Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century

This work is drawn from the author's experience as a teacher, a prize-winning scholar of American literature, a feminist thinker, and an