Other People's Colleges - by Ethan W Ris (Paperback)

About the Book

"America's constant push to make its colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, in Other People's Colleges, Ethan Ris argues that the reform impulse is baked into American higher education. For well over one hundred years, elite reformers have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. Colleges and universities have responded with a combination of resistance and acquiescence. The end result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence. When that reform is beneficial (offering major rewards for minor changes), colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile (attacking autonomy or values), they know how to resist it. In the early twentieth century, the "academic engineers," a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but their efforts fell short, despite their wealth and power, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians are again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But top-down design is not destiny. Today's reform agenda in higher education should not be viewed as a new existential threat. It is a longstanding fact of life to be assimilated, diverted, or subverted on an ongoing basis"--

Book Synopsis

An illuminating history of the reform agenda in higher education.

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People's Colleges, the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence.

In the early twentieth century, the "academic engineers," a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People's Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today's reform agenda.

Review Quotes

"Other People's Colleges provides critical insights for understanding contemporary calls for reform. The book provides a careful tracing of the lasting impact that came not only from the efforts of these philanthropists and their foundations to create reform, but also the coalitions that emerged to resist them. An important and timely read for those interested in higher education history, philanthropy, governance, and policy."

--Laura Perna, author of "Taking It to the Streets: The Role of Scholarship in Advocacy and Advocacy in Scholarship"

"This book makes important and useful contributions to the field. Through its considerations of how academic outsiders worked to structure and restructure higher education, it provides insight into a crucial era that has relatively few book-length works devoted to it. It is well researched, compellingly written, and will have wide appeal to scholars interested in higher education, reform, and philanthropy."

--Timothy Cain, author of "Establishing Academic Freedom: Politics, Principles, and the Development of Core Values"

"For too long, historians have tended to treat the massification and differentiation of higher education, as well as the systems and structures that emerged during that period, as products of inevitable forces that reshaped higher education as institutional reformers sought to keep pace with the invisible hand of growth. This book, however, is poised to deepen our understanding of the philanthropists, reformers, and bureaucrats that worked to control and guide these changes by employing the logic of industrial production to universities during this critical time of transformation in higher education." --Nathan Sorber, author of "Change and Continuity in American Higher Education: Lessons from Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Innovations"

"The achievements of Ethan Ris's first book, Other People's Colleges: The Origins of Higher Education Reform, are numerous . . . he not only offers snapshots of interesting moments in higher education that have transcended their time and place, but also presents an original theory of institutional change."
-- "History of Education Quarterly"

"Remarkably researched and well-written. . . Ris's book should be required reading for anyone interested in today's discussions about the past and future of higher education."-- "Choice"

About the Author

Ethan W. Ris is assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Nevada, Reno.