collegiality. These examples stand out to us because the creation of community and collegiality seems to be such a difficult task to accomplish in our current system.

Lucas (1994) notes a recurring theme regarding loss of community in late twentieth-century commentaries on higher education. He points to George Douglas’s analysis as the most insightful of many during this period. Douglas commented that universities were failing to provide the type of human setting in which education worthy of the term could thrive. They were too big, too full of activity to be places of authentic learning. Instead he claimed they had become factories for producing specialized expertise or for imparting information. The prevailing opinion in the 1990s was that the sheer size of modern universities militated against the creation of community (Lucas, 1994, p. 288).

We would argue that the frustration of working in higher education, in a system that seems to preclude change, is not solely the result of the size of institutions, but rather that it is caused by the paradigm that governs all institutions, large and small. The instructional paradigm we work in is not conducive to community nor to individuality or creativity. In fact, it is at odds with most of the values espoused by today’s colleges and universities. It is a paradigm that has fostered alienation and an unhealthy divisiveness between and among faculty and administration as well as between academics and nonacademics within institutions. Our paradigm must change if higher education is to change.

Challenges of Academic Leadership

How many of us have had someone, usually a faculty colleague, say to us, “I couldn’t stand doing administrative work” or “I wouldn’t want your job”? Job descriptions for administrative posts include impressive-sounding requirements like “outstanding scholar/teacher with administrative experience” and “creative visionary with proven record of academic leadership,” and position descriptions talk about “leading and providing vision, leadership and oversight of the maintenance and development of quality academic programs,” and promise such things as working with “a visionary president, a highly productive and engaged faculty, and an exceptionally strong senior leadership team.” Yet somehow the day-to-day work seems much more humble as we spend our days and too many of our evenings and weekends running from meeting to meeting and event to event, mediating disputes that run the gamut from banal to absurd, and dividing our energy among the competing demands of students, faculty, public entities, and our immediate supervisor. The reality of the day-to-day tasks is often at odds with the ideal.

Many administrators were recruited into administration from faculty positions because of a need to help out in a time of crisis, filling a position that suddenly became vacant. That was the scenario that drew the two of us into the administrative life. Neither of us ever intended to become academic administrators; in fact, when the opportunity arose, we faced it with a healthy dose of skepticism. In spite of our reluctance to leave the classroom and our scholarly endeavors, we accepted the challenge because we were team players who wanted to help our departments in a time of need, and we also believed that we could make a difference, we could make things better through administrative channels, and in our years at this type of work, we have made things better in many ways. However, we continue to ask whether the struggle to do so has to be so great. What is it about higher education administration that makes us feel like Sisyphus, always rolling a boulder uphill? Why is it that we so often feel that our gains are minimal in relation to the effort we expend?

The leadership challenges in higher education administration differ from those of administration in the business/for-profit sector. One unique challenge of academic leadership involves the dynamic of leading peers. As we noted, a great many academic administrators began their careers as faculty and continue to hold rank and tenure
in their academic departments. As academic leaders we work with our peers; they are highly intelligent individuals who have been trained to be skeptical and critical, who do not accept new ideas without challenge, and who do not necessarily hold academic leadership in high regard. One does not “boss” a tenured professor. The penchant of academics to thoughtfully consider and examine in detail every proposed change and the necessity of prolonged discussion and debate about issues make rapid response to environmental pressures nearly impossible for institutions of higher education. Yet, flexibility and rapid response to environmental factors is a requisite for survival in the twenty-first century.

A further difficulty we have in higher education is defining and measuring our outcomes, our product. A computer company or a restaurant has clearly defined goals and can usually pinpoint with fine accuracy where and how to address loss in sales or glitches in production. Higher education is being called on to perform similar feats, but creating a graduate for the twenty-first-century workforce is a very different kind of operation, one that has suffered from attempts to compare it with a factory or business enterprise.

These challenges in addition to mounting pressures for higher education to change have led to growing cynicism and frustration for all of us in higher education. Many academic administrators feel increasingly dissatisfied working within a system that at times appears to preclude change, making their effort seem unrewarding.

Concluding Thoughts

In describing this time of transformation, Dee Hock, former CEO of Visa Corporation, said: “We are at the very point in time when a four-hundred-year-old is dying and another is struggling to be born, a shift in culture, science, society and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced” (quoted in Waldrop, 1996, p. 75). His words are reminiscent of the famous lines by English poet Matthew Arnold describing the birth of the modern era: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born.” Both use the birth and death metaphor, a metaphor that is not only appropriate but helps to explain the emotional intensity of our situation.

