Education
Peril and Promise
A former college president and bestselling author offers leadership lessons for today's troubled campuses.
"Peril and Promise is both a practical guide and a moral compass, urging those in leadership roles to lead not from fear but from purpose." ―Forbes
Higher education is under assault from all sides. Scandals, protests, and dramatic resignations dominate the news cycle, and the pressure has grown so severe that the average tenure of university presidents has fallen to less than six years. Even so, Peril and Promise insists, American universities provide the solutions to the ignorance and division that plague our society--but only if wise, courageous leaders step up. Blending insights from social science with many years of experience as a college president at Spelman and Mount Holyoke Colleges, Beverly Daniel Tatum celebrates the power of leadership to make higher education a force for good. Alongside an unflinching look at the financial challenges, political attacks, and social problems that besiege today's college campuses, she offers real-life leadership examples of institutions that have overcome the steepest odds and produced real transformation in ideas, student bodies, and society at large. At once conversational and contemplative, Peril and Promise reckons with the complexities of higher education in our time, while exhorting future leaders to take up the mantle and chart a path forward for our campuses and country.Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention
A succinct and impassioned call to reimagine and revive the small liberal arts college, by two veteran educators.
Private liberal arts colleges have struggled for decades; now, as the COVID-19 pandemic widens cracks latent in many American institutions, they are facing a possibly mortal crisis.
In The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention, Steven Volk and Beth Benedix call for small colleges to seize this moment and reinvent themselves. With the rise of rankings that set peer institutions against each other, tuition that outpaces income, creeping pre-professionalism, and a race to build student "customers" the splashiest new amenities, many private liberal arts colleges have strayed from their founders' missions. If they could shed the mantle of exclusivity, reduce costs, facilitate true social mobility, and collaborate with each other, the authors argue, they might both survive and again become just, equitable, accessible institutions able to offer the transformative and visionary education that is their hallmark.
Educators, students, parents, and anyone invested in the future of higher education should read this book.Practice Dialogues
