leadership

What is the unique value of higher education? What is effective instruction? Is there a cost crisis that is threatening the value and efficacy of higher education? Can technology offer a solution? These are a few of the questions posed by William Bowen and others in Higher Education in the Digital Age. This readable and thought-provoking book consists largely of lectures delivered by Bowen at Stanford University in 2012. The discussion of these issues is expanded to include other voices of leadership in higher education, all of whom contribute responses to Bowen’s original lectures.

Bowen addresses the pressures facing university administrators who must balance all aspects of post-secondary education: cost to students, quality of education, financial support of research, and costs of personnel. The first two of three sections are lectures Bowen delivered at Stanford. The first lecture describes the economic issues facing institutions of higher education, including problems of affordability and the lack of productivity-increases in higher education compared to other industries. The second lecture implores leaders in higher education to address the dual issues of rising tuition and rising expenditures and to, at the very least, try to slow the rates of increase. His possible solutions look to technology (online or hybrid instruction) to increase productivity. In so doing, he opens up a larger discussion on what qualifies as actual learning and what costs (to quality of education and to funding for development and implementation) are acceptable.

The discussion among higher education leaders and administrators in the third section of the book is its greatest value. The discussion hits on many of the economic and societal issues Bowen brings up: the flattening of family incomes, rising tuition rates, issues of completion rates, the pros and cons of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), and issues raised by the existence of for-profit degree-granting institutions. All of the authors come from top tier research institutions: Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton. One wonders how different the conversation would be if more publicly-funded universities, smaller liberal arts colleges, or community colleges participated in the discussion. While some of the writers acknowledge this bias and seek to qualify it by examining data from other types of institutions, their solutions (that require a large amount of funding) seem removed from the reality at other institutions.

In spite of this limitation, the authors of Higher Education ask questions that invite reflection and conversation, given the financial situation in which many institutions find themselves. What value do we offer our students? Will the drive to increase productivity take that value away? Does technology offer opportunities to improve education while also increasing productivity? Can online learning maintain what is most valuable in a liberal arts education? The solutions offered are not a total fix (by the authors’ own admission), but the dialogue initiated in Higher Education presents administrators, faculty, and staff with an opportunity to rethink and innovate traditional teaching methods.

Women involved or interested in leadership in higher education will find this book to be at turns inspiring and somewhat painful to read. Any woman who has held a position of leadership likely shares similar stories of personal sacrifice and institutional prejudice; indeed, many of the stories in this book paint a picture of academia as hostile, male territory. Tanya Fitzgerald manages to add a twist to this tale in the way she weaves together stories from her ethnographic research with senior women leaders in universities in Australia and New Zealand. Her work focuses primarily on the trials and triumphs of women as they extend themselves mentally, emotionally, and physically in their jobs, but the book manages to offer a sense of hope in part because the author chooses to frame her analysis around the experiences of Indigenous women. This inclusion and focus gives the book leverage in a field flooded with similar studies. Fitzgerald uses the experiences of these women to show that women’s encounters with academic institutions are best described as “continuous struggle and compromise” (25) that nevertheless opens the way for new ways of conceiving of leadership in higher education.

Fitzgerald teases out the complexities of the tasks facing women who oversee diverse staff, who are expected to “think big” while handling minutia, and who serve as mentors for women wanting to break into the leadership roles. Women’s lives as academic leaders is, in one word, “messy.” Fitzgerald is also appropriately attentive to disciplinary context and institutional climate, and her subjects come across as real individuals in real circumstances. Her overall goal is to push up against the myths that keep women as institutional housekeepers or otherwise limit their potential as leaders (22) and she manages to do that, albeit in a limited and incomplete way that fits with the stories she includes. She is careful not to advance any “grand narrative,” preferring instead to celebrate the individuality of her subjects as they improvise their lives.

The myths being shattered here include the myth of opportunity (which assumes that gender equality is established) and the myth of what leadership ought to look like and how women ought to behave (17). Overall, Fitzgerald paints a picture of academia as a land alien to women and women’s ways of being, so that women who find themselves in position to lead often have to adjust to the rules or courageously make up new rules. Fitzgerald highlights the precarious positions held by women in leadership roles, and she ends on a point of hope that seems a bit of a stretch based on her evidence. Nevertheless, I would recommend this study to any woman (or man) in leadership, either in higher education or the clergy. Although Women Leaders in Higher Education does not focus much on teaching, many women in higher education will find themselves faced with the question of whether to move into administration. This book will shed light on that personal and professional choice.