The birth-and-death metaphor resonates because our institutions are organic artifacts. They live and grow and evolve as a result of the human interactions that take place within them. We use human metaphors to talk about institutions when we consider elements like growth or health of the institution. For this reason we cannot discount the human element in this enterprise, for education and leadership are all about people and relationships. As we examine the commonalities between good teaching and good leading, we will see that the core competencies for both involve human relationships, understanding people, caring about people, and developing the capacity to motivate and inspire them.

One element of the human condition is the fear of death. Even when we know that death is appropriate, a necessary condition, it’s hard to let go. We become comfortable and feel safe with what we know, with what is familiar to us, and giving that up is challenging because of the uncertainty involved. To use a mundane example, think of the uncertainty we feel when the IT people take away our computer and give us an upgrade or our institution changes e-mail software. How many of us have said, “Can’t I keep my old one? It works just fine.” The irony is that what we are resisting isn’t so much the idea of change as the need to learn something new. In order for us to thrive in the new paradigm, we must embrace change but even more important, we must embrace learning. The new paradigm is all about learning, about everyone increasing knowledge, skills, and abilities. The organization as a whole and all the members of the organizational community are learners in a perpetual state of transformation.

The anticipation and excitement of birth is also a key element of the human condition. The use of the birth metaphor for ushering in this new paradigm is apt not only because of the idea of bringing forth something new that is not completely developed, something that holds promise but is still in the progress of development, but also because one of the prevailing metaphors used in describing the role of teachers and leaders in the new paradigm is the midwife, one who attends, coaches, supports. The birth metaphor is also appropriate because birth is a transformative experience for new parents, and new parents reevaluate their priorities, become more intentional about their choices, and examine their fundamental beliefs. The birth metaphor lends a sense of continuation and evolution from the old to the new. Leaders will be challenged to allay the fears of those who will cling to the old paradigm, though it must die if we are to move forward. At the same time leaders will be challenged to inspire, to foster hope, anticipation, and excitement over the prospect of the birth of the new paradigm.

A Perfect Storm

These variables affecting higher education are not new. Fifty years ago, Clark Kerr, then president of the University of California system, coined the term multiversity to describe the transformation of the university to become increasingly responsive to market demands. In referring to the challenges facing academic leaders as a result of the explosion of knowledge and rising market demands of business, government, the military, and other groups, Lucas (1994) writes, “Too harassed to lead, university administrators had become mediators among competing interests, trying to balance contradictory demands, treating students like consumers, knowledge as a factory product and course offerings as supermarket wares”. The intensity of these challenges has not abated in the past fifty years, but intensified.

Each of the converging challenges seems like overwhelming in its own right, but like a perfect storm, the confluence of these five challenges generates a condition or circumstance that is far more powerful. Together these five challenges have created a perfect storm, a perfect opportunity to innovate on various fronts; they have created a sense of crisis that makes innovation more likely to be accepted by those who might otherwise resist change. Academic leaders can seize the opportunity to meet these challenges and, rather than react to them, take a proactive position and use the challenges to transform higher education.

The challenges facing higher education are serious, and they will test academic leaders to be innovative and creative in moving their institutions away from the status quo. This will be achieved not through incremental change but through systemic change. Many institutions are currently implementing isolated innovations to address some of the changes discussed in this chapter. These actions, although successful on a small scale, are not addressing systemic issues. The Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the largest of the regional accrediting agencies, both in number and type of institution, provides a good gauge of the efficacy of these individual efforts. Steven D. Crow, the departing president of the HLC, noted at the 2008 annual meeting that while institutions have been working diligently to figure out what their students should be learning and whether they are, in fact, learning, it is not clear whether all the individual efforts are adding up to much (Lederman, 2008,p. 1). Institutions are employing a wide variety of approaches, many of which are very small in scope, as they address individual challenges. Instead, leaders need to see the confluence of the challenges. Academic leaders need to assess the current situation from a comprehensive view and assume the risks required to chart a course through this perfect storm.

Transforming higher education will require innovation and a spirit of entrepreneurship. As the political, social, economic, and technological environment continues to change rapidly, more attention must be given to the role of innovation and entrepreneurship in addressing those changes. Leaders who accept this challenge will be the learning entrepreneurs, the leaders who will lead dynamic change. Drawing on an agenda put forth by Mintrom (1997) in defining policy entrepreneurs, we define learning entrepreneurs as those individuals who identify problems, shape policy, and move their institutions away from the status quo.

