The Academic Workplace
SPRING 1999 — VOLUME 10, NUMBER 1

In this issue

Note From the Editor: We mark an important transition at NERCHE in this issue. In December, Zelda Gamson retired as NERCHE's first Director. As NERCHE begins our second decade, we welcome Deborah Hirsch as the new NERCHE Director.

Letter from the Director
It is difficult for me to write this final letter for the newsletter upon retiring from the University of Massachusetts Boston. So much has happened since I joined the Univer-sity in 1988 after twenty years at the University of Michigan and six years as an independent consultant. It gives me great joy, however, to acknowledge how much we have accomplished at the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) in the past ten years. NERCHE opened a few months before the cutbacks in state support for higher education in Massachusetts that would eventually reduce state funds by more than one-third. This meant that I was forced to find a way for NERCHE to function with few resources. In spite of the inauspicious timing of its founding, NERCHE has thrived. It has thrived because it created hope and shared resources. It did this by building a sense of community and collective accountability.

From the beginning, my vision for NERCHE was to create a vehicle to help higher education transform itself. This meant empowering faculty members and administrators at the grass roots, especially in non­elite colleges and universities, to be both wiser and smarter as they faced reduced funding, political attacks, and increased pressure in the work lives of faculty and administrators. Our first conference, held early in 1989 at the Kennedy Library, focused on the changing nature of the academic workplace. The conference identified three forces that have changed higher education in the lifetimes of most faculty: growth, changes among students, and government involvement -- changes that left faculty, in the words of Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster in American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled "dispirited," "fragmented," and "devalued."

NERCHE identified three ways of improving the situation: articulate institutional purposes, foster collaboration, and encourage professional development. We have been pursuing this agenda ever since. The key to change in higher education, we came to see, was to understand and improve the worklife for faculty. And, given my own background as an organizational sociologist, improving the worklife for faculty was an organizational problem. What were the main organizational problems of colleges and universities? Fragmentation among departments, hyper­individualism leading to a state of near­anarchy, and a growing gap between faculty and administration.

It was obvious to me and my co-founders, Sandra Elman and the late Ernest Lynton, that the only way to change higher education was to find some people to talk about what the problems were and how they could be solved. When I moved to this region, I was struck by the lack of interaction among colleges and universities. Our first job at NERCHE was to build a culture for people to do this, across the diverse set of colleges and universities in the region, and help them to talk to one another.

So we identified some interesting people from all over New England and convened them in ongoing discussion groups we called "think tanks." These think tanks bring together between 20 and 30 people from the range of colleges and universities in the region who hold the same job title at four or five long meetings a year. (Current think tanks are described inside this newsletter.) Some have been going on for ten years and have been one of the most important comm unity­building tools that NERCHE has created.
Often for the first time, people in higher education in the region encounter their counterparts in institutions very different from their own -- public and private, rich and poor, urban and rural, two­and four­year. They soon learn that what they think are unique problems and characteristics are widely shared. They recognize that they can help one another. And they carry the value of what they learn back to their institutions.

NERCHE has been able to capitalize on the sense of community we have created among our constituents to develop collaborative projects and serious change efforts. We bring think tanks together to address problems from the multiple perspectives that different institutions and positions bring. For example, department chairs and senior academic officers met this Fall to talk about how they can cooperative to create the conditions for powerful student learning. We also started a new think tank for chief financial officers. Already we have learned that this is a group that thinks organizationally and strategically and is searching for ways to connect across the campus to enrich the learning environment for students and faculty. In the spring they met with colleagues from the Academic Affairs Think Tank for chief academic officers and found ways to connect academic and financial planning more effectively than they typically are. In May, NERCHE will bring together all of our five think tanks for a mediated discussion on the impacts of technology, distance education and for­profit providers. The possibilities are endless, and NERCHE will be exploring them in the future.

I have always regretted that NERCHE has not found a way to work more with faculty in the trenches. The think tank for department chairs has gotten us closer to the faculty. And our series of projects on faculty professional service, described in the newsletter and in Deborah Hirsch's letter, gets us even closer. This work has uncovered members of the faculty who are campus community­builders. These unheralded heroes have no special portfolio for doing so; they just do it. We all know people like this who skillfully connect their knowledge and institutional resources with community issues. In the process of doing so, they learn how to use their skills to rebuild campus community and civic life. NERCHE will continue in the future to make the work of these faculty more visible, more transferable and more strategic.

Speaking of being strategic, I believe that it is time that colleges and universities -- including faculty -- should be speaking up for themselves as policy-makers. Public policy in higher education has typically been developed by specialists who may not necessarily share the intellectual and humanistic values of most faculty members and administrators. Public policy increasingly is being carried out by politicians and business leaders who have their own agendas for change, agendas that may have very little to do with improving the opportunity for the general population to get the best kind of education. NERCHE has been articulating a public policy based on strengthening higher education's relationships with communities and in strengthening civic life in America.

New England is the home of the town meeting. It is also home to some of the oldest colleges and universities in the nation. What better place to put the two together: higher education and community, higher education for democracy. I can think of no better person to take on this agenda for NERCHE than its new Director, Deborah Hirsch. Deborah brings extraordinary talent as a community­builder and analyst of higher education and its role in civic life. Her strength will be matched by the NERCHE staff whose collective experience working with NERCHE totals more than ten years and with higher education more than twenty­five. To Deborah, Cathy Burack, Sharon Singleton and Thara Fuller: My thanks to you for your commitment and stout hearts.

To my friends in New England and around the country: Farewell. It has been a grand voyage.
Zelda F. Gamson

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For some time, both insiders and observers of academe have lamented the "disconnect" between academics and actions, between intellect and values and the loss of communal life. This yearning for meaning and connection follow years of fiscal uncertainty, an increasingly diverse student body, faculty stretched to fulfill heavy research and publishing demands, increasing teaching loads, and time­consuming administrative tasks. Students and faculty juggle exceedingly busy lives commuting to campus from distances of one hour or more, burdened by family caretaking responsibilities and struggling to keep pace with the technology that was supposed to simplify their lives. NERCHE has found one antidote to the isolation and fragmentation in its thinks tanks, as my colleague Zelda Gamson -- "Zee" -- notes in her letter in this issue. NERCHE was created with an agenda for organizational change and improvement and it accomplished this through community building via think tanks, collaborative research projects translated into action programs and professional development activities tailored and responsive to campus needs. To accomplish this agenda, Zee brought to the task a strong academic background as a researcher and organizational sociologist, and personal characteristics as a collaborator, agitator, kibitzer and facilitator. And the Center thrived and grew!

NERCHE's 10th Anniversary Symposium was as much a look back over our first decade and a tribute to founding director Zelda Gamson as a step forward into our next ten years which will build on a strong foundation of programs, publications and projects. As I take the helm, I am prepared to help NERCHE capitalize on its strengths and build for the future. We will do this by continuing to weave the themes of com-munity, collaboration and civic engagement into our current activities and future programs. When I joined NERCHE, five years ago, I had been part of the early movement to link the academy and the public realm through community engagement. At Campus Compact, my colleagues and I understood the value of student participation in community life -- both a vehicle for educating students -- in the true "liberal" sense -- and for connecting the needs of the external community with the resources of the academy. It became clear that this engagement needed to be deeper and more profound. Who can ignore that the world outside the campus walls is disintegrating -- cities are plagued by seemingly intractable problems, politics and politicians are in moral disarray, job security is a thing of the past. Community engagement provides a vehicle for linking classroom learning to real world dilemmas and problem solving. Students and faculty alike find that in helping others, they build connection and a sense of community and purpose among themselves.

At NERCHE, I developed, along with Zee and Ernest Lynton, the Project on Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach which sought to understand the degree to which faculty were using their expertise to participate in community engagement in the region, and how these efforts were part of their academic life. This initial project identified institutional structures and policies that support faculty working as community scholars applying their disciplinary knowledge and expertise. It also laid the foundation for a succession of other projects that focused on faculty expertise and community engagement. We designed Project Colleague to prepare experienced faculty to educate other faculty members about how to develop partnerships with community groups and organizations and how to get support from their institutions to do so. The project's capstone event will be a conference next fall on "Faculty as Change Agents." A third Program component is the Portfolio Project to develop professional service portfolio prototypes to document this work. The recently published monograph, Making Outreach Visible, is now available from the American Association for Higher Education.

The Ernest Lynton Award for Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach has brought to light hundreds of faculty from across the country representing every institutional type, academic discipline and range of community­based issues. Over the past three years, we have received over 200 nominations from all over the country -- from medical schools and English departments, environmental studies programs and biology departments. It was awfully hard for us to pick a single winner the first year, and it is getting harder every year. So this year we didn't. We picked four, about whom we talk in this issue.

Their stories are not uncommon. Colleges and universities are filled with people like them, who have been active in the public realm for years. Many will begin a new project, Project Engage, that will bring the Lynton nominees togeth-er, make their work more visible, and through a competitive grants process, help them incorporate students more centrally as collaborators in their community­based research and action projects.

