Search results for ""Author Robert Birnbaum""

This unique book offers quotations that reflect both historic and current thinking in the field of higher education. These quotations are enjoyable to read, useful to those who speak and write on the subject of higher education, and illustrative of the enduring purposes of the academic enterprise. This book will be of particular value to academic, political, and journalistic practitioners who prepare speeches, position papers, or news backgrounders for both professional and lay audiences, as well as for scholars seeking citations to materials that are otherwise difficult to locate. More than 1,600 quotations from over 650 authors are arranged both chronologically and by subject. This arrangement offers readers the opportunity to trace how thinking has changed, or how it has remained the same, during the 2000-year period covered in this book. The collection includes both statements that support higher education as well as those that criticize it. Many of the quotations in this book were developed from original sources, which are cited in detail for verification and further reading. The represented authors range from academic leaders to social critics, U.S. presidents to Russian revolutionaries, Roman poets to student radicals, John Donne to Fats Domino. All of the authors are identified by professional positions, years of birth, and, where applicable, year of death.

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This book reveals the complex factors that influence the real and perceived effectiveness of academic leaders. It shows that the qualities commonly thought to be indicators of good leadership are irrelevant and often counterproductive. It explains that successful academic leadership can be defined by the extent to which strategic constituencies?faculty, students, and others who share in campus leadership?support the president.

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"One of the best theoretical and applied analyses of universityacademic organization and leadership in print. This book issignificant because it is not only thoughtfully developed and basedon careful reading of the extensive literature on leadership andgovernance, but it is also deliberately intended to enable theauthor to bridge the gap between theories of organization, on onehand, and practical application, on the other." --Journal of Higher Education

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"Management fads in higher education will never be the same. Birnbaum's penetrating analysis reveals in the clearest possible terms why fads die an early death." --Burton R. Clark, Allan M. Carter Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles "Anyone in higher education leadership should read this critical and amusing book. It goes much further than the dull descriptions of management techniques for universities and colleges. It is fair, convincing, and well documented." --Frans van Vught, Rector Magnificus, University of Twente, The Netherlands When is a management innovation truly a good idea, and when is it only a fad? In this thoughtful book, Robert Birnbaum scrutinizes the rise and fall of management fads in higher education since the 1960s. He shows administrators and faculty how to move beyond the hype of new fads to make wise, informed decisions and adopt sound management policies. Birnbaum begins by analyzing the historical development of seven major management systems in higher education. From these histories, he develops a model for understanding the life cycle of management innovations, including their creation, development, and eventual adoption or abandonment. He then explains the social and environmental factors that make institutions vulnerable to fads, plus the psychological issues that may lead academic managers to support failing fads. This comprehensive resource is for anyone who wants to understand how management innovations can be used to strengthen the educational and social purposes of higher education. To read the first chapter of this book, Seeking the Grail: The Never-Ending Quest, click here.

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