Recognizing that there is no single remedy or solution to the complex challenges facing institutions of higher education and that each institution has unique characteristics and features, the framework that we provide is just that, a framework, a scaffolding that will support independent investigation, an agenda to guide leaders as they take actions to innovate and redefine higher education. The comprehensive framework that we propose is predicated on the belief that in order to transform higher education, we must analyze the paradigm that we operate within. We will then call for a shift to a new paradigm, the shift toward learning-centeredness that was introduced by Barr and Tagg in 1995.

Process Needs

The fifth area of potential opportunity identified by Drucker is process needs. In light of the growing concerns that our graduates are emerging from our institutions without appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities, we must begin to question our traditional process of educating students. Our current model of undergraduate education has been based on an epistemology, methodology, and instructional paradigm focused on the transference of information and assimilation of knowledge. As technology transformation has accelerated and problems have become more complex, we have responded by adding courses that attempt to accelerate information transfer. However, it is becoming apparent that covering more or different content is not the solution.

We must begin to question the belief that knowledge in and of itself is valuable. In answering this question, more and more institutions are shifting their focus from knowledge to learning, from information transfer to helping students develop lifelong learning capacity in order to make the educational experience a transformative one. Adding more courses, transferring more information, does not transform students. Students will be transformed by increasing the depth of their learning and their self-awareness of how they learn. Our process of educating students must address this fundamental need if we are to develop lifelong learners with the capacity to readily adapt to a changing world.

While we are closer to reaching consensus on what the new graduate must know in order to succeed in the changing world and the twenty-first-century workforce, we have yet to agree on how those outcomes are best achieved. As Guskin and Marcy (2002) write, “Higher education now faces a critical choice about this process [by which knowledge is delivered]. Present forces in higher education will either lead to significant reform in the undergraduate educational environment or to a significant diminution in the quality of faculty work life because of sharp increases in faculty teaching loads and related work”. Answering this question of process is an opportunity for innovation.

Industry and Market Changes

The fourth area of potential opportunity identified by Drucker is industry and market changes. If it were not enough for institutions to respond to the changing audience, the subjects that are taught are also rapidly changing. The lines between disciplines are becoming increasingly blurred, and the rate of increase of knowledge, especially in the areas of science and technology, is in a perpetual state of acceleration. Added to that are global influences in all areas.

Business and industry have been vocal about the quality of graduates entering the workforce. A 2006 publication titled Educating Engineers for the 21st Century: The Industry View called for engineers to have a sound knowledge of the engineering fundamentals within their discipline as well as social and interpersonal skill sets including communication, team-working, and business skills (Spinks, Silburn, & Birchill, p. 3). Charles Vest (2007), president emeritus of MIT, called for engineering graduates to “write and communicate well, think about ethics and social responsibility, conceive and operate systems of great complexity within a framework of sustainable development and be prepared to live and work as global citizens”.

The National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP; Crutcher, O’Brien, Corigan, & Schneider, 2007), an initiative sponsored by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, identified analogous aims and outcomes for all students, regardless of discipline, outcomes necessary for survival in a twenty-first-century workforce. In preparing graduates for the twenty-first-century workforce, we need to take into consideration the features of that workforce. Kalantizis and Cope (2002) make the observation that “a division of labour into its minutest deskilled components is replaced by ‘multi-skilled’ allround workers who are flexible enough to be able to do complex and integrated work”. New workers will be what they call “portfolio workers,” whose strength is not in career stability and content knowledge but in range and versatility. The learning culture that will foster a transformation to the needs of the twenty-firstcentury workforce is one in which learning is a matter of repertoire, flexibility, and multiple talents.

Demographic Changes

The third area of potential opportunity identified by Drucker is demographic changes. Significant social, economic, and technological changes are challenging universities to reconsider their business. The profile of the undergraduate has changed dramatically. Prior to World War II, universities educated a fairly homogeneous population: 60 percent male, 97 percent Caucasian, middle and upper class backgrounds, upper third or upper quarter ranking in high school (Lucas, 1994, p. xiv). The shift in this demographic began with the GI Bill of 1944. Lucas writes, “The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944—popularly dubbed the GI Bill of Rights—more than any other single initiative, brought massive changes to higher education in the postwar era”. This influx of nontraditional students, approximately 60,000 men and women, “altered the meaning of a college education”.