Our projects and our work are carried out at a grassroots level with the "real" workers in academic organizations -- faculty and administrators. Our regional focus allows us to delve deeply into campuses to study, analyze and amplify the issues for a larger audience via conferences, national alliances and publications. In this next decade, we will work to articulate these public policy issues with our campus partners to inform policy­makers, business leaders and a wide public audience. I encourage all of you to be in touch with me and with NERCHE to inform our work and to help us respond to you and to your campus's needs.

Deborah Hirsch

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FUNDED PROJECTS
Faculty Professional Service Project
Five years ago, NERCHE set out through this project to create a portrait of faculty professional service -- collaborations between higher education and the community -- in the New England region. We surveyed 120 regional colleges and universities about the kinds of outreach activities that are taking place in the region, the faculty who carry out this work, and the structures that support them. From these data, we developed workshops and publications to help colleges and universities strengthen their own outreach missions. And we formed alliances with individuals and organizations nationwide who are invested in promoting change in higher education through community engagement. While the original Project on Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach is in its final year, it has produced three other projects listed below, to form the ongoing Program on Faculty Professional Service. Last Fall, NERCHE celebrated the accomplishments of this Program along with NERCHE's 10th Anniversary in a Symposium dedicated to community building (for more about this Symposium, see the NERCHE News section).
Project Engage
In March 1999, NERCHE began a three­year project to identify and support models of faculty­student collaboration in community­based research. Project Engage utilizes faculty nominees for the Lynton Award for Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach (see NERCHE News). This Award has yielded scores of exemplary faculty -- representing the full range of disciplines and institutional types -- engaged in community­based scholarship and service. This new project builds on and extends NERCHE's Program on Faculty Professional Service and Academic Outreach by offering grants for faculty to involve students in their community work through collaborative research projects. In this way, all three academic missions -- research, teaching and service -- can be united and enlivened. NERCHE will publish working papers and journal articles at various stages of the project, in addition to a final monograph. Faculty recipients of grants will offer workshops and presentations about their projects at national conferences and disciplinary meetings.

Project Colleague
This year, we welcomed five new Faculty Associates to Project Colleague: Joan Arches, College of Public and Community Service, UMass Boston; Dick Hogarty, McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, UMass Boston; Mark Levine, Community Service, UMass Lowell; Marian Darlington Hope, School of Management, Lesley College; Marjorie Jones, Adult Baccalaureate College, Lesley College. We are also joined by Matthew Hartley, doctoral candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, who assists Cathy Burack with project coordination. We've selected "Faculty as Change Agents" as the focus for this year. During Project meetings -- day­long retreats in which Associates reflect on their practice -- faculty share their own strategies to create change within their institutions and with communities. Collectively, they develop the means to disseminate these ideas and products. Plans are in place to recruit more Faculty Associates from among the New England area Lynton Award nominees and to hold a summer retreat to focus on skill building in community organizing and institutional change. Next Fall, the Project will hold a Forum on Faculty as Change Agents for faculty involved in community engagement nationwide.

Portfolio Project
We are pleased to announce the publication of Making Outreach Visible: A Guide to Documen-ting Professional Service and Outreach, by Amy Driscoll and Ernest A. Lynton. The Guide is the culmination of the three­year Portfolio Project to document the scholarship of service. It presents insights and guidelines for faculty seeking to document their community based work. The Project involved sixteen faculty and administrators form Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Michigan State University, Portland State University, and the University of Memphis. Making Outreach Visible can be ordered from the American Association of Higher Education ((202) 293­6440 x11).
The Kellogg Forum on Higher Education Transformation
In April 1998, NERCHE, in collaboration with the American Council on Education, UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, the Center for Post-secondary Study at the University of Michigan, and the WK Kellogg Founda-tion (WKKF), embarked on a multi­institutional project to study transformation in higher education. The NERCHE team carries special responsibility for creating a prototype cluster of ten institutions that will undertake significant transformation to strengthen civic learning. During the first phase of the project, NERCHE is designing an application process for colleges and universities to become part of a civic learning cluster. With continued funding, NERCHE, in collaboration with WKKF, will select institutional participants for a prototypical civic learning cluster. The project is directed by Arthur Chickering, NERCHE Senior Associate and Visiting Professor of Higher Education at UMass Boston's Graduate College of Education.

Wingspread Event
NERCHE is the co­sponsor, along with the Johnson Foundation, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, the American Association for Higher Education, the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, Campus Compact, University of Pennsylvania Center for Community Partnerships, and the University of Michigan Center for Community Service and Learning, of two Wingspread meetings on "Strategies for Renewing the Civic Mission of the American Research University." NERCHE's Cathy Burack and Barry Checkoway, from the University of Michigan, planned and implemented the first meeting, held in December 1998. This meeting was designed to formulate strategies for renewing the civic mission of the research university both by preparing students for responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy and by enabling faculty members to develop and utilize knowledge for the improvement of communities. The strategies address ways to bring about changes in the university by involving students, faculty, administrators, and those with important civic roles from outside the campus. A second Wingspread meeting will take place in July.
American Council on Education's Regional Forums on Higher Education's Capacity to Build and Serve Democratic Society
Colleges and universities need to reexamine their academic programs and their public service and outreach activities and ask, "What works?" The Listening to Communities project is directed by NERCHE Senior Associate, Nancy Thomas, and is designed to strengthen civic education through community­university relationships. Through a series of regional forums, Listening to Communities convenes community, civic, business, philanthropic, religious, government, and educational leaders. The Forums are struc-tured to help colleges and universities best fulfill their role as educators of future civic leaders and partners in community problem solving.
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The Academy and the Public Realm
Zelda F. Gamson
Adapted from the 1998-99 Distinguished Lecture at the University of Massachusetts Boston

What is meant by the "public realm?" There is quite a literature on this question. At its base, the public realm is a place and a process whereby citizens become engaged in public life.

This engagement can be passive, as in voting for officials who will represent the interests of the citizenry, or it can be active, as in participating in decisions that affect citizens' lives. The forms of expression in the public realm can include formal decision­making, rational arguments presented by knowledgeable people, debate, discussion, and story­tel-ling. Participants can be experts and ordinary citizens, activists and non-activists. Issues up for discussion can include questions of general public concern, such as the effects of large donations to candidates for election, or they can be of concern to certain groups or a certain locale, such as the effects of a plant closing on a city. They can be tradition-al public topics, such as education or the economy, or what were not so long ago considered private matters, such as abortion and the sex lives of politicians.

Why is the public realm so important? Most of us recognize that political life in this country is in some trouble. Turnout for elections is low, reflecting decreasing trust in politicians and increasing influence of wealthy interests on government programs like welfare, environmental regulation and even social security. Cities are beset by crime, drugs, poverty and homelessness. Some social scientists, such as Robert Putnam, see a decline in participation in civic organizations, marked by a decline in membership in voluntary groups like the League of Women Voters and the Elks, bowling leagues and other local organization in the last generation. Others have pointed out that, while membership in the traditional fraternal and women's organizations may have indeed declined, a new kind of citizenship is on the rise, especially among those born after World War II. Sociologists Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland found that participation in grassroots problem­solving activities, "civic innovations," such as the healthy communities movement and local efforts to counter youth violence, has been growing.

Indeed, new forms of civic life are being invented out of the buzzing, postmodern confusion that is American life -- multi­racial and multi­ethnic coalitions, battered women's shelters, chat rooms on the Web, what Mary Belenky calls "public home-places" that provide homelike settings, often founded by women, for public engagement. One of the most interesting developments in the past decade or two is the creation of partnerships among public and private organizations.

Whether or not there has been a measurable decline in all forms of civic participation, modern Tocquevillians do see a breakdown in civic life that cannot be captured by statistics about volunteer activities and local participation. Some, like Robert Bellah and the co­authors of Habits of the Heart, argue that the over­emphasis on individual choice and personal development undermines deeper social commitments. The fragmentation of American society into "identity groups" based on religion, gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity -- argue commentators like Jean Bethke Elshtain and Todd Gitlin -- weakens efforts to forge shared commitments among people who have more in common than they think. Like social class.

For it seems as if social class is becoming the great divide in American society. I am convinced that the reason for the decline of civic life does not lie with ordinary citizens, who have shown tremendous creativity and good sense in the way they have engaged in public life. Rather, the problem lies with elites and their institutions. In The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, Christopher Lasch points to elites, in particular economic elites, for being at fault for the decline of civic life. Wealthy people have gone their own way in America, reaping the benefits of their position and a favorable stock market without regard for the less privileged. This has led to the decline of the middle class -- traditionally the carriers of civic life -- and a growing gap between the rich and ev eryone else. These forces have led to the hollowing out of our cities, argues Robert Kaplan in a deeply pessimistic series of books that describe the decline of metropolitan areas in favor of "pods" consisting of "standardized corporate fortresses, privately guarded housing developments, and Disneyfied tourist bubbles."

Add to the elites of wealth the elites in the media and government, who have increasingly separated themselves from the general public -- so vividly demonstrated by the public's disgust with the exploitation of the Monica Lewinsky affair by the media and Republicans -- and it would appear that civic life is in trouble because the people and organizations with the greatest power and resources have trashed democracy. They themselves are separated from the communities in which they reside, have little interest in the people who engage in community life, and have systematically drained those communities.

