The key to an American corporate renaissance is the development of "participation management" skills and environments that allow for the full use of ideas that arise from within the corporation itself. Companies must relearn to trust their people and encourage them to use neglected creative capacities. (Author/MLW)

Responsibility Center Budgeting/Management in higher education places at the heart of the university a mode of rationality in decision making that subverts educational policy and weakens the institution's ability for corrective cultural criticism. Academic leaders should make academic and research decisions based on students' and society's…

Examples of retrenchment at colleges and universities are given as are five principles such as the need to reconsider institutional mission. Both strategic and tactical perspectives are applied to retrenchment decisions of college leadership. (DB)

"Thinking without assent" is seen as a moral pathology within our pluralistic society. Dealing with it should be higher education's agenda. Citizens in academe can provide new convictional possibilities for a pluralistic society. (MLW)

Recommendations of commission reports on improving quality in public education are seen as primarily political statements reflecting the public outrage over the declining quality of American schooling. If the recommendations for sharpening basic skills spill over into higher education, there will be pressure to make colleges into trade schools.…

When declining resources make difficult choices unavoidable, higher education must: assert a unified, coherent state strategy for instruction, financial aid, research, and public service independent of federal policy; eliminate outmoded facilities and obsolete equipment; reconsider the instructional process; and reevaluate the role of faculty.…

Universities are "organized anarchies," with individual colleges and even departments pursuing independent objectives. The institutions themselves contribute to this organizational anarchy and to their own disintegration in how they organize themselves with regard to budget, in the incentives they give to colleges to raise their own funds, and in…

Suggestions of how a university should go about the task of technology transfer are presented. Two important lessons to relate include: the imperative of a decision-making infrastructure and maintaining perspective. Experiences at the University of Houston when a professor made some discoveries in high-temperature semiconductivity are described.…

The Reagan revolution is making profound changes in the basic assumptions that have undergirded American educational and social policy. The time has come to form a new national consensus whose unifying idea is educational quality. The declining quality of teachers poses the gravest threat to the quality of education. (MLW)

The obstacles to aid-and-access research on minority students include: inadequate models of the decision process, heterogeneous subpopulations, and the momentary equality of 1977. Until research yields qualitative knowledge of why similarly situated teenagers make different decisions about college, analysis of minority aid-and-entry decisions will…

The use of computer technology in college management has its own momentum, and the danger is that it will be pursued for its own sake. However, the use of computers to enable students to think more deeply and effectively, rather than just more technically, will be challenging and rewarding for higher education. (MSE)

The president of Notre Dame University offers some advice for college presidents. Included are developing courage to make unpopular decisions, learning to live without praise, sharing leadership with others, and giving credit where it is due. Relationships with trustees, faculty, and students are also discussed. (JMD)

Accreditation of specialized college programs would be improved by increasing communication and specific reform agendas; longer intervals between comprehensive self-studies; improved site-visit and accreditation-decision teams; greater consistency; opportunities to form new accrediting agencies; easing documentation burdens; measuring quality by…

The lack of satisfaction with the political process as the means of reaching informed public policy judgments about higher education is seen to be manifested in the intermediate agencies created by every state. Important choices remain between the concentration of authority in centralized governance systems and the decentralization of authority.…