These demographic changes continued throughout the succeeding decades. Beginning in the 1960s, women and minorities began attending college in greater numbers, and by the 1970s women outnumbered men (Lucas, 1994, p. xvi). Huber and Hutchings (2005) reported that the profile of the eighteen-year-old entering college supported by parents and working only part time has become the exception rather than the norm. Close to half of the undergraduates in the United States are more than twenty-four years old, and more than one quarter are working adults over thirty. The part-time student is quickly becoming the norm. Additionally, undergraduates who are married and/or have children have become routine. Nearly 60 percent are pursuing occupational degrees or professional studies (Lucas, 1994, p. xvi).

The nature of the traditional-aged student has also changed. Often called the millennials, these highly social students, technologically savvy and intolerant of delays, create new demands on the system from housing to admission to marketing to pedagogy. Their highly social nature leads them to prefer teamwork and group activity and to keep constant contact with their social network. And with the growing calls for accessibility, more and more students are the first of their family to attend college. No longer is a homogeneous student population the norm or the goal. This changing population of students adds another new demand on institutions while offering an opportunity to support innovation.

In addition to the changing demographics of students is a shift in demographics of faculty and staff. Between 1976 and 2005 full-time nonfaculty professional staff grew at a rate of 281 percent. At the same time the rate of administrative staff doubled (American Association of University Professors, 2008). The growth rate of full- and part-time nontenure-track faculty was 200 percent. The American Association of University Professors (2008) reports that “the more than 200 percent increase in the number of contingent faculty on the payrolls represents a deprofessionalization of the faculty role in higher education” (p. 14). Similarly, Schuster and Finkelstein (2006) write about the restructuring of the American faculty, noting that no one is content with the way campuses are governed, and the tension between managerial culture and faculty-shared governance is becoming greater, contributing to a reshaping and redistribution of academic work.

Gappa, Austin, and Trice (2007) examined what they describe as the changing context for faculty work and noted that the rise of temporary, short-term, and part-time faculty constitutes one of the “most significant responses by universities and colleges to the challenges posed by fiscal constraints and by the need to stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment”. They conclude that the institutional goal of gaining flexibility and cost efficiency through the shifts in faculty appointment types has created an inequitable two-tiered system that undermines the sense of commitment that faculty bring to their work. These nontenure-track faculty members have little or no role in shared governance and more often than not are dividing their energy teaching at multiple institutions. In sum, the dramatic increase in administrative staff and nontenured faculty represents a major shift in university personnel that directly affects the core service of the university, academics.

Changes in Perception

The second area of potential opportunity identified by Drucker is changes in perception. The public perception of higher education is changing, thus creating a climate conducive to change. Once heralded as the finest educational system in the world, higher education in the United States is now perceived to be falling behind other countries and not producing qualified graduates. John Doerr, considered one of the top technology venture capitalists in the world, called education “the largest and most screwed-up part of the American economy” (quoted in Carlson & Wilmot, 2006, p. 267). Similarly, Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now [1997] the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. . . . Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis” (quoted in Carlson & Wilmot, 2006, p. 267). These and other leaders in business and industry have chimed in on the emerging public outcry for accountability in higher education. Education professors Terenzini and Pascarella (1994) called into question some of the basic tenets of American higher education. They found that educational quality did not correlate with an institution’s reputation or standing. Similarly, they questioned the assumption that good researchers are good teachers, calling into question education techniques, in particular the lecture method.

In an open letter entitled An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education, the Wingspread Group (1993) charged that “some faculties and institutions certify for graduation too many students who cannot read and write very well, too many whose intellectual depth and breadth are unimpressive, and too many whose skills are inadequate in the face of the demands of contemporary life”. They conclude that “A disturbing and dangerous mismatch exists between what American society needs of higher education and what it is receiving. Nowhere is the mismatch more dangerous than in the quality of undergraduate preparation provided by many campuses”.

In support of this claim, a National Adult Literacy Survey conducted in 1993 found that large numbers of graduates were unable to use basic skills including reading, writing, computation, and elementary problem solving (Lucas, 1994, xiii). A decade later Brown University conducted the Futures Project, a four-year examination of the major forces affecting the future of higher education. The Futures Project investigated the impact of competition and market values on higher education, targeting three specific areas: autonomy and accountability, responsibility for student learning, and access and attainment. In the report on the project, The Future of Higher Education (Newman, Couturier, & Scurry, 2004), the authors called for institutional responsibility with regard to student learning, claiming that at most institutions “there is an unspoken, comfortable conspiracy between faculty and students not to bother each other too much; mediocrity reigns”.