The Academy as a Public Realm

What are the responsibilities of the academy in all this? First, we must look at the university as a public realm. Asking whether and how the university is a public realm is not an obvious question, because academic institutions have both public and non­public aspects. There is no doubt that higher education is a public issue, like schools. We do not have to look far, especially in this state, to realize that public colleges and universi-ties are considered to be the concern of the public and of the state. Accountability discourses about higher education have been common and growing in the last twenty years and show no sign of abating. But going back to the idea of the public sphere as a place or a process where-by citizens can become engaged in public life, let's look at where this happens in colleges and universities.

The most obvious place to look is the classroom and the curriculum. Now, the classroom is not a public realm in the sense I am using the term. It is limited to the students taking the course and the teacher in the classroom or the teachers of a particular curriculum. Indeed, there are some critics of higher education who have argued that the classroom is too private -- that teachers and students could benefit from opening up the classroom to observers and visitors who could offer suggestions for improving teaching. The move to introduce peer assessment of teaching takes this view. But even if we were to allow visitors and peer reviewers into classrooms, the reason for their presence is not usually to focus on public issues.

Another way to think about colleges and universities as public realms is whether their members have the opportunity to engage issues of public concern. Antioch, the Residential College at the University of Michigan, Monteith College, learning communities of various sorts, offer myriad opportunities for this to happen in classes, in the curriculum in general, and in the total environment. Experiential learning programs like service learning and the publicly oriented College of Public and Community Service at the Uni-versity of Massachusetts Boston are other examples. Less powerful examples are to be found on almost any campus. Student affairs offices and academic programs routinely invite speakers and host events about issues of public concern.

Of course, we cannot go to them all, and I am sorry to say that I see few undergraduates in attendance when I do manage to go. When students do come, higher education is carrying out one of its most important educational functions: preparing students for engaging actively as citizens. It is easy to forget in our efforts to cope with students' need to prepare for the world of work that higher education has traditionally taken as its mission the liberal education of students. The "liberal" in "liberal education" does not mean left of center ideologies but rather "free" or "liberated" education that is not training for work.

I don't have to tell you how hard it is to uphold this vision of education, as the economy, the mass media and politics have turned students from the liberal arts and sciences. The decline of liberal education also reflects the faculty's inability to join together beyond their disciplines and specialties. Because of this fracturing into disciplines and specialties, higher education has not been very good at articulating liberal education and its significance for the public realm. Perhaps competition from places like the University of Phoenix, a for-profit university that does only career programs, and from on­line quickie degrees will spur administrators and faculty to articulate the benefits of a liberal education -- and do it more seriously and more creatively than they have in the last two decades. For ideas, they can turn to the Antiochs and the Evergreens, the Monteiths and the Residential Colleges -- places that have known how to engage students in the most important public issues of the times, teach them how to analyze and act on those issues, and by the way prepare them for very successful careers.

It is unequivocally clear that colleges and universities are frequently public realms in the sense of providing spaces and occasions for the general public to hear about and discuss public issues. In David Mathews' term, they provide "public space" for citizens and organizations to meet on neutral ground to learn about and discuss issues of public concern. Almost all colleges and universities do this, whether by inviting the public to lectures, holding open meetings for electoral candidates, organizing forums on civic issues, and convening groups. The NERCHE Symposium last fall convened representatives of different sectors to deliberate about how higher education could build better relationships with communities -- and vice versa.

The Academy Working in the Public Realm

So we've seen that thinking of universities as public spheres, in the sense of providing space and organizing occasions for the public to think and talk about public issues, is fairly common. We have also seen that universities can be public realms for their members and should be preparing students for engaging in public life. What if we ask, in addition, whether the academy works in and for the public sphere? Here, I think we are likely to encounter skepticism among faculty members and administrators. This is because the "academic revolution" described in the late 1960s by Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, in which distinctive local and regional institutions turned into less distinctive and more national ones, has drawn faculty and administrators away from the communities in which they reside. This is especially true for elite private universities. As a prominent faculty member told me about a series of critical articles about Harvard in the Boston Globe last spring, "Actually, I don't ever see the Globe." When he saw my raised eyebrows, he added, "But I have gotten the daily New York Times delivered to my house for years."

There is another way that universities can work in the public realm. Faculty who live in but are not of their local communities can still function as public intellectuals. About a decade ago, Russell Jacoby, in The Last Intellectuals, bemoaned the loss of intellectuals in this country who spoke on important public issues. Jacoby argued that as more intellectuals took jobs in colleges and universities, where they got caught up in the widespread preoccupation with careers in ever­narrowing disciplinary specializations, they stopped talking to the general public. Now, whether the ranks of university-based intellectuals has declined, there is no question that publishing even in The New Yorker does not get you tenure. Having said that, I want to acknowledge the gifted writers and speakers from the academy on the public circuit who do not seem to be in such short supply as Jacoby thought. Surely, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who writes about science for the general reader, and the literary scholar of African-American studies, Henry Louis Gates, who writes about almost everything, are only two examples of public intellectuals.

But we don't all have the gifts of a Gates or a Gould. Rather than talking about public intellectuals, I'd like to bring attention to public scholars. Now we hit paydirt. For the last four years, NERCHE has run a series of projects about faculty doing public work by using their expertise in behalf of communities, government and other organizations. We began with a survey of all of the colleges and universities in New England to find out about such activities. The survey and subsequent work turned up the rather surprising information that a lot of faculty are involved in such activities. In fact, many have been engaged for years in work of this sort. We found this to be true across the spectrum of higher education, not just in the community colleges and church­related colleges that take service and outreach as their mission.

We found faculty in liberal arts colleges, research universities, and state colleges. What they did varied according to the settings where they worked, but the fact of involvement across the board was striking. Not all were working in the public realm -- that is, in encouraging or laying the groundwork for the citizens to participate in public life. Some were consulting with government agencies, businesses and other organizations that had no connection to the public realm. Others were using their expertise to provide service to organizations like schools and social service agencies -- good work in its own right -- but not contributing to general public discourse or participation.

Here is the real sticking point. For while we found a lot of public scholars around the country, we did not find many universities that supported them. Some universities, research universities and their many imitators, made it hard for them to do public work by devaluing it as not "real" scholarship. The result is that most faculty members are doing these things in spite of their institutions, working around tenure and promotion standards, fitting the work into already overcrowded schedules, trying to integrate it with their teaching and research. Few know about other faculty in their own institution who are engaged in the public realm -- who may be working on similar issues, such as school improvement, sometimes in the same school! In these conditions, the miracle is that so many faculty are as involved as they are.

The real problem is with our institutions themselves. In our research, my colleagues and I at NERCHE found that the generalized support among administrators for public work is very high. Three­quarters of the deans and chief academic officers who responded to our survey said that public work is part of the mission of their institutions. However, when we asked specific questions about structures, resources and rewards in support of this emphasis, much smaller percentages showed concrete support. The result is that the efforts of individuals on campuses are privatized, invisible, isolated, uncoordinated, and not strategic.

College presidents and national higher education associations talk a lot nowadays about the need to increase the university's contributions to society, indeed to think of the university itself as a citizen. They are essentially following the business world, where even companies that are not considered enlightened encourage their employees to be involved in their communities. Corporations do so not out of superior morality but because they think it is good for business. College presidents are beginning to recognize the PR value of public service, PR that cannot be bought at any price. But PR it will remain, unless we get serious.

What would it take to make the contributions of universities to the public realm more significant and systematic? NERCHE has several projects that are grappling with this question. We have been part of a national project sponsored by the American Council on Education to increase the awareness of higher education about its role in the public realm. We have closely examined the structures in support of public work in universities that have them and are working with a number of schools to help them create structures.

More fundamentally, however, I think it is necessary to go back to some of the ideas I discussed earlier about the university as a public realm. And it is here that we must start if we are serious. If we are really honest, we would have to admit that the public realm in colleges and universities is impoverished. The traditional research culture that so many institutions have imitated in their quest for prestige and resources is a vampire that saps the blood of younger and older faculty alike. By drawing faculty away from commitment to their institutions and communities, the research culture has broken up whatever community existed within the academy and whatever connections the academy had with the public realm in the past.

The denigration of applied research and problem­solving has further eroded higher education's connection to the world. The fetishism of much academic writing has contributed to the unintelligibility of academic discourse. The domination of research and publication in tenure and promotion decisions has had a chilling effect on the faculty who do engage in the public realm. I am not advocating that faculty stop doing research and stop publishing. Far from it. But they need to do this work in settings that enabled -- even force -- them to ask whether what they are doing contributed to the public realm. We need to ask that question again, and we need to re­create our universities to make that question central.

Think Tanks
One of NERCHE's hallmarks is its Think Tanks for faculty and administrators from New England colleges and universities. Think Tanks meet five times a year for intense discussions of the most serious issues facing higher education.

Associate Deans Think Tank
This year the Associate Deans Think Tank is focused on the theme: "Learning within a Learning Organization." Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, used the phrase to describe an organization in which people at all levels are collectively and continually enhancing their capacity to create things they really want to create. Even though colleges and universities are about the business of teaching and learning, there are a number of challenges for institutions of higher education to meet to truly become a learning organization. At each meeting throughout the year, the group explored various sub­topics of this theme.

