Widely regarded as one of the most active and publicly engaged university presidents in modern academia, Duderstadt—who led the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996—presided over a period of enormous change, not only for his institution, but for universities across the country. His presidency was a time of growth and conflict: of sweeping new affirmative-action and equal-opportunity programs, significant financial expansion, and reenergized student activism on issues from apartheid to codes of student conduct. Under James Duderstadt’s stewardship, Michigan reaffirmed its reputation as a trailblazer among universities. Part memoir, part history, part commentary, The View from the Helm extracts general lessons from his experiences at the forefront of change in higher education, offering current and future administrators a primer on academic leadership and venturing bold ideas on how higher education should be steered into the twenty-first century.
To achieve prosperity and security in a hypercompetitive global, knowledge-driven economy, the American Midwest faces the challenge of transforming what was once the farming and manufacturing center of the world economy into what could become its knowledge center. Put another way, while the Midwest region once provided the industrial muscle that powered the twentieth century, now it must make the commitment and the investments necessary to become the brains of the twenty-first century knowledge economy.What role should the region's colleges and universities play in this effort? Here one is tempted to emulate the spirit of the California Master Plan, developed during a period of extraordinary economic and demographic change in 1960. Yet today one must broaden considerations to include all stages of education-K-12, higher education, workplace training, lifelong learning-indeed, "cradle to grave" learning needs, opportunities, and experiences. Furthermore, such a study must encompass all of the missions of the contemporary university-education, scholarship, engagement, health care, economic development, innovation, entrepreneurial activities, and, of course, traditional roles, such as preserving and transmitting culture and serving as a social critic. Finally, while the California Master Plan was an extraordinary success, setting simple yet challenging and compelling goals that would guide public higher education in the state for decades, today it is likely that a "strategic process" that can be sustained over many years will be more important than a "strategic plan" that might quickly sink beneath the waves.This report adopts a common planning technique from high-tech industry, strategic roadmapping, to develop such a contemporary "master plan" for the region. It should be viewed as one effort to develop not only a vision and plan to utilize the Midwest's rather considerable higher education assets to enable the region's transformation into a learning and innovation society, but as well to suggest both tactics and a process required to sustain this effort for the long haul.
Widely regarded as one of the most active and publicly engaged university presidents in modern academia, Duderstadt—who led the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996—presided over a period of enormous change, not only for his institution, but for universities across the country. His presidency was a time of growth and conflict: of sweeping new affirmative-action and equal-opportunity programs, significant financial expansion, and reenergized student activism on issues from apartheid to codes of student conduct. Under James Duderstadt’s stewardship, Michigan reaffirmed its reputation as a trailblazer among universities. Part memoir, part history, part commentary, The View from the Helm extracts general lessons from his experiences at the forefront of change in higher education, offering current and future administrators a primer on academic leadership and venturing bold ideas on how higher education should be steered into the twenty-first century.
DIVFrom the former president of one of America's leading universities comes a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing higher education in America as we enter the twenty-first century. In A University for the Twenty-first Century, James J. Duderstadt discusses the array of powerful economic, social, and technological forces that are driving the rapid and profound change in American social institutions and universities in particular. /divDIVChange has always characterized the university as it has sought to preserve and propagate the intellectual achievements, the cultures, and the values of our civilization. However, the capacity of the university to change, through a process characterized by reflection, reaction, and consensus, simply may not be sufficient to allow the university to control its own destiny. Not only will social and technical change be a challenge to the American university, Duderstadt says, it will be the watchword for the years ahead. And with change will come unprecedented opportunities for those universities with the vision, the wisdom, and the courage to lead in the twenty-first century. The real question raised by this book is not whether higher education will be transformed, but rather how . . . and by whom. /divDIVJames J. Duderstadt is President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, University of Michigan. /div
After decades of domination on campus, college sports' supremacy has begun to weaken. "Enough, already!" detractors cry. College is about learning, not chasing a ball around to the whir of TV cameras. In Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University James Duderstadt agrees, taking the view that the increased commercialization of intercollegiate athletics endangers our universities and their primary goal, academics. Calling it a "corrosive example of entertainment culture" during an interview with ESPN's Bob Ley, Duderstadt suggested that college basketball, for example, "imposes on the university an alien set of values, a culture that really is not conducive to the educational mission of university." Duderstadt is part of a growing controversy. Recently, as reported in The New York Times, an alliance between university professors and college boards of trustees formed in reaction to the growth of college sports; it's the first organization with enough clout to challenge the culture of big-time university athletics. This book is certainly part of that challenge, and is sure to influence this debate today and in the years to come. James J. Duderstadt is President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, University of Michigan.