A similar claim was made in Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (Hersh & Merrow, 2005), a collection of essays accompanying a PBS documentary, which exposed a lack of accountability for student learning and an unhealthy focus on research and athletics as well as other prestige factors that had little to do with educating students. Even more candid was Lewis’s (2006) indictment of undergraduate education, in which he claimed that universities have forgotten their purpose, namely, creating educated adults who will take responsibility for society. In the same vein, Bok’s (2005) critique of higher education’s shortcomings focused both on the failure of universities to prepare citizens and the need to improve teacher quality because not enough attention is paid to pedagogy.

This is not the first time, of course, that higher education has been deemed as disaster. Lucas (1994) identified three common themes among commentators from 1965 through the 1990s: (1) professionalization of scholarship in higher education was a factor contributing to fragmentation; (2) the tendency to view knowledge as a commodity contributed to the confusion of what constituted a relevant liberal education; and (3) the structure of the university itself was a root cause of the decline. “Such allegations had been heard before, of course,” said Lucas. “But they were given new clarity and force in analyses of the apparent decline of liberal educational values” (p. 268). The many critiques of the state of higher education have clarified the issues creating external pressure for changes in higher education.

New Knowledge

The first area of potential opportunity identified by Drucker (2002) is new knowledge. New knowledge is influencing higher education on three fronts. First, discoveries and innovations are accelerating at a tremendous rate, changing discipline content and the prerequisites to adequately prepare graduates for the workplace. Especially in the sciences and technology, new knowledge is growing at an exponential rate that nearly precludes adequate preparation of graduates in our current system.

On the second front, new knowledge about how people learn is affecting our ways of teaching and preparing graduates. Many practices that have long been part of good teaching as a result of common sense and an intuitive understanding of human behavior are now part of an emerging body of research into brain functioning and learning, motivation and learning, and the role of memory as well as other affective concerns regarding power and control.

In addition, new knowledge in the form of technology is changing how we teach. Computer technology, specifically, is revolutionizing course management and delivery, and the Internet has tremendously increased the accessibility of information and changed the process of conducting research. All these forms of new knowledge are leading educators to question common pedagogical practices about what to teach as well as how to teach it. New knowledge in terms of what we teach and how we teach has provided the motivation for innovation and change.

Rethinking Our Current Challenges The Context for Change

In this chapter we will discuss the challenges in higher education that are currently creating a climate conducive to change. We will look at our opportunities for innovation through the lens that Peter Drucker (2002) offered in relation to conditions that make change possible. Drucker outlined seven areas of potential opportunity which can support innovation. Five of those are apparent in higher education today: new knowledge, changes in perception, demographic changes, industry and market changes, and process needs.

The Time for Innovation

Before we outline our strategy for undertaking this monumental task of shifting to a new paradigm, we need to make the case for making this shift at all. One of the many points that we debated as co-authors was whether it was absolutely necessary to recount the litany of stresses currently affecting higher education. Since everyone reads every day about the technological, societal, market, and political pressures on higher education, we questioned whether more discussion of these pressures would be informative, repetitive, or simply depressing for the reader.

After much thought, discussion, and coffee, we realized that we were thinking about this question from a habitual way of seeing the issues, in part because we too have read so often about these issues as problems. Instead of viewing these issues as negatives, the high winds and hard rains of the perfect storm intent upon sinking our ship, we reminded ourselves that storms are not solely forces of destruction but natural events that generate great power, that usher in a new weather system, that clear debris and refresh our environment. Our goal is to demonstrate how the forces that we read about and discuss on a daily basis are, in fact, power to be harnessed, opportunities for change. In Clark Kerr’s 1994 analysis of the history of higher education, a history that he says gets more glorious upon reflection while fear of the future gets more dreadful, he poses the question, Why are we always so happy looking backward and so unhappy looking forward? We will undertake the challenge of looking forward, if not with complete happiness, at least with cautious optimism.

