Robert Zemsky

Making Reform Work is a practical narrative of ideas that begins by describing who is saying what about American higher education, who's angry, who's disappointed, and why. Most of the pleas for changing American colleges and universities that originate outside the academy are lamentations on a small number of too often repeated themes. The critique from within the academy focuses on issues principally involving money and the power of the market to change colleges and universities. Sandwiched between these perspectives is a public that still has faith in an enterprise that it really doesn't understand.

Checklist for Change diagnoses the problems in American higher education today and describes principal reforms that must occur in combination in order for it to remain a vital enterprise: a fundamental recasting of federal financial aid; new mechanisms for better channeling the competition among colleges and universities; recasting the undergraduate curriculum; and a stronger, more collective faculty voice in governance that defines not why, but how the enterprise must change.