In October, the group tackled assessment as a way to serve learning. Led by Casey Coakley, from Tufts University, members read "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Holyer in a recent issue of Change magazine. As the title implies, Holyer includes alternative and non­standard measures in his discussion of the best ways to assess outcomes. This as a central issue for all of our campuses -- as evidenced by the NEASC standards on assessment and the recent brouhaha over teacher testing.

At the second meeting, Susan Lane, Lesley College School of Education and NERCHE Visiting Fellow, Tammy Lenski, facilitated a discussion on learning from conflict. Think Tank members read from Susan Holton's new book: Mending the Cracks in the Ivory Tower: Strategies for Conflict Management in Higher Education. Tammy Lenski, a professional mediator and trainer, drew on her work with a variety of institutions of higher education to help individuals, groups and organizations prevent or constructively resolve conflicts and disputes.

For the winter meeting the Think Tank read a number of articles, including Arthur Levine's Chronicle of Higher Education piece on higher education as a mature industry, as a backdrop for examining the relationship of colleges and universities to the external world. In particular, the group looked and how we educate external constituents about our purposes and programs. Northeastern's Malcolm Hill, Robert Martin, Westfield State College, and Anita Kaplan, Northshore Community College, co­facilitated the discussion from a number of different angles. First, Think Tank members discussed a case of a faculty/student dispute over grading which illustrated issues of missed communications, mismatched expectations and misunderstandings. The case instigated a discussion about how we can respond better to external pressures that sometimes mount to attacks on how we do business. The group examined how we can both understand these external perspectives and interests and communicate with these constituents in appropriate and constructive ways that become a learning opportunity everyone involved.

Building on this discussion, the April meeting, led by Reebee Garofalo, of the College of Public and Community Service at UMass Boston, and Gwen Rosemond, from Salem State College, addressed the following questions: How do we define what we do? What is the purpose of liberal education as we prepare students for their futures? How can we demonstrate success?

Members of the Associate Deans Think Tank 1998­1999
Nancy Aleo, Massachusetts College of Art; Susan Atherton, Suffolk University; Connie Bosse, Babson College; Joseph Burns, Boston College; Casey Coakley, Tufts University; Diane D'Arrigo, University of Massachusetts Boston; Beverly Dolinsky, Endicott College; Thomas S. Edwards, Castleton State College; Reebee Garofalo, University of Massachusetts Boston; Murney Gerlach, Roger Williams University; Carol Hurd Green, Boston College; Malcolm Hill, Northeastern University; Wendy Hirsch, Bennington College; Deborah Hirsch, NERCHE; Anita Kaplan, North Shore Community College; Milton Kornfeld, Brandeis University; Mark Kosinski, St. Joseph College; Susan C. Lane, Lesley College; Dorothy Laton, Assumption College; James McCroskery, Rhode Island College; Victoria McGillin, Wheaton College; Robert Martin, Westfield State College; Lois Nuñez, Boston University; Sister Mary Daniel O'Keeffe, Boston College; Melissa Read, Dean College; Sarah H. Rockett, University of Rhode Island; Gwendolyn Rosemond, Salem State College; Donna Schroth, Emerson College; John Tumiel, University of New England; John S. Waggett, Trinity College

Student Affairs Think Tank
An ongoing theme in various Student Affairs Think Tank discussions is the effect of the external world on our campuses: calls for accountability, relationships with the media, the impact of new state and federal legislation, and students' multifaceted lives. Members of the Think Tank decided to address these topics head-on by making "External Influences on Student Affairs" the theme for this year. Each of this year's discussions will be informed by two guiding questions: What is the impact on student learning and what can student affairs contribute to the issue?

The first meeting was a day­long retreat, hosted by the University of New Hampshire, that focused on accountability from both personal/professional perspectives and a broader institutional one. Sharon Kipetz, Dean of Students, University of Connecticut and Co­coordinator of the Think Tank, facilitated the discussion from which several issues emerged. In preparation, members read "On Mission and Accountability" by Jim Guy Tucker.

Student affairs is accountable to multiple and extremely diverse constituencies, both on and off the campus -- from Boards of Trustees to trade union officials, from students and parents to neighbors and local law enforcement. As a result, Student Affairs Officers (SAO's) have become experts at developing strategies that require collaboration. SAO's also often take on the role of trans-lator, whether translating the academic experience for students, or translating the world of students to others.

Susan Brady, NERCHE Outreach Coordinator and Paula Gagnon, Acting Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Students at New Hampshire Technical Institute, presented the Seven Principles Workshop for Student Leaders, a workshop developed by student affairs professionals based on the work of Zelda Gamson and Arthur Chickering (see NERCHE Consultation & Outreach in this issue for more information).

The second meeting, hosted by the University of Hartford, focused on the role of outside media. During the discussion, co­facilitated by Rod Crafts, Tufts University, and Cindy Kozil, Dean College, Think Tank members described their best and worst experiences with television and print media. Members shared useful strategies, among them: mastering the sound bite, exercising leadership and developing on­going relationships with key editors and reporters in advance of a "breaking story," and working with on-campus offices of public information to develop training sessions for student affairs staff. The Think Tank tradition of the "Mini­topic in the Management of Student Affairs" continued with a discussion of campus drug use and abuse, especially the recreational use of prescription drugs. A number of campuses reported experiencing problems with students abusing Ritalin and other medications. Emerging educational strategies and policies focus on both students and parents, particularly related to the potential dangers associated with bringing large quantities of these medicines to campus.

At our third meeting, members discussed the influence of government, broadly defined as a major funder to which we are accountable and as the source of acts and legislation that directly impact policies, staffing, and/or programs. The current reality demands that student affairs professionals become more skilled in dealing with public policy. In a conversation facilitated by Anne Fitzmaurice, University of Hartford, members analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of student affairs in this context. The group concluded that the many strengths of student affairs professionals -- the ability to be flexible, to be initiators, to mobilize students and to strategize -- prepare them well for this challenge.

Ken Kelly, Bristol Community College, led the mini topics discussion on campus strategies for addressing stalk-ing and harassment, including situations in which the perpetrator and/or victim are not students. Some campuses have developed domestic violence policies. At other campuses, stalking comes under the campus harassment policy. Mediation, counseling, and preventive education are crucial elements of most successful campus interventions.

Members of the Student Affairs Think Tank 1998­1999
Doris B. Arrington, Capital Community Technical College; Denise Bilodeau, Endicott College; Cathy Burack, NERCHE; Rod Crafts, Brandeis University; Thomas Eakin, Bryant College; Anne M. Fitzmaurice, University of Hartford; Marlene Godfrey, Lesley College; Richard Hage, Plymouth State College; Karen Haskell, Roger Williams University; Barbara J. Hazard, University of New England; Sharon Herzberger, Trinity College; Delina Hickey, Keene State College; Joyce Judy, Community College of Vermont; Ken Kelly, Bristol Community College; Sharon Kipetz, University of Connecticut; Cindy Kozil, Dean College; Tammy Lenski, NERCHE; Christopher Lucht, Simon's Rock College of Bard; Leila Moore, University of New Hampshire; Carlton Perry, Becker College; Marva Perry, Wheelock College; Jacqueline Dansler Peterson, College of the Holy Cross; E. Joseph Petrick, New England College; Linda M. Ragosta, Newbury College; Charles Ratto, Fitchburg State College; Paul Raverta, Holyoke Community College; Eric Riedel, Colby­Sawyer College; Patricia A. Rissmeyer, Emmanuel College; John Rubino, Husson College; Judy Ryan, University of Southern Maine; Maureen Smith, Laboure College; Elizabeth True, Mount Ida College; Constance Wilds, Western Connecticut State University

Department Chairs Think Tank
The Department Chairs Think Tank is led this year by Janice Green, NERCHE Senior Associate, and Barbara Beaudin, Chair, Math and Science, Hillyer College, University of Hartford. New members have joined the group to replace those who have rotated out of the position of chair. NERCHE encourages institutions to support the membership of up to three department chairs to promote campuswide exploration of Think Tank discussion topics.

The Department Chairs Think Tank in past years has focused largely on the "how to's" of carrying out the chair's responsibilities, e.g. mentoring and counseling, faculty evaluation, shared governance, legal issues, etc. This year the group has moved to the consideration of certain broader policy questions faced by campuses everywhere.

The October meeting, led by Barbara Beaudin, focused on the economic, emotional, and social stresses common to students today. Students often report feeling isolated and uncertain about their futures and needing help to feel successful and to become part of their community. Participants shared the various steps taken by their institutions to address contemporary student needs including special advising programs, use of technology and email and student success courses.

In December, the Think Tank met jointly with the Academic Affairs Think Tank in a special session led by Barbara Beaudin and Joseph Mark, Dean of the College at Castleton State College. The meeting was designed to bring together two key campus constituencies for discussion of a very important topic: "Higher Education and Competing Forces Today." As members discussed the three questions described in the write­up for the Academic Affairs Think Tank, they raised the following issues: 1) How do we meet the needs of students for a "safe haven"? 2) How do we help students find their vision? 3) How do we link work lives to learning activities? It was clear from the comments that, as with students, faculty are feeling more stressed. What results is often tension around what students want and what faculty think students need, the increasing demands of technology, increased expectations from outside con-stituents, and the rapidity of change. These issues make the role for department chairs increasingly complex and heightens the need for them to work closely with chief academic officers to meet these demands.