If we analyze the evolution of higher education in the United States we will see strategic junctions and times of significant challenges. In each era, academic institutions responded and took action, and higher education, subsequently, was strengthened. The calls today to reevaluate higher education are consistent with that pattern. We are at a strategic junction in which many internal and external variables are leading to questions and concerns about the relevancy of higher education, its current status, and its path to the future.

As a result, many universities, organizations, accreditation bodies, governments, and researchers are engaged in efforts to innovate. Their goal is to find ways to assure that, despite the significant challenges higher education faces, it will continue to be relevant, a key contributor to advancing knowledge and educating people for productive and successful lives. This role of higher education is necessary for sustaining a prosperous civic society. The study of the current challenges will be benefited greatly by examining colleges and universities as open systems, dynamic organisms,shaped by and shaping the environment. It is the unique structure, mission, role, and value of each university, understood in the context of the changing environment, which will allow us to address the challenges, maximize the opportunities, and also develop an enhanced vision for higher education. While there are general features and challenges common to all institutions, each institution also has unique features and challenges; there is no one-size-fits-all challenge or solution. With that in mind, we will discuss general and significant threats all institutions face, large or small, public or private. It is a time of great opportunities for those who have an interest in shaping the future of higher education, for those who, like Ernest Shackleton, maintain optimism in the face of extreme challenge.

Research on innovation and entrepreneurship demonstrates that in times of crisis or economic hardship, the opportunities for innovation increase, for the sense of crisis creates motivation for change. For example, the skyrocketing cost of gasoline in 2008 created a sense of crisis for individuals and businesses, thus creating a climate conducive to innovation in the area of alternative fuels. The sense of crisis creates a willingness and an interest in these innovations on the part of consumers and innovators, who if gas were one dollar per gallon would most likely be disinterested.

Innovative change is greater than incremental change because it results in a new condition that is measurably different from the status quo. Innovation may be achieved through the introduction of new or different policies, regulations, or practices and procedures. Our definition of innovation includes changes and processes that expand and reconceive the scope of higher education.

Management expert Peter Drucker (2002) suggests that most innovations “result from a conscious, purposeful search for innovation opportunities, which are found only in a few situations” . He identifies seven sources of potential opportunity through which systematic analysis and knowledge can support innovation. Some are internal to organizations, for example, process needs and market changes. Others are external sources of opportunity, for example, demographic changes, new knowledge, and changes in perception. We will look at five of these innovation opportunities which offer the greatest potential for stimulating change in higher education. These forces are converging to create a climate conducive to innovation and subsequently to transformation. Drucker explains that at the heart of successful entrepreneurship is innovation: “the effort to create purposeful focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential” . This is achieved through “a commitment to the systematic practice of innovation” . The future of higher education depends upon innovative entrepreneurs to lead this purposeful and focused change.

Learner-Centered Leadership

While the focus on student learning has come to the forefront of institutional planning, there has been very little discussion of the magnitude of this proposed systemic change. Instead the focus has been on classroom pedagogy with most of the effort and literature on the learner-centered paradigm and the scholarship of teaching focused on strategies for faculty. And although incremental change has occurred, the larger, systemic change that defines a paradigm shift has not. The first four chapters that constitute Part I are about systemic change.

Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, noted how change occurs through critical reinterpretation: “Scholars develop powerful skeptical and critical capacities to reexamine old truths using the lenses of new conceptual frameworks” (Shulman, 2008, p. 7). A reinterpretation of old truths using a new lens is what we offer in Part I. While others have documented the market influences affecting higher education, the shortfalls of the current system, and the impact of demographic changes and offered solutions for various facets of this multifaceted challenge, we offer a systemic and sustainable solution by examining our core values in relation to the current paradigm and extend a framework for moving to a new paradigm. The focus in Part I is on the role of leadership in bringing about a transformation to a new paradigm.

Transformative experiences trigger new ways of perceiving and defining one’s world. Often these experiences are life changes, for example, becoming a parent. Such a transformational experience leads individuals to redefine their roles and their purpose. The birth of a child often leads new parents to reevaluate their priorities, to become intentional about their choices, to examine their fundamental beliefs. Simply put, “When people critically examine their habitual expectations, revise them, and act on the revised point of view, transformative learning occurs. Transformative learning leads to perspectives that are more inclusive, discriminating and integrative of experience” (Cranton, 2006, p. 19). The process that we outline in the first part of this book is based upon transformative change, specifically examining our habitual practices in light of the instructional paradigm and critically examining them through the lens of the learner-centered paradigm in order to gain a new perspective.