DIVFrom the former president of one of America's leading universities comes a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing higher education in America as we enter the twenty-first century. In A University for the Twenty-first Century, James J. Duderstadt discusses the array of powerful economic, social, and technological forces that are driving the rapid and profound change in American social institutions and universities in particular. /divDIVChange has always characterized the university as it has sought to preserve and propagate the intellectual achievements, the cultures, and the values of our civilization. However, the capacity of the university to change, through a process characterized by reflection, reaction, and consensus, simply may not be sufficient to allow the university to control its own destiny. Not only will social and technical change be a challenge to the American university, Duderstadt says, it will be the watchword for the years ahead. And with change will come unprecedented opportunities for those universities with the vision, the wisdom, and the courage to lead in the twenty-first century. The real question raised by this book is not whether higher education will be transformed, but rather how . . . and by whom. /divDIVJames J. Duderstadt is President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, University of Michigan. /div
In the United States, public colleges and universities educate more than 80 percent of the nation's 11 million college students. Public universities conduct the majority of the country's campus-based research and produce most of the nation's doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and other professionals and public leaders. They provide critical services such as agricultural and industrial technology, health care, and economic development, and they help students of all ages develop more rewarding careers and more meaningful lives. Written for everyone who is interested in and concerned about the nation's public universities, The Future of the Public University in America offers a view from the perspective of two experienced professionals. James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, and Farris W. Womack, former executive vice president and chief financial officer of the University of Michigan, explore the unique challenges facing public higher education today. They look at the forces driving change—economic imperatives, technology, and market forces—as well as the characteristics of the public university that make change difficult: the nature of its various campus communities, its governance system, its management and decision-making processes, and its leadership. The authors conclude by suggesting strategies at the state and federal level to preserve and strengthen public higher education as a resource for future generations.
Intercollegiate Athletics, Inc. examines the corrupting influence and damaging financial effects of big-time intercollegiate athletics, especially football and to a lesser extent basketball, on American higher education. Including historical and contemporary perspectives, the book traces the growth of intercollegiate sports from largely student-run activities supervised by faculty to the gargantuan, taxpayer-supported spectacles that now dominate many public universities. It investigates the regressive student fees that have helped subsidize big-time sports at public universities and prop up chronically unprofitable athletic departments, as well as the corrosive effects of athletics on the university’s academic enterprise. A review of the alleged salutary effects of massive sports programs, such as spurring alumni donations and student applications, reveals that such benefits are largely illusory, more myth than real. The book also pays special attention to the often prescient, if largely unsuccessful, opponents of these developments, and considers the alternatives to big-time athletics, from abolition to professionalization to club sports. Students, scholars, sports fans, and those interested in learning how big-time football and basketball have cast such an enormous—and often baleful—shadow upon American colleges and universities will profit from this provocative and engagingly written book.
In The third volume of The Digital Hand, James W. Cortada completes his sweeping survey of the effect of computers on American industry, turning finally to the public sector, and examining how computers have fundamentally changed the nature of work in government and education. This book goes far beyond generalizations about the Information Age to the specifics of how industries have functioned, now function, and will function in the years to come. Cortada combines detailed analysis with narrative history to provide a broad overview of computings and telecommunications role in the entire public sector, including federal, state, and local governments, and in K-12 and higher education. Beginning in 1950, when commercial applications of digital technology began to appear, Cortada examines the unique ways different public sector industries adopted new technologies, showcasing the manner in which their innovative applications influenced other industries, as well as the U.S. economy as a whole.He builds on the surveys presented in the first volume of the series, which examined sixteen manufacturing, process, transportation, wholesale and retail industries, and the second volume, which examined over a dozen financial, telecommunications, media, and entertainment industries. With this third volume, The Digital Hand trilogy is complete, and forms the most comprehensive and rigorously researched history of computing in business since 1950, providing a detailed picture of what the infrastructure of the Information Age really looks like and how we got there. Managers, historians, economists, and those working in the public sector will appreciate Cortada's analysis of digital technology's many roles and future possibilities.
Why the paradigm of the world-class university is an implausible dream for most institutions of higher education Universities have become major actors on the global stage. Yet, as they strive to be “world-class,” institutions of higher education are shifting away from their core missions of cultivating democratic citizenship, fostering critical thinking, and safeguarding academic freedom. In the contest to raise their national and global profiles, universities are embracing a new form of utilitarianism, one that favors market power over academic values. In this book, James Mittelman explains why the world-class university is an implausible dream for most institutions and proposes viable alternatives that can help universities thrive in today’s competitive global environment. Mittelman traces how the scale, reach, and impact of higher-education institutions expanded exponentially in the post–World War II era, and how the market-led educational model became widespread. Drawing on his own groundbreaking fieldwork, he offers three case studies—the United States, which exemplifies market-oriented educational globalization; Finland, representative of the strong public sphere; and Uganda, a postcolonial country with a historically public but now increasingly private university system. Mittelman shows that the “world-class” paradigm is untenable for all but a small group of wealthy, research-intensive universities, primarily in the global North. Nevertheless, institutions without substantial material resources and in far different contexts continue to aspire to world-class stature. An urgent wake-up call, Implausible Dream argues that universities are repurposing at the peril of their high principles and recommends structural reforms that are more practical than the unrealistic worldwide measures of excellence prevalent today.
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