Saturday, February 16, 2013

Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure

There is a certain ebb and flow in the number of articles calling for significant changes or highlighting the financial stress of small colleges or universities.  We certainly appear to be in one of those periods where a new article or blog posting seems to surface every few days.  In a recent example, Nathan Harder writing for the The American Interest predicts, "In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist."

I found Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure to offer a timely and interesting selection of case studies and essays edited by Alice W. Brown and Sandra L. Ballard.  Intended as a wake-up call, readers can certainly benefit from the experiences of the various authors involved with institutions that either closed or almost closed.

The book was published in 2011 as part of the Jossey-Bass New Directions for Higher Education series.  Chapters include:
  1. Case Study of a College that Closed: Saint Mary's College, Alice W. Brown
  2. Bradford College: Requiem for a College, Arthur Levine
  3. A College that Reinvented Itself: The Wilson College Story, Mary-Linda Merriam Armacost
  4. Case Study of Reinvention: College of Charleston, Alice W. Brown
  5. Reinventing Black Colleges in Postethnic America: The Case of Knoxville College, Barbara R. Hatton
  6. Antioch College: A Celebrated History and an Uncertain Future, Elizabeth R. Hayford
  7. Advice to Presidents of Struggling Colleges, Michael J. Puglisi

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