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About the Author
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg served for 30 years as a university president. He is now president emeritus and university professor at the George Washington University, where he teaches courses on the university presidency in America. He is also an adviser to Korn/Ferry International, where he is helping to find the next generation of university leadership. In June 2008 Simon and Schuster will release his new book Big Man on Campus: A University President Speaks Out On Higher Education. B.A. Columbia, M.P.A. Harvard, J.D. Yale. Fifteen honorary degrees. A swell guy. But not much of a dancer.He will blog about issues torn from the headlines dealing with higher education. Contemporary topics of pressing, current concern. And some serious matters too.
About Brainstorm
Mark Bauerlein
Marc Bousquet
Laurie Fendrich
Dan Greenberg
John L. Jackson Jr.
Stan Katz
Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
Brainstorm Alumni
Marty Nemko, guest bloggerBob Zemsky
Recent Posts
They Came, They Carved, They Created | Comment
Law-School Rankings | Comment [9]
Presidential Spouses | Comment [1]
Gallaudet University | Comment [7]
Letters to the Next President | Comment
Featured Articles By the Author
Seeking Education Gurus
Recently, the Wall Street Journal posted a list of the 20 most influential “gurus” (a word used interchangeably with “thinkers”) in the business world, the 19 men (and one woman) that CEO’s and other business executives say they have found give them “easily digestible advice,” primarily on three hot themes, “globalization, motivation and innovation.”
For those of you who also like easily digestible tidbits and may not have time to click on the link to read the full article, here are the top five on the list and their latest books: Gary Hamel, The Future of Management; Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded (out this summer); Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought; Malcolm Gladwell, Blink; and Howard Gardner, Responsibility at Work (editor).
Included as a sidebar is an explanation of the methodology used by Professor Thomas Davenport from Babson College to produce the list of 20, which, by the way, includes seven professors. One of Davenport’s intriguing quotes in the piece is that he believes “traditional business gurus writing ‘weighty tomes’ are in decline.” He doesn’t define weighty but I take it to mean, academic and theoretical. What a sad statement about readers. This list of 20 is an update of one Davenport produced four years ago, and like similar ranking systems, some people moved up, others down, and a few fell off the list altogether even as new ones appeared on the scene. He’s given us a slice of contemporary sociological news, a quick take on the 15 minutes of fame awarded to a slice of the society by another segment, a group of leaders who collectively steer the economic ship of the American economy.
I began to ponder a similar list for higher education. Who are the people that are writing about our enterprise, the people we should all be reading in order to understand where we are, how we got here, and what we should do in the future?
Let me know your choices.
Posted at 09:42:57 PM on May 5, 2008 | All postings by Stephen Joel TrachtenbergComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Ben Barber
— David A. McCullough · May 6, 08:26 AM · #
Stephen Katsinas is the foremost thinker for rural community colleges hands down. This oft forgotten piece of higher education continues to serve more first generation students and is responsible to more citizens than any other single unit.
— Christopher Thomas · May 6, 09:08 AM · #
Kevin Carey http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0709.careycascadia.html
— BenjaminL · May 6, 10:29 AM · #
Tempted to say that “hot thinker in higher education” is an oxymoron, but I’ll simply ask how come it is when regular folks in regular jobs do something, they use a “method,” whereas in higher education, it’s a “methodology”?
— LuckyJim · May 6, 11:10 AM · #
The most trenchant analysis usually comes from top practitioners (i.e. serious scholars), not ‘pundits’. Educational pundits are generally careerists who accept the state of things as an acceptable given and then tweak it or accept the state of things as broken but then offer advice that repeats generation after generation. The education lobby is the weakest lobby in Washington because it lacks vision and credibility. The great leaders/commentators are people like the late Jary Pelikan—a brilliant historian, exceptional administrator and president of the national academy. Most of the so-called pundits are not authentic scholar/teacher/administrators who have excelled in all of these roles. Some of the putative ‘experts’ (I’ll be kind and not name any) are people who never rose above the rank of associate professor, but fell into administrative/association work and spent their lives on ‘commissions’, ‘task forces’, and ‘blue ribbon panels’ that issued ‘reports’ written by staffers, were covered by a Chronicle story and then went to their eternal rest in that government warehouse where they put the Ark in the first Indiana Jones film.
— Observer · May 6, 01:23 PM · #
I’ve been very influenced by Barry Schwartz, and his analysis of the “debasing” of education (which can be found, among other places, in his book, Costs of Living). In fact, I should have cited Schwartz in my last comment on your blog, since I was drawing on his ideas (what is the citing etiquette in blog comments, anyway? lol)
— Marc Flacks · May 6, 04:36 PM · #
Observer:
C’mon, babe, NAME them. I’m on your side. No reason to be kind. Look at all the damage these apparatchiks are doing. And if you’re not specific, it sounds like the same ol’ political deliberately vague name-calling, e.g., “nattering nabobs of negativism” or the ol’ reliable “special interest groups.” Without a name or two, nobody knows whether you’re just making up a straw man, e.g., “Yeah, you know the type.” OK, so don’t pick on some assoc. professor clinging to some bureaucratic niche; pick one or two of the prominent members of the educational punditoriat, and tell us who they are, so we can look up their c.v.‘s, read some of those reports, and try to figure out how they, and what they do, got that way. Look, you’ve got the cover of a poster’s pseudonym, so no harm can come to you as a whistleblower. No reason to be decorous. Drop a dime on ‘em. I’ll give you a jumpstart: Do any of them blog for “Brainstorm”? Just whisper yes or no.