In February, the Think Tank turned to the issue of faculty turnover and implications of impending retirements for department chairs. The Chairs were joined by NERCHE Visiting Fellow, Ellen Switkes, on leave from the University of California system, to conduct a study of the end of mandatory retirement for faculty. Discussion leader, Iain Crawford, from Bridgewater State College, prepared a case study on the role of the department chair in leading a planning process of program review, goal development and hiring strategies. Few departments have developed models of successful retirement planning which allow for transitioning and for recruiting and mentoring new faculty. As many institutions face the faculty shortages that have been predicted for some time, these issues will become even more prominent.

The final meetings will examine the issue of program review and evaluation and the role of department chair in interfacing with non­academic departments.

We are pleased to announce that Barbara Beaudin, in concert with Think Tank colleagues, is preparing a handbook "by chairs, for chairs" that will cover many of the issues addressed in Think Tank meetings over the last two years. Information about the handbook will be forthcoming.

Members of the Department Chairs Think Tank 1998­1999
Donald B. Armfield, Bridgewater State College; Barbara Beaudin, University of Hartford; Gail Carney, Lesley College; Lorrie Comeford, Salem State College; Iain Crawford, Bridgewater State College; Joanne Dreher, Lesley College; Linda Dumas, University of Massachusetts Boston; Ronnie Elwell, Lesley College; Christine Evans, Lesley College; Ann Froines, University of Massachusetts Boston; Robert Gerst, Massachusetts College of Art; Janice Green, NERCHE; John M. Hancock, Fitchburg State College; Ruth Hannon, Bridgewater State College; John Jahoda, Bridgewater State College; Edward L. Jarroll, Northeastern University; Ellen Kosmer, Worcester State College; Tony Laramie, Merrimack College; Peter McClure, University of Massachusetts Boston; Lucia Miree, University of New England; David Tanner, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy & Allied Health Sciences; Marion Winfrey, University of Massachusetts Boston; Nancy White, Pine Manor College

Academic Affairs Think Tank
The theme for this year's Academic Affairs Think Tanks is "Creating the Conditions for Powerful Learning." It is a fruitful theme, with implications that could be explored for many years.

The group was led in the fall term by Zelda Gamson, outgoing Director of NERCHE, and in the spring term by NERCHE Senior Associate, Hannah Goldberg. Joseph Mark, Dean of the College at Castleton State College, serves as Co­coordinator of the group for the second year. The group welcomed many new members, who bring diversity and heightened vitality to the discussions. Members of the group were saddened to hear about the untimely death of Luke Baldwin, Provost of Lesley College, last Spring. His interim replacement, Janet Schulte, delivered a eulogy at the first meeting of the Think Tank.

For this meeting, the group read two provocative readings: "Contemporary Understandings of Liberal Education," by Carol Schneider and Robert Shoenberg, and "The Stressed Student" by Fred Newton. These articles sparked a rich and free­ranging discussion about the aims of education, changes in the student body, the balance between liberal education and the major. Members exchanged ideas and examples from their own campuses about innovative approaches to the education of the "stressed" students described in the Newton article. Hannah Goldberg closed the discussion by observing that the democratization of higher education has created new dynamics, as access has brought both challenges as well as gains. She also pointed out something that the Student Affairs Think Tank has recognized for years: that students bring the increased stress experienced widely in the society into our colleges and universities.

At its second meeting, the group met jointly with the Department Chairs Think Tank to share their views of the Topic of the Day, "Higher Education and Competing Forces Today." Under the direction of Joseph Mark and Barbara Beaudin, University of Hartford, (Co­coordinator from the Department Chairs think tank), the group considered the following three questions: 1. What do institutions offer students today in the face of vocational pressures, fragmented lives, and competition from other providers? 2. What should we be offering, given these challenges? 3. How can chief academic officers and department chairs work together to accomplish this? The lively discussion focused especially on the faculty and stresses they experience themselves, and ways that department chairs could get greater support to do their jobs. There was wide agreement in the joint meeting that the faculty are key to the answers to the questions above and to the challenges faced by higher education today.

The next sessions took up these issues in greater depth. In January, the group examined the student­teacher relationship in the education of the "whole student." Building on readings which included: excerpts from Gamson's Liberating Education, Jane Tompkins' "A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned," and Laura Rendon's moving account, "From the Barrio to the Academy: Revelations of a Mexican American 'Scholarship Girl'," members discussed the power of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary teaching and the difficulty of getting faculty to work outside of their department or disciplines. Think tank members also discussed the struggle to respond to pressures to prepare graduates for employment while offering a liberal arts education that enables students to become strong participants in our democratic society. The March meeting examined this changing landscape and the role of higher education in transforming both the individual and the community. Whether the faculty will be up to the task, and how their efforts will be mobilized through mutual goal­setting, collaboration and the need to foster change is the $64,000 question for the Think Tank -- and for higher education as a whole. Most members of the group agreed that addressing these concerns is urgent.

Members of the Academic Affairs Think Tank 1998­1999
Bruce Bergland, Trinity College; David Buchdahl, Community College of Vermont; David Burgess, Boston College; Thomas L. Canavan, Providence College; Mary Carey, Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions; Theodore DiPadova, University of New England; Walter Eggers, University of New Hampshire; David Entin, Holyoke Community College; Geoffrey Gamble, University of Vermont; Sol Gittleman, Tufts University; Hannah Goldberg NERCHE; Robert Golden, Keene State College; David Hall, Northeastern University; Albert Hamilton, Salem State College; Nancy Hensel, University of Maine Farmington; Sue Ann Huseman, University of Maine System; Steven Ingram, Vermont Technical College; Douglas Johnstone, Cambridge College; David Kale, Eastern Nazarene College; Jackson Kytle, Norwich University; Mark Lapping, University of Southern Maine; Cathy Livingston, Quinsigamond Community College; William H. Lopes, Westfield State College; Ann Lydecker, Bridgewater State College; Richard Lyons, University of Massachusetts Boston; Louis A. Manzo, Stonehill College; Joseph Mark, Castleton State College; Cora Marrett, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Robert L. Pura, Berkshire Community College; Janet Schulte, Lesley College; Patricia Sharpe, Simon's Rock College of Bard; Patricia Spakes, Fitchburg State College; Charmian B. Sperling, Middlesex Community College; Paul Tero, Lyndon State College; John Weston, Newbury College

Chief Financial Officers Think Tank
This is the inaugural year of the Chief Financial Officers Think Tank, formed after a number of participants in other NERCHE think tanks stressed the importance of bringing the perspectives of campus financial leaders directly into think tank discussions. Led by John Cooper, NERCHE Senior Associate, and Janyce Napora, Vice President for Administration and Finance at Salem State College, an enthusiastic group began meeting to explore important dimensions of the theme: "Doing More With More." Nationally, tuition income, state appropriations, and private giving are increasing. The financial circumstances for most institutions in New England are beginning to improve, but the misfit between institutional aspirations and resources continues as ambition outpaces more, but limited, new revenues.

At its first meeting, led by Janyce Napora, members discussed the applicability of for­profit business strategies for leveraging resources, described in a 1993 Harvard Business Review article, "Strategy as Stretch and Leverage," by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. While more revenue is expected for the next few years, members agreed that the nature of more has changed. While revenues will increase on many campuses, the rate of growth is not expected to return to former levels and new revenues often carry restrictions regarding use. Consequently, pressures are expected to intensify for the chief financial officer and senior management team to find ways of getting a higher rate of return from existing resources. The group discussed the role of the chief financial officer (CFO) as seen from a number of perspectives. Of particular interest was the role that the CFO might play as a member of the executive team in promoting a collaborative approach to problem solving. This became the topic of discussion for several subsequent meetings.

"Doing More with More" requires the effort of the entire "team at the top," and members provided various perspectives to the central question of "what does a chief financial officer see as his/her role on the executive team?" Led by members Brenda Smith, Merrimack College, and Jay Kahn, Keene State College, Think Tank members read Jon Katzenbach's article "Making Teams Work at the Top" on the myths of team effort among corporate executives. This article resonated with Think Tank members who work in environments premised on individuality, selfless dedication to original thinking and competition -- seemingly antithetical to team thinking and func-tioning as proposed by Ron Napier in his article "High Performance Teams." Think Tank members shared instances of effective team behavior and elucidated principles that help promote collaboration and consensus. These included: clearly defining the team task, putting together the right people, establishing specific rules for operating and gaining commitment and support from leaders and participants.

The February meeting built on this discussion by examining the challenges of collaborative decision­making. Led by NERCHE Visiting Fellow, Tammy Lenski, the group read from Peter Senge's Fifth Discipline Fieldbook on strategies that groups use for dealing with difficult issues. Think Tank members discussed their role in facilitating collaborative decision-making on difficult topics such as budgets and allocation of resources. These issues served as a backdrop to the joint meeting with the Academic Affairs Think Tank.

