Requirements: This course requires everyone to read, write, and participate. Universities are places of reading, writing, and participation; they are consensus driven within an often highly conflict driven context; and whether private or public, they are all highly political organizations. To manage these enterprises, academics require the ability to analyze, report, and communicate with their colleagues, constituents, and friends. In this class we will do all three. Students must have a personal email account and address in their own name for our discussion list.

Also, students need access to the Internet for webpages and email. The required reading is available online through our class website, and the class discussion requires email access. In addition, all students must have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader available on their computers to read documents in the .pdf format. The essays appear online in this format as do most of the readings.

Reading: This course provides a core set of readings. The required reading uses a variety of materials published in locations accessible through the Internet. Most of the readings are collected in our password protected online site. We will send you the username/password for the collected reading site at the beginning of the course. The Schedule on the Main Contents page provides a guide to the class. Each week is defined by an introduction and a set of readings. Everyone should have read the introduction and begun reading the materials for the week by the time the class meets. This information serves as the basis for the in-class presentation and discussion and the email discussion during the week. The comments you make in class, your online discussion, and the essays you write should reflect the substance of your readings. The link to Internet Resources provides an annotated list of websites useful for students of university management and other higher education topics. For weeks 2 through 13, the members of the class will contribute essays on the week's topics. The essays will be posted the night before the regular class meeting, and everyone will need to read these during the week and find occasion to comment on our colleagues' work.

Writing: Beginning with Week 2, each member of the class writes 6 essays, one every other week, based on 6 different themes (using chapters, articles, and other materials in the readings or acquired elsewhere). Each essay will be 500-1000 words submitted electronically in a file saved in Microsoft Word document format (file extension .doc or .docx) or Adobe Acrobat format (.pdf) for posting to the class website. A roster with the schedule of presentations is available in the private section of the course website. The essays should focus on issues and materials related to the current week's topics. For example if an essay is due for week 4 it should address issues related to teaching and students. This means that your essay posted on the night before the class of week 4 should explore topics related to the readings and the introduction collected for week 4 on Teaching.

The essays will appear online exactly as you write them, so please include a title, your name, and a date. Although this is not a writing class, please write clearly, use spell-check, and include references to the reading or other materials as appropriate to your topic. Most of us benefit from a grammar checker as well. The easiest way to transmit these files is to email them as attachments to jlombardi@library.umass.edu. We will post these essays on the class web site in the password protected, private pages for review by all members of the class. Essays are due on the day before class at 5 pm each week beginning with week 2 and ending with week 13. Half the class submits essays each week.

Participation: This class meets for about three hours a week. We have about two hours of live in-person class. We all participate the equivalent of at least one hour on the Internet through the email discussion list. Everyone should participate in the conversations in class and in the email discussion list. Minimum participation is approximately three email posts to the list per week. More postings are better than fewer. Quality contributions are better than uninformed comments. Email posts that use and reference materials from the reading are especially valuable because they demonstrate that we have actually read the material!.

Grades: The essays count 40%, Class participation counts 25%, and the email discussion list participation counts 35%. Note that in this course there is no final paper as the six essays serve that function. In addition, there are no examinations on the readings. Instead, the email discussion provides an opportunity to demonstrate that you have read many of these materials, can comment on or critique them effectively, and reference their contributions in your own email posts.

The Internet: This class requires everyone to use online resources and email. While we have live office hours by appointment, much consultation between students and instructors uses email. You will find many resources on higher education online. The Internet, as everyone now knows, is a highly undisciplined collection of information and tools. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to use effectively, but rich beyond compare in data, access to information sources, and communications.

The Internet and its many resources are not the subject of this class, and the information online rarely provides a complete resource for every research issue. Instead, the online world represents a continuously transforming collection of information of variable quality. Those with an interest in the future of higher education need to understand what is valuable, useful, and unreliable online. The Internet will not solve our problems, it will not end the university as we know it, it will not eliminate the need for teachers and students, but much of its content will enhance, enable, and enrich what we do. We use information online and in the library interchangeably and with equal facility.

Class Format: This class functions in two connected dimensions. The first takes place in real time once a week in a regular classroom setting. The instructors present the topic, offer some insights, and provoke some discussion. The second takes place every day of the week at any time through the online email discussion list. A discussion list does not require us to be in conversation at the same time and place; it only requires us to check our email frequently, read each other's comments on the topic of the week, and email back to the list with insight, suggestions, commentary on the readings, new information, and Internet sites of interest. We engage in these discussions on a week by week basis. Each week, the discussion, engaged and guided when necessary by the instructors, addresses primarily a new set of issues and topics.

Each week begins with the live class discussion and takes as its base the material in the readings and the student essays posted for that week. The discussion list is an Internet email tool that prolongs, extends, and improves the quality of the live classroom interactions. The live class session sets the tone for the online discussion list and helps us personalize our comments to the class. This mode of conversation and discussion has become essential for managing universities because it permits a flattened organizational structure with less hierarchy and more shared information. It can reduce rumor propagation and improve response time for administrative and academic questions and answers. It has its dangers and difficulties, but it is powerful and ubiquitous.

This is a class about how colleges and universities work, not about any particular institution. Its purpose is to understand the structure and operation of America's higher education enterprise with an emphasis on research universities, although we often look at other types of institutions for perspective. Everyone brings their personal experiences in various institutions of higher education to the conversation, and that varied background provides an important dimension to the class discussions. In this class we are all participants in higher education, and the pursuit of objectivity is sometimes a challenge and its achievement a desirable accomplishment.

In most cases our view of higher education seeks to identify how things work, rather than determine how they should work. Everyone has an opinion and perspective on what universities should be doing. We tend to focus on the operations as they are, understand how and why they work the way they do, without necessarily passing judgment on the ideal characteristics of institutions and their activities. We believe it is possible for people of widely differing political, economic, social perspective to understand the structure and operation of these institutions even as they may disagree dramatically about what these colleges and universities ought to be. Indeed, many observers seek change in college or university operations, but often have a poor understanding about how and why they operate as they do. As a result, we often see proposals for reform and change that fail, not because the purpose is flawed but because the proponents of change do not understand how the institutions work.

Pictures: We have almost everyone's picture from Spire on our picture site. If we don't have your picture, at the end of the second class, we can take your photograph and add it to our protected webpage for pictures. Because we spend so much of our interaction time online, it sometimes helps to have a picture to place an email with the colleague we see in class but whose name we may not remember. The pictures also help your instructors remember who you are when we have the opportunity to write a letter of recommendation for you some years from now. If anyone does not want their picture posted online, they only need send a private email to jlombardi@library.umass.edu and your picture will not appear or will disappear. In case you don't like the picture we took, we can try again on the third week.

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