Provocative Book On Transforming Higher Education

  Robert Zemsky , professor at the University of Pennsylvania has a new book that is well worth reading. It is a fine overview of the current problems and possibilites for improving higher education- Making Reform Work: The Case For Transforming American Higher Education. Zemsky stresses faculty and administrators must participate and perceive reform as in their self interest.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/04/zemsky has an interview with Zemsky.

Robert Zemsky’s Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher education-who’s angry, who’s disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn’t understand.