A presidential transition has a major impact on the life of an institution. Hundreds of presidential transitions take place annually, and when they are not amicable and carefully orchestrated, they can scar both the institution and the president. Sanaghan, Goldstein, and Gaval estimate that more than one-third of the presidential transitions in higher education are involuntary and have a negative effect on the institution. This book is designed to provide assistance to presidents, trustees...

How did the 1990s and early 21st century impact the evolution of the college presidency? The legitimacy and performance of higher education were called into question during this period, and respect for some of its leaders declined. An economic downturn and the concomitant change of student enrollment patterns have required presidents to lead in compromised conditions. The new emphasis on financial management and fund raising has opened the job of academic president to those with nontraditi...

In development circles, there is now widespread consensus that social entrepreneurs represent a far better mechanism to respond to needs than we have ever had before--a decentralized and emergent force that remains our best hope for solutions that can keep pace with our problems and create a more peaceful world. David Bornstein's previous book on social entrepreneurship, How to Change the World, was hailed by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times as "a bible in the field" and published in...

Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda. The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's univer...

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world.McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect

A sweeping assessment of the state of higher education today from former Harvard president Derek BokHigher Education in America is a landmark work--a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the current condition of our colleges and universities from former Harvard president Derek Bok, one of the nation's most respected education experts. Sweepingly ambitious in scope, this is a deeply informed and balanced assessment of the many strengths as well as th...

Veteran journalist Naomi Shaefer Riley contends that tenure—the jobs-for-life entitlement that comes with a university position—is at the heart of so many problems with higher education today. She explores how tenure—with the job security, mediocre salaries, and low levels of accountability it entails—may be attracting the least innovative and interesting members of our society into teaching.

Why are some civic associations better than others at getting--and keeping--people involved in activism? From MoveOn.org to the National Rifle Association, Health Care for America Now to the Sierra Club, membership-based civic associations constantly seek to engage people in civic and political action. What makes some more effective than others? Using in-person observations, surveys, and field experiments, this book compares organizations with strong records of engaging people in health an...

Citizens expect their governments to lead on sustainability. But from largely disappointing international conferences like Rio II to the U.S.’s failure to pass meaningful climate legislation, governments’ progress has been lackluster. That’s not to say leadership is absent; it just often comes from the bottom up rather than the top down. Action—on climate, species loss, inequity, and other sustainability crises—is being driven by local, people’s, women’s, and grassroots movements around th...

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.The task of aligning the interests of liberals and environmentalists is not an easy one. There is a fundamental split between them on the question of economic growth. For most mainstream liberal thinkers, economic growth is a necessary ingredient for a positive future, holding the potential to lift people out of poverty, but environmen...

The development discourse has long been dominated by best practices prescriptions for reform, but these are not a useful way of responding to the governance ambiguities of the early 21st century. Working with the Grain draws on both innovative scholarship and Brian Levy's quarter century of experience at the World Bank to lay out an alternative-a practical, analytically grounded, "with-the-grain" approach to reducing poverty and addressing weaknesses in governance. Best practice p...

For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Indeed, it is almost universally believed that college diplomas give Americans and Europeans a competitive advantage in the global knowledge wars. Challenging this conventional wisdom, The Global Auction forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it. Drawing on...