Toward Transformative Change, March/April 2009

This issue of Trusteeship features articles focused on the challenge of change in higher education. Steve Pelletier calls the academy's habits of "glacial-paced reform, incremental change, or tinkering around the edges" insufficient to meet current needs. Steve Jordan discusses one of those needs, educating and supporting the growing numbers of low-income students and students of color on our campuses "whom higher education historically has not served well." Cathrael Kazin and David Payne examine another need, creating and implementing effective means of assessing student learning, and warn that without this, "the entire postsecondary enterprise rests on a shaky foundation." Scott Cowen offers hard-won lessons of changes made in the wake of Hurricane Katrina through Tulane University's Renewal Plan.

Anne Ponder writes of "the burden and the gift" of our financial crisis, acknowledging the human costs of the cuts to higher education funding as well as the opportunities to clarify thinking and focus on mission. This burden and gift are the board's to shoulder. They must catalyze our institutions and our system of higher education into making the changes necessary to deliver on their promises to society and to meet the needs of the nation. Nothing less will do.