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Rethinking the Enterprise

By Stephen G. Pelletier

Any college administrator will tell you that the landscape for higher education is shifting under our feet.

Consider some of the powerful forces that buffet academe today: Shrinking revenues. Stronger resistance to tuition hikes. Calls that universities produce more graduates. The rapid rise of classroom technology and online learning. Stronger competition, including the expanding for-profit sector. Shifts in student demographics. Globalization. More government scrutiny of university practices. Louder calls for transparency and accountability. Public skepticism about the value of higher education.

Welcome to the “new normal,” many say. Behind that cliché lie hard truths that raise perplexing questions. If the landscape for higher education has in fact been transmogrified, what now? How should colleges and universities respond? If the academy is changing fundamentally, is it time to fundamentally rethink the academy?

Not Far Enough

As he ponders the “new normal” in his role as AASCU’s vice president for academic leadership and change, George L. Mehaffy worries that “our current model for funding and delivering education is not sustainable.” Perhaps even more troubling, he believes, is that higher education’s thinking about reforms in the face of today’s challenges is not broad enough, or suitably bold.

Academe seems “unable to develop the adaptive responses that acknowledge the rapid and dramatic changes all around us,” Mehaffy suggests.

To be certain, colleges and universities are slashing budgets and making other changes to ensure their short-term survival. Mehaffy fears, though, that their efforts don’t go far enough. “Too many institutions seem to simply hunker down, cutting around the margins, reducing services or serving fewer constituents,” he says. What they’re not doing, he says, is “fundamentally re-thinking the enterprise.”

“I wonder if we in public higher education are approaching our own crisis-of-imagination moment,” Mehaffy says. “We confront rapid changes in the circumstances and context in which public higher education operates. Yet we seem unable to respond with the creative and innovative solutions that will ensure our success.”

Not content just to think about these issues, Mehaffy hopes to recruit a host of innovative thinkers from across public colleges and universities for a new AASCU collaboration that will pursue new solutions for today’s difficult problems.

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