Members of the Chief Financial Officers Think Tank 1998-1999
Jeff Apfel, Rhode Island School of Design; Bernard Chretien, University of New England; Brian Cobb, Franklin Pierce College; John M. Cooper, NERCHE; Sister Anne Donovan, Emmanuel College; Charles Gilroy, Lesley College; Deborah Hirsch, NERCHE; Wilbur Jones, University of Connecticut; Jay Kahn, Keene State College; Jean MacCormack, University of Massachusetts Boston; Edward Mackay University System of New Hampshire; Joseph Meichelbeck, Bryant College; Edwin Merck, Wheaton College; Dana Mohler­Faria, Bridgewater State College; Janyce Napora, Salem State College; Thomas Oates, Roger Williams University; Brenda E. Smith, Merrimack College; Richard Sobel, Bristol Community College; Mary L. Spolidoro, Massachusetts College of Art; Edward Terceiro, Mount Wachusett Community College; Elizabeth Winter, Lasell College

Northern New England Think Tank
In its second year, The Northern New England Think Tank for chief academic officers is designed to improve collaboration and build expertise among top administrators who are interested in community outreach. The Think Tank is part of a larger initiative by the Maine and New Hampshire Campus Compacts to advance faculty service and service­learning in rural areas. The group aims to increase institutional support for faculty endeavoring to integrate service with academic study and scholarship and is co­led by Bill Warren, Vice President and Academic Dean, Southern Maine Technical College, and NERCHE's Cathy Burack.

The theme for this year is "Service and Higher Education: Academic Integrity and Risk." Members are reflecting on their institution's mission as it's practiced in light of the following questions: What practices would change/remain if you embraced Ernest Boyer's definition of scholarship, specifically, the "scholarship of application?" What are the risks involved in changing/not changing? These questions frame the specific topics of the Think Tank's five meetings. The first meeting focused on the topic, "Implications for Students" in the context of distinctions between service-learning and service, and practica and internships. Service­learning can provide powerful experiences for students, but also requires time, skilled faculty, thought-ful assessment, and on­going relationships with community partners, if it is going to be tied into the institution's mission.

The second meeting was hosted by the University of New England West-brook College Campus. Daniel Sheridan, Vice President for Academic Affairs, St. Joseph's College, facilitated the discussion of the "Implications for Faculty." Faculty reward and evaluation systems often overlook or under­emphasize the importance of community­based work and service­learning. Currently, the burden falls to faculty to demonstrate the scholarly nature of these activities. It is especially difficult in institutions where faculty are divided by disciplines, and there is little communication across departments about what faculty are doing. Ernest Lynton's, "10 Questions for Depart-mental Discussion," in Making the Case for Professional Service, is one approach that departments can use to begin to develop ways to support faculty engaged in service.

Susan Wycoff, Vice President for Academic Affairs, New England College, facilitated the third discussion, "Implica- tions for the Institution," held at Southern Maine Technical College. Members read "Professing the Liberal Arts" by Lee Shulman. Wycoff highlighted three themes from the article: 1) Service­learning can be a crucible for classroom learning, where students weigh the evidence of their eyes against the theories they are taught. It can help them develop judgment skills. 2) Reflection is a critical part of service­learning. 3) Service provides an excellent tool for integrating learning. Several institutional strategies emerged, including inserting language that supports service or outreach into the mission statement, making service part of faculty work load discussions, showcasing faculty who are doing outreach well, and budgeting funds to support these activities.

Future meetings will address the implications for the community. At the final retreat­like meeting, members will synthesize the year's topics. In the Fall, the Think Tank and Maine Campus Compact will be hosting a regional con-ference on academic leadership and service for all chief academic officers in New England and Pennsylvania.

Members of the Northern New England Think Tank 1998­1999
Sid Barnes, New Hampshire Community Technical College­Claremont/Nashua; Janice Blankenstein, New Hampshire Community Technical College-Claremont/Nashua; Cathy Burack, NERCHE; Jacque Carter, University of New England; Karin Cogswell, Hesser College; Douglas Gelinas, University of Maine; Susan Henderson, New Hampshire Community Technical College-Claremont/Nashua; Nancy Hensel, University of Maine at Farmington; Amy McGlashan, Campus Compact for New Hampshire; Meg Malmberg, Unity College; Mary Nickerson, Andover College; Liz McCabe Park, Maine Campus Compact; Suzan Schafer, Daniel Webster College; Jean Servello, Castle College; Daniel P. Sheridan, St. Joseph's College; Ron Turner, Eastern Maine Technical College; Bill Warren, Southern Maine Technical College; Susan Wyckoff, New England College

Think Tank Events
On Wednesday, May 5th, NERCHE will host members from all of the Think Tanks and their invited guests for a dinner at the Harvard Faculty Club. The special topic for the evening's discussion is "New England Institutions Respond to Distance Education." Panelists will address issues related to the changing role of faculty, the impact on library and information resources, and new opportunities for partnerships.

Sponsors
The New England Resource Center for Higher Education has received support form the Graduate College of Education, the Office of Graduate Studies and the Division of Continuing Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston; Ford Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Exxon Education Foundation, Mellon Foundation, The Education Resources Institute, and anonymous gifts.

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Congratulations to:
 
Michael Baer, formerly Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at Northeastern, is now Senior Vice President for Programs and Analysis at the American Council on Education.

NERCHE Visiting Fellow, Diana Beaudoin, has accepted the position of Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee.

Student Affairs Think Tank alumna and former NERCHE Visiting Fellow, Paula Gagnon, is currently Acting Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Students at New Hampshire Technical Institute.

Milton Kornfeld, of the Associate Deans Think Tank, is serving as Acting Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Brandeis.

Robin Jacoby, former Academic Affairs Think Tank member and Provost at Lesley College, is now Chief of Staff at Partners Health Care System, Inc. in Boston.

Student Affairs Think Tank member, Liz True, formerly Assistant Dean for Campus Life at Castleton State College, now Dean of Students at Mount Ida College.
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Book Review

A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong
Barbar, Benjamin R. NY: Hill and Wang, 1998, 166 pages.
In A Place for Us, Ben Barber presents a tight (147 pages of text), provocative and forward­looking summary of the arguments he has been developing since publishing Strong Democracy in 1984. The essence of his argument is that civil society exists in the associative and imaginative space between government (the coercive authority of the state) on the one hand, and the marketplace (the realm of private interests), on the other. His argument unfolds in this way: we face a crisis as civil society has been eroded by our growing dependency on bureaucratic government and by the dramatic expansion of the market and its attendant culture of consumption.

Those tending toward a libertarian perspective understand the problem differently: they assume that all social transactions are simply expressions of private interest. Civil society, from this perspective, is the market in which private interests are transacted (and a weak government should limit itself to protecting a free market). The libertarian objective is therefore to expand the market, maximizing individual freedom.

Communitarians begin with the assumption that people are first embedded in communities, and that they drag communal ties and bonds into all their other social interactions. From this perspective, civil society is "the zone where people interact and are embedded in communities." The dangers of the communitarian perspective are that it can become nostalgic for a past with firmer ties -- ties of morality and authority that, in practice, can easily become oppressive.

Barber offers a third way -- a concept of strong democracy, of a vibrant civic space in which citizens are actors balancing and negotiating private interests and their relationship to the state. "This third, independent sector," he writes, "is defined by its civic communities -- their plurality is its essence -- which are membership associations that are open and egalitarian enough to permit voluntary participation." It is this space, he contends, that is "a place for us." Without civil society, he warns in one of my favorite lines, "citizens are homeless: suspended between big, bureaucratic governments they can no longer trust..and private markets they cannot depend on for moral or civic values."

Barber acknowledges that this idea is not uniquely his, and part of his effort in this book is underscoring the growing commitment of scholars, public intellectuals and citizens to the idea of civil society -- Robert Bellah, Sara Evans, Harry Boyte, Nan Kari, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer among them. He suggests the impact this idea has had on programs as practical as national service and on civilized public discourse. He provides an agenda for expanding civil society that ranges from the architectural (make malls public spaces by design) to the economic (maintain in an organization a differential ratio of highest to lowest paid of no more than 20 to 1). He offers a useful summary of learn-ed attitudes and behaviors that could support civil society -- seeking common ground, deliberation, provisionality of judgment, listening, learning, lateral communication, imagination.

Barber's new ground is to imagine what civil society might look like in light of "the economic reality of jobs vanishing," what Jeremy Rifkin has called the disappearance of work as we know it and the "painful transition to a 'near workerless information society.'" In brief, Barber posits a future where we will not have enough work available for everyone to "earn their way"; the question is, what will be the consequence of this new leisure time, unwanted as it may initially be? Barber's hope, despite the acknowledged pressures of mass media and a cultural and economic emphasis on material consumption (reinforcing the image of the world as a marketplace), is that we will use this new leisure time to engage in, become actors more present on the stage of, civil society. It's not a bad vision.

As well argued and stimulating, persuasive and hopeful as the book is, I find myself wishing it had an additional chapter, literally on the problem of place that is raised in its title: the relationship between the local and the global, the face­to­face and the invisibly distant. Barber is concerned with a place that is theoretical and constructed by effort of the imagination. By not linking this imaginative realm to the particularity of places, Barber misses an opportunity to reorient the polarities of civil society, to take into account the ways in which the increasing pressures to seek economic and environmental sustainability will impact work, leisure and civil society.

Barber points out in passing, for example, that only 2% of the population is engaged in agriculture, down from the 80% of yesteryear and evidence, seemingly, of increased production efficiency, the move toward a global economy and the end of work as we know it.

Others engaged in the deliberative space of civil society view statistics like this somewhat differently. Wendell Berry, for example, argues ("Does Community Have a Value") that large scale agribusiness is ultimately inefficient -- producing less per acre than traditional small­scale agriculture and concentrating pollution (waste from hog farms is the hot political issue in Iowa this year). In the long run, agribusiness not only destroys community, he concludes, but it is simply not sustainable. Scott Nearing, a radical economist and advocate of intentional living from the 1910s until his death in the 1980s, argued powerfully that what is most efficient in terms of energy consumption generally ends up being the most ethical and civil, as well. Arguably -- even reasonably -- the case can be made that the perceived "efficiency" of the workless economy is simply not sustainable. And I would add, somewhat less reasonably and more intuitively, my own guess that if the link between economics and place is broken, then there will be no "place for us."

My point is this: sustainable economies are embedded in particular places; these places are the ground of local community; our interests in these local places are what bring us into civil society and public life. Productive life -- of subsistence goods, art, civic space -- is inextricably linked to the problems of place and sustainability. "Think locally," Myles Horton taught, "and act globally." This is not a veiled communitarian argument premised on the search for moral authority in a rootless world, but rather an argument that a theory of civil society must literally be grounded in particular places if it is to have any weight in practice.

My home town is in court trying to block a McDonald's restaurant from moving into main street (between a Dunkin' Donuts and a Walgreen's Pharmacy, no less). How can a theory of civil society help us to find a way through an argument that is not only uncivil in its own right, but is also trapped by the polarities of market and government that Barber describes? How can a theory of civil society respond to the announcers of a new call­in show on the campus where I teach, whose print advertisement ends, "Call in, tell us what you think!!! We'll at least listen to you and pretend that we're interested, even if we aren't."? How can a theory of civil society create new space for deepening conversations about sustainable economy in a town that has just lost 300 jobs? The answers, I suspect, will be found in the boundaries between the metaphoric space that Barber helps us to imagine and the particular geographies of place that gives consequence to our ideas .

Reviewed by Keith Morton, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Associate Director of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College.

NERCHE Consultation and Outreach

NERCHE consultants provide services to colleges and universities in New England and across the country. NERCHE prides itself on working closely with campus contacts to best meet institutional needs.

At the request of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, we have begun a second year­long educational program for administrators employed by the state system. The Executive Leadership Institute, under the capable direction of Sharon McDade, provides an in-house development opportunity for senior administrators throughout Massachusetts and is tailored specifically for their needs.

NERCHE's first focused program, "Revitalizing General Education," provides content and process consulting for faculty and administrators engaged in curriculum improvement. At any point in time, this critical area of higher education is undergoing some form of review and change at 75% of colleges and universities. Many institutions have sought the help of NERCHE's core of Gen Ed consultants, and we expect to see increased use of this program by community and technical colleges as they enhance and expand their general education curriculum.

This Fall we piloted another focused program -- our first for student leaders -- at the University of Maine. Based upon "The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" and designed by Senior Student Affairs Officers, this workshop teaches the Seven Principles to students and helps them to understand how they, as leaders, can improve the learning environment of their campus. Watch for more information about this workshop and a compatible series for other campus populations.

NERCHE has undertaken a year­long evaluation of the Ford Foundation's initiative to revitalize the way social sciences are taught at some of the leading schools in the country. NERCHE affiliate, Leah Smith, is leading this inquiry at 13 campuses: Bryn Mawr College, Carlton College, Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard University, Pomona College, Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.

Outreach and consulting activities continue to benefit from the experience of NERCHE's Senior Associates and Visiting Fellows. We welcomed Nancy Thomas last Spring and, under her leadership, initiated a campus­ tailored program of Preventive Legal Education. Nancy combines her legal and higher education experience in ways that make practical sense for faculty and administrative decision­makers.

We are pleased to welcome Amy Kirle Lezberg and Hannah Goldberg (profiled in the NERCHE News section of this newsletter) to our group of experienced consultants. Amy, formerly of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, is currently investigating the impact of distance education on New England institutions, and will be coordinating a NERCHE Think Tank seminar on that subject in May. In addition, she assists institutions seeking to monitor and implement activities related to quality control at their local and overseas campuses.

Perhaps the most desirable mentor any academic administrator could want, Hannah Goldberg, former Provost of Wheaton College, is particularly interested in working in this role with a small number of chief academic officers. Her knowledge of faculty, curriculum and academic leadership keeps her busier than a "retired" person should be.

As always, NERCHE finds the right people for clients' needs, linking colleagues together to improve higher education. Whether you are struggling to design assessment plans, learning outcomes, improve faculty governance or implement ADA regulations, our client­centered, affordable consulting services have the resources you need. To explore further, contact us.

NERCHE News

Symposium
Community Building: An Agenda for Higher Education and Its Communities

In November 1998, NERCHE marked its 10th Anniversary by bringing together faculty, administrators and college presidents from across New England, with community leaders and philanthropists to consider the state -- and fate -- of civic life in the region, including the region's higher education institutions. Alison Bernstein of the Ford Foundation opened the day by proposing a set of indices to determine whether a college or university is deeply committed to community building. A panel including Ceasar McDowell, Director of MIT's Community Fellows Program; Frances Moore Lappé, Executive Director of the Center for Living Democracy; Charlotte Kahn, Director of the Boston Community Building Network at the Boston Foundation; and Chuck Collins, Co­director of United for a Fair Economy, responded from the perspective of the community. During the afternoon session, community leader and activist, Mel King, challenged institutions of higher education to assess how well they build community within their own walls. Hodding Carter III, of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, drew links between community and higher education agendas, emphasizing that it is the "calling" of the academy to go out to the community and to bring the community in. Responding to Carter's talk was panel of college and university presidents from the region: Judith Ramaley, of the University of Vermont; Margaret McKenna, Lesley College, Sandra Kurtinitis, Quinsigamond Community College, and Evan Dobelle, Trinity College. Symposium Proceedings are available from NERCHE.

Visiting Fellows and Senior Associates
Hannah Goldberg has worked in higher education for the past 30 years as a faculty member and administrator at Antioch and Wheaton Colleges. She has consulted extensively with the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) and countless institutions nationwide. As Provost and Academic Vice President for 15 years at Wheaton College, she championed innovative faculty development initiatives, introduced a new general education curriculum, a first­year seminar program, multi­cultural requirement, service­learning requirement and helped build the Filene Center for Work and Learning. She guided Wheaton College through a transition from single sex to co­education, ensuring that women's learning and performance not be sacrificed in the decision to admit men. As a NERCHE consultant, she specializes in working with chief academic officers and this Spring, she assumed the leadership of the Academic Affairs Think Tank.

Ellen Porter Honnet, a counseling and consulting psychologist, has just returned from five years working in London and Tokyo. During this time, she consulted with international schools, conducted research and taught courses and workshops on the impact of the cross-cultural experience on individuals and families, global nomads and adolescent development. As former Assistant Dean of Harvard College for Co­Education and the Sexual Harrassment Hearing Officer, she worked with a wide range of student groups and the Dean of the Faculty on issues of policy and improving student life. There, she co­authored a report on the role of public service at Harvard. From 1988­96 she served as program consultant to the Johnson Foundation (Wingspread, Racine, WI), facilitating and supporting conferences in the areas of community building and youth commun-ity service, volunteerism and service­ learning. She has been a consultant to a variety of foundations, non­profits, government organizations, and higher education consortia, and served on the Boards of COOL (Campus Outreach Opportunity League) and National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE). Ellen will be working with NERCHE to enhance our Visiting Fellows program.

Tammy Lenski, President of Lenski & Associates, is an independent educator, professional facilitator, mediator and trainer with more than 13 years of leadership experience in higher education. Prior to starting her own practice, she served as a vice president, dean, director and adjunct assistant professor, working in four­year, two­year, public and private, women's and coeducational institutions. She has worked on campus issues as diverse as strategic planning, leadership education, enrollment management, crisis management, campus crime, campus master planning and diversity education. Tammy has published, presented and facilitated nationally on a range of higher education topics and has held leadership roles in several higher education organizations, including NERCHE's Student Affairs Think Tank and the Vermont College Student Personnel Association. Tammy is working with NERCHE to develop a leadership retreat for college and university cabinets.

From 1987 through 1998, Amy Kirle Lezberg was the Associate Director of the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). Responsible for selecting and training evaluation teams for more than 200 institutions in New England and selected overseas areas, she has given more than 100 presentations at individual institutions, as well as regional and national meetings on the subjects of self­study, academic outcomes assessment and accreditation. Prior to joining NEASC, she directed the English as a Second Lan-guage Program at the University of Mass-achusetts Boston and at the Massachu-setts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences, where she also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Nationally active in devising policies for the quality control of degrees offered electronically, Amy currently serves on the board of The Internet and Higher Education. The proliferation of programs that are offered electronically and their impact on traditionally offered degrees will form the basis of her work at NERCHE, where she will be conducting a study on the impact of distance education on students, institutions, and the very enterprise of higher education. In addition, Amy will be teaching this spring in the UMass Boston Doctoral Program in Higher Education.

