Leading Higher Education As and For Public Good asserts that the purpose of higher education is twofold: for public good and as public good. Acknowledging that the notion of public good increasingly cannot be taken for granted, the book argues that leading, teaching and learning must be directly connected to its pursuit. It avers and demonstrates how this may be accomplished, articulating specific approaches and dispositions that require cultivation within university communities. This volume argues that leading higher education occurs within competing and sometimes conflicting webs of commitments, necessitating a capacity to negotiate legitimate compromises. Its empirical chapters expand on this, providing examples of academic developers who use deliberate communication as a method in cultivating leading and teaching praxis. What emerges is the potential of deliberative leadership to be transformative in building sustainable leadership in higher education, while simultaneously renewing commitments to education and contributing to public good. Leading Higher Education As and For Public Good is essential reading for policy-makers, university leaders and administrators, academics, students and all those interested in building a sustainable future for higher education that also contributes to public good.

This important book explores the various ways that higher education contributes to the realization of significant public ends and examines how leaders can promote and enhance their contribution to the social charter through new policies and best practices. It also shows how other sectors of society, government agencies, foundations, and individuals can partner with institutions of higher education to promote the public good. Higher Education for the Public Good includes contributions from leaders in the field—many of whom participated in dialogues hosted by the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good. These leaders are responsible for creating successful strategies, programs, and efforts that foster the public’s role in higher education.

Land-grant colleges and universities have a storied past. This book looks at their future. Land-grant colleges and universities occupy a special place in the landscape of American higher education. Publicly funded agricultural and technical educational institutions were first founded in the mid-nineteenth century with the Morrill Act, which established land grants to support these schools. They include such prominent names as Cornell, Maryland, Michigan State, MIT, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, West Virginia University, Wisconsin, and the University of California—in other words, four dozen of the largest and best public universities in America. Add to this a number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges—in all, almost 300 institutions. Their mission is a democratic and pragmatic one: to bring science, technology, agriculture, and the arts to the American people. In this book, Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee discuss present challenges to and future opportunities for these institutions. Drawing on interviews with 27 college presidents and chancellors, Gavazzi and Gee explore the strengths and weaknesses of land-grant universities while examining the changing threats they face. Arguing that the land-grant university of the twenty-first century is responsible to a wide range of constituencies, the authors also pay specific attention to the ways these universities meet the needs of the communities they serve. Ultimately, the book suggests that leaders and supporters should become more fiercely land-grant in their orientation; that is, they should work to more vigorously uphold their community-focused missions through teaching, research, and service-oriented activities. Combining extensive research with Gee’s own decades of leadership experience, Land-Grant Universities for the Future argues that these schools are the engine of higher education in America—and perhaps democracy’s best hope. This book should be of great interest to faculty members and students, as well as those parents, legislators, policymakers, and other area stakeholders who have a vested interest in the well-being of America’s original public universities.

This book innovatively explores how universities might be engines of reform and be directed towards social change. Using rich case studies drawn from South African research, the book comprehensively provides a myriad of new perspectives on what constitutes a set of appropriate public-good professional capabilities that will translate successfully into contributions to human development. It challenges universities to produce professionals who have the knowledge, skills and values to improve the lives of people living in poverty in urban and rural settings. It covers issues such as: Conceptualising Public-Good Professionalism Global Issues and Professional Education South African Debates about Higher Education Institutional conditions and professional education arrangements Social Constraints on educating ethically aware public professionals By drawing on an approach that focuses on differing public-good professional capabilities in five professions, this book produces a crucial new framework for the preparation of professionals relevant to the global study of higher education policy. It expands higher education’s contribution to global social justice beyond a concern with human capital, administering a challenge to higher education internationally to address human development in the 21st century. This book will be of great interest to all scholars of higher education involved in higher education studies, comparative education, and development studies. It will also prove valuable to policy makers, higher education leaders and lecturers and graduate professionals in diverse organizations.

Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for? In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good? Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

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