Cautionary Tales : Strategy Lessons from Struggling Colleges

Through a unique case study approach to examining and analyzing colleges that have struggled, Alice Brown reveals the steps that can lead to a sustainable operation and, when closure is inevitable, the steps to do so with orderliness and dignity.

Rather than expounding on management theory and prescriptions, she focuses on narrative examples of survival and closure, recounted by real people in actual colleges, and reports the lessons they learned. Here are examples of strategies involving mergers, partnerships, or “going it alone”, and their outcomes, that illustrate principles that can serve as guides for fragile colleges struggling to address their social and economic challenges.

This book also offers guidance by seasoned scholars and administrators on issues as varied as leadership, the roles of the president, governing boards, faculty and staff, in articulating and implementing mission and strategies for survival.

While this book is of immediate practical value for trustees and leaders of small colleges as they look toward and plan for the future, for anyone aspiring to an administrative positions in higher education the examples constitute a microcosm of the interplay between the external constituencies, governance structures and internal forces that sustain or undermine institutional health, and which are hard to observe clearly in larger, more decentralized environments.

Alice W. Brown spent much of her academic life as an administrator at Eastern Kentucky University and the University of Kentucky, having taught previously at Appalachian State, Ohio University, and Eastern Kentucky University. She directed an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant that led to the formation of the Appalachian College Association, which she then led as president until her retirement.

Richard K. Kneipper

Robert Zemsky