Becoming Great Universities Small Steps for Sustained Excellence

"Becoming Great Universities arose from co-author Richard J. Light's visits over the past twenty years to more than 250 campuses and his conversations with presidents, administrators, faculty, and students. Light and co-author Allison Jegla have distilled the topics arising from these conversations into the ten chapters that frame their book, with emphasis on the prospect of promoting a culture of continuous innovation for creating value for students. This book is precisely about the university's teaching and student development mission-not research. The overwhelming evidence in the higher education literature asserts that it is on the teaching and education side that our colleges and universities are most challenged, and therefore that is where the greatest improvements can and must be made. Light and Jegla's message to higher education leaders is that improving performance depends to a great extent on their purposeful development of the institution's culture as a community, and on leveraging this culture through the encouragement of constructive working relationships across all sectors of campus, including administration, staff, faculty, and students. Their chapters cover the following topics: how to help students from under-resourced backgrounds; how to encourage students to invest their time and talents beneficially; how to attract students from non-traditional backgrounds to campus; how to improve learning outcomes through innovative teaching; how to assess learning; how to productively elicit student opinions, ideas, and advice; how to facilitate constructive interaction among students from differing backgrounds; how to build opportunities for lifelong learning; and how to inspire students to think globally. Throughout their book, Light and Jegla emphasize practical lessons for promoting measures of innovation on each front. With a broad spectrum of institutions in mind, the authors present dozens of no-cost or low-cost, actionable initiatives that faculty, university leaders, and even students can implement, always in the spirit of working toward their campus's sustained improvement over time"--