Stephen J. Nelson is currently a research associate in the education department at Brown University and is at work on a book on the moral leadership of college presidents. Previously, he served as Dean of Students at Bard Col-lege, Director of Student Activities and the College Center at Dartmouth Colege, and Assistant Director of the College Center at Wellesley College. For nearly two decades, Steve has been actively involved in collegiate alcohol and other drug issues, regionally and nationally. He was a co­founder of the New England College Alcohol Network (NECAN), which provides resources on alcohol and other drugs to colleges and universities in New England. He has been a member of the US Department of Education's Planning Group for the Network of Col-leges and Universities Committed to the Elimination of Substance Abuse. Since 1996, he has served as a Center Associate of the Higher Education Center on Alco-hol and Other Drug Prevention funded by the US Department of Education. He is also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Steve works with NERCHE's consulting program in the area of program evaluation and review.

Elsa Nunez has been an administrator and faculty member at a variety of institutions in the northeast, holding such posts as University Dean for Academic Affairs and Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs at The City University of New York (CUNY) and Associate Dean of the Faculty at The College of Staten Island/ CUNY and professor of English at Ramapo College, Lehman College/CUNY and currently at Wheelock College. She has been a Hispanic Leadership Fellow in Academic Administration for the New Jersey Department of Higher Education, and a fellow at the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Ford Foundation. In 1991, Governor James Florio of New Jersey named her Outstanding Woman of the Year in Education. Elsa re-gularly publishes and presents her research on language acquisition, language and culture, and curriculum development; her most recent book is Pursuing Diversity. Elsa serves on several editorial boards of journals, statewide task forces on higher education policy, and numerous national boards. Elsa is conducting research on women and minority administrators in New England to inform the development of a program aimed at these constituents.

Ellen S. Switkes is an Assistant Vice President for Academic Advance-ment at the University of California where she oversees the development and interpretation of academic personnel policy for the 40,000 faculty and other academic appointees at the University of California's nine campuses. Specific responsibilities include faculty compensation, health science practice plans, severance compensation, grievance and layoff policies, and policy for academic collective bargaining. Some projects of note include a policy to extend the tenure clock for new mothers and fathers, policy revisions for access to faculty records and dis-missal of incompetent faculty. Ellen oversees affirmative action programs and policies for faculty and graduate students, and she is currently involved in program changes to conform with changing Regental policy and state law on race and gender based admissions and employment. Ellen will be using her leave to develop a paper on the end of mandatory retirement and will serve as a resource to NERCHE think tanks and to the students and faculty at UMass Boston's Doctoral Program in Higher Education.

Lynton Award Announcement
In January, NERCHE presented its third annual Ernest A. Lynton Award for Faculty Professional Service and Academ-ic Out­reach at the American Association for Higher Education's (AAHE's) Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards in San Diego. We received almost 150 nominations -- each a ringing testament to the creative and deeply meaningful work of faculty engaged with their campuses and their communities. To present only one award was unthinkable, so this year, we presented four.

Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of Philosophy, History of Science; and Frédérique Apffel Marglin, Professor of Anthropol-ogy, are the co­founders of the Center for Mutual Learning at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Center endeavors to connect the academic world to communities in the United States and South America. Kathryn and Frédérique's work centers on how professional expert knowledge needs to change in order to learn with and from local communities. They have developed new epistemological theories and concepts, which help to form a bridge between learning in the academy and learning in the community.

Joseph Bathanti is Professor of English, Program Coordinator of the Humanities Division and Writer­in­Resi-dence at Mitchell Community College in Statesville, North Carolina. Joseph's belief in the power of writing extends the walls of his classroom to encompass the community. It is in this extended classroom that his deep commitment to education as an avatar of social and intellectual change comes to bear. His work involves many groups that society often overlooks -- prisoners, battered women, and the poor.

Leonard Fleck is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Ethics in the Center for Ethics and Humanities and the Philosophy Department at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. His special interests lie in medical ethics and, particularly, in issues of social and economic justice in the allocation of health care resources. Through the "Just Caring Project," he uses his skills as a philosopher­ethicist to facilitate community dialogs that bring together citizens and opinion leaders to determine moral values in health care. The ultimate goal is to create a more informed electorate to participate in political decision making about the future of health care.

Peter Kiang is an Associate Pro-fessor in the Graduate College of Educa-tion and the American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Peter is the founder of the University's Institute for Asian American Studies and the University's Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment. Currently, his work focuses on analyzing racial conflict in schools, developing leadership with Asian American youth and immigrant/refugee communities, and ensuring access by communities of color to the information superhighway.

We are pleased to pay tribute to the following Honorable Mentions.

Clint Gould, Associate Professor, Humanities and Coordinator, AIDS Educ-tion Program, Community College of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for his work in HIV/AIDS education, prevention, policy and research; Meredith Minkler, Professor and Chair, Community Health Education Program, Division of Health and Medical Sciences, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, for her work in fostering the development of healthy communities; Mary Morton, Associate Professor, Biology, Charles A. Dana Faculty Fellow, and Science Projects Coordinator, College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, for her work with K­12 public school teachers and students on innovative biology curricula and pedagogy; Thomas O'Toole, Assistant Professor, Division of General, Internal Medicine, Associate Director, Division of General, Internal Medicine Fellowship Program, and Course Co­Director, School of Medicine, Ambulatory Care Course at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for establishing clinics that provide healthcare to the homeless; Robert Prigo, Professor, Physics, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, for his work with local K­12 teachers and administrators on inquiry­based, science teaching and learning; Linda Silka, Professor, Regional Economic and Social Development and Director, Center for Family, Work, and Community, University of Massachusetts Lowell, for her efforts to promote and enhance skill building with local immigrant groups; Robert Sykes, Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, for his work that integrates design principles for physical space with new political and institutional frameworks for community building; and Ann Withorn, Professor of Social Policy, College of Public and Community Service, University of Massachusetts Boston, for her work on welfare rights and social justice.

We would also like to recognize our friend and colleague, the late Luke Baldwin, former Provost of Lesley College in Cambridge Massachusetts, who embraced a broad definition of scholarship and who supported, challenged and encouraged faculty to take their work into the community.

News from the Doctoral Program
The Doctoral Program in Higher Education marked a major milestone in June 1998 by awarding its first two Doctorate of Education degrees. Leslie Hitch and Paul Harrington earned their Ed.D. after five and four years, respectively, of full­time employment and participation in the doctoral program.

The two dissertations topics indicated the range that Ed.D. students are pursuing. Leslie investigated "Recalibrating the Relationship Between Institutional Needs and Faculty Expectations: The Faculty Hiring Process in a Time of Preci-pitous Financial Distress." Her study found increases in administrative oversight of the hiring process following financial distress, but revealed that these increases resembled those already occurring over the range of collegiate institutions. Paul, Associate Director of Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, examined "The Economic Returns to a College Degree: With Special Reference to Major Field of Study and Race/Ethnicity and Gender." His work suggests that colleges and universities represent the last important bridge between affluence and the margins of the economy.

Twenty more students are working at the dissertation stage, exploring issues as varied as curriculum changes, managerial leadership, student psychiatric disabilities, unionization, and trustee roles.

The practice­oriented UMass Ed.D. program is designed for mature professionals in higher education who combine doctoral study with full­time employment. Classes meet weekly on Fridays throughout the regular term and for in-tensive three­week summer sessions. The cohort model enhances group support and expands the range of professional settings examined in the classrooms. For information about applications, please contact program secretary, Virginia MacKay, at (617) 287­7601 or mackay@umbsky.cc.umb.edu.

Ernest A. Lynton National Conversation on Faculty Professional Service
Last summer, 20 invited participants gathered in Boston for a one­day meeting hosted by NERCHE to exchange information and resources about their work, find avenues for collaboration, and develop ways to make the work already being done more visible. The meeting was held in honor of NERCHE's late colleague and long­time friend, Ernest A. Lynton, who was one of the first scholars to "make the case for professional service." Those gathered were Rick Battistoni, Providence College, Kenneth Brook, Montclair State University, Cathy Burack, NERCHE, Barry Checkoway, University of Michigan, Amy Driscoll, California State University Monterey Bay, Zelda Gamson, NERCHE, Ira Harkavy, University of Pennsylvania, Deborah Hirsch, NERCHE, Barbara Holland, Northern Kentucky University, Hugh Lena, Providence College, KerryAnn O'Meara, University of Maryland, Judith Ramaley, University of Vermont, John Saltmarsh, Campus Compact, Lorilee Sandmann, Michigan State University, Sarena Seifer, University of Washington, Nancy Thomas, NERCHE, and Edward Zlotkowski, American Association for Higher Education.

The conversation produced the following recommendations:

Defining faculty professional service: As the field matures, we need to develop a definition of faculty professional service that is local enough to reflect different campus missions and cultures and national enough to mean something to the larger higher education community in terms of the disciplines.

Studying institutional change processes that strengthen the service mission: We need to study the conditions on campuses that foster service: for example, when a campus is in transition, when there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, when campuses are writing a new strategic plan, and/or when faculty and institutional leaders become connec-ted to national efforts to redefine scholarship.

Strengthening reward systems for professional service: We need to continue to support professional service and make the work visible through such means as offering awards, including NERCHE's national Lynton Award for Faculty