Otherwise, better change to “Passive Observer.”
— LuckyJim · May 6, 07:44 PM · #
An urgent need in higher education is to think through, and address, the student experience in a comprehensive way, attending to the ‘hidden curriculum’ in the whole of student life, and to the intersection of academic with other forms of learning that are constantly in process outside of the classroom. One place that need is being addressed, world-wide, is in the burgeoning residential college movement, which brings faculty direction and presence into student residences, and promotes learning environments and communities of support for students. The central forum for that movement is the ‘collegiateway.org’ website maintained by Dr. Robert O’Hara, who himself contributes much wisdom and many creative ideas to the cause. For his promotion of, and contributions to, this important educational development, Dr. O’Hara would surely be among my choices for inclusion in the corps of higher education gurus.
— Mark Ryan · May 6, 09:40 PM · #
OK, #7. How about Barbara Uehling, Ph.D. ’58; taught until 64, did a two-year postdoc, taught 66-9 and then became an administrator. Or Ernest L. Boyer, Ph.D. ’57, becoming an administrator in ’60. Both (especially Boyer) are considered leaders, etc. and both held very prominent association positions.
— Observer · May 6, 10:01 PM · #
The thing about Boyer’s career that’s just so dripping with irony is that he was the Chancellor of SUNY when the retrenchments came down in questionable fashion, meriting the AAUP’s still ongoing censure.
Now, who ever bothers to remember that?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 6, 10:43 PM · #
Observer:
Thank you.
— LuckyJim · May 7, 05:20 AM · #
Second thought: Uehling and Boyer must be about 80, maybe legends but probably not players anymore. Anybody younger, more in the game?
— LuckyJim · May 7, 05:51 AM · #
For higher ed history: John Thelin @ University of Kentucky
— Reasonable Center · May 7, 06:53 AM · #
Bob Zemsky – His “mission-centered, market-smart, politically-savvy” represents a “big,hairy, audacious” approach to higher ed strategy that captures the predominant dynamic for publics of all shapes, sizes, and missions.
— Larry Gould · May 7, 07:38 AM · #
On Comment 12:
Ernest Boyer died over a decade ago in his late 60s, but not before receiving honors from the NEA and even the SUNY faculty union (United University Professions) for his administrative achievements — one of which, ironically, is the still-current AAUP censure of SUNY!
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 7, 08:45 AM · #
P.S. Accidentally omitted link to the NYT obit on Ernest Boyer: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE4DA1F39F93AA35751C1A963958260
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 7, 09:01 AM · #
Lloyd Thacker.
— Peter · May 7, 09:18 AM · #
Steve Katsinas is a great choice for the community college sector, as is Tom Bailey of Columbia. John Roueche of UT Austin is also probably the widest read on community colleges and clearly our most widely known public intellectual on the topic of community colleges.
— Kevin Drumm · May 7, 09:29 AM · #
The difficulty is that higher education rewards narrow expertise, and this tendency carries over into the realm of thinkers about higher ed. Someone might well be the big noise on higher ed history but incapable of discussing
internationalization, quality control or finance.
My list would certainly include Phil Altbach, Cliff Adelman, Roger Geiger, Alison Wolf (from the UK but brilliant insights applicable anywhere) and the dude from the Carnegie center whose name escapes me.
Most of these are old and crusty, of course. It isn’t hard to come up with a list of potential talkers, but who, exactly, is listening?
I think higher ed will be largely on its own in another 25 years, and schools that have failed to plan for the near-disappearance of public support will be in big trouble.
— Alan Contreras · May 7, 10:19 AM · #
The late Wayne Booth of the University of Chicago did much to strengthen the teaching of the humanities and, especially, writing. His work in lit crit has always been valued, but I’ve also found his THE VOCATION OF A TEACHER to be quite wonderful and revealing. I discovered it late in my professional life and regretted not having read it when I first began teaching. His work is inspiring in many ways.
— George T. Karnezis · May 7, 01:01 PM · #
In teacher education, I believe the key thinkers are as follows:
Del Schalock (http://preview.tinyurl.com/6s2s26)
Linda Darling Hammond (http://preview.tinyurl.com/5g9q6a)
Howard Gardner(http://www.howardgardner.com/)
Carol Tomlinson (http://preview.tinyurl.com/6qo5lm)
— Ella · May 8, 11:56 AM · #
Steve Trachtenberg!!! You belong on your own list.
— Skip Godow · May 8, 12:51 PM · #
“a group of leaders who collectively steer the economic ship of the American economy”
As opposed to the profligate ship?
And I see you’re working hard to find synonyms for “slice.”
— Bad ABD · May 8, 08:52 PM · #
Cary Nelson, Michael Berube and Marc Bousquet to name three people who are consistent critics of what the new managerialism has done to higher education.
— Velvet Elvis · May 14, 07:32 AM · #
A critic of managerialism does not necessarily a visionary make.
One need only look at the sad unraveling of the AAUP, in which the three from Comment 24 are national leaders, to realize that the big shoes of Arthur Lovejoy are difficult to fill….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 14, 07:52 PM · #