This book speaks to three challenges that face higher education in its quest to redefine the academic community: (1) beliefs about ourselves, our circumstances, our relationships, and our problems; (2) beliefs about personal and organizational change; and (3) beliefs about academic life, about reform and revolution, competition and cooperation, bureaucracy and community, and managers and agents of change. The book sees opportunity and challenge in three areas: financial to find the means to halt the current cycle of negative retrenchment; academic to define a vision of the ends to be achieved; and management to create and start a process of change. The discussion covers many of the substantive issues of higher education including cost containment, incoherent curricula, retrenchment, loss of community, faculty renewal, new forms of scholarship, teaching and learning, accountability, and a new clientele of learners. It looks at social and psychological issues, such as interdependency, security, and competition and cooperation, and at organization and management issues such as defining academic quality and total quality management precepts. (Contains 165 references.) (CH)