Higher Education and the New Society

Abstract

Higher Education and the New Society by George Keller Johns Hopkins University Press 2008 188 pages ISBN: 978-0-8018-9031-4 Reviewed by Thomas C. Longin George Keller needs no introduction to Society of College and University Planning (SCUP) members or readers of Planning for Higher Education (PHE). Most of us knew him as the father of "academic planning;" the author of Academic Strategy (Keller 1983), likely the most influential book ever in the field; and the founding and long-time editor of PHE. And yet, it is important to keep in mind who George was and all that he accomplished in the realm of academic planning as one ventures into this, his last book. Certainly not his greatest literary accomplishment, this book must still be counted as a monumental attainment - monumentala its call for radical structural change in American higher education and monumental because it was written while George carried on a valiant struggle with leukemia. The book, not published until shortly after his death, is superbly written and intentionally provocative; it manifests George's passion for and dedication to higher education as well as his willingness to offer radical solutions for difficult challenges. For those who had the privilege of hearing George Keller present at SCUP annual meetings in his later years, the landscape of this book really an extended essay - will be familiar. Fascinated as he was with educa donai change, in this little book he is sharply focused on the breadth, magnitude, and pace of contemporary social change. He had earlier concluded that American higher education needed to recognize "that the society has been going through revolutionary changes and that new, outside forces require educators to rethink and redesign some of their operations" (p. xi). Here, while defending American higher education against charges that it has persistently resisted change - he clearly delineates numerous significant changes - he nonetheless chides his colleagues about the kind of change initiated in contrast to the kind needed: "Change in higher education can no longer be incremental. It must be fundamental and structural" (p. xii). After lamenting the fact that most historical analyses of American higher education have been "remarkably insular" (p. 3) - that is, detached from their full social and historical context Keller identifies two kinds of social transformation with which American higher education needs to deal: (1 ) the movement away from a more agrarian, small town, local, and self-reliant society toward a more urban, corporate, educated, liberated, and international social life with greater emphasis on "equality of gender, race, and ethnicity, dependence on numerous entitlement programs, lessened moral taboos, and e-mail and Web pages" (p. 5) and (2) a more recent "collection of fundamental shifts, new conditions, technological innovations, and changing behaviors" (p. 6). Keller devotes nearly half of the book to cataloguing and chronicling a plethora of social changes that appeared to him to be eroding the social fabric of America. Demographic changes abound: everything from declining fertility rates in developed countries to "an inexorable aging" (p. 10) of the population in many countries, to burgeoning (nearly uncontrolled) immigration in the United States, to the "crumbled" (p. 19) nuclear family and the decline of traditional family life, all with dire consequences too numerous to mention. Second among the drivers of change is technology or, in Keller's mind, the communication (digital) revolution of the 20th century with its ubiquitous impact on both research and teaching in higher education. Keller identifies economic change broadly conceived as the third driver of social change, noting that the "growth of America's economy in recent decades is a chronicle of astonishing success" (p. 41). Focusing particularly on the 1970s - a decade he selects as showing the greatest transformational change since industrialism unfolded on the American scene - he cites the rise of global competition and international terrorism; an excess of "blunders, lapses, and failures" (p. …