Heart & Soul: Higher Education Action Research Techniques & Strategies of University Leadership

Higher education is undergoing profound change at an unprecedented pace in today's academic marketplace. This accelerating and precipitating change has motivated these distinguished authors -- passionate observers of academe -- to read well-chosen publications about meeting demands and responding to needs among our nation's historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). We have captured the essence of expediting the critical analysis to confront the challenges of academic administration, finance, student life, technology, and other areas in the academic enterprise. Today's administrators and academicians must be able to make balanced decisions based on a methodology that is compendious, intelligible, unambiguous, clear, and credible. The authors have provided this methodology based on their collective experiences in perhaps the toughest sector of the marketplace - the HBCU sector.

The timing of this savvy book could not be better. Given recent media coverage of controversial and debatable decision-making at institutions of higher learning, this book can serve as a resource for meeting institutional challenges, approaching them with sequential structure, involving stakeholders in analytics (patterns) & informatics (processes) and formulating recommendations for future arbitration. The active research process for making these tough decisions provides a collaborative convergence to advance the process from a collegial examination of facts and issues. This process supports widespread advocacy in higher education for fostering organizational learning, leveraging human capital, institutionalizing human empowerment, and growing learning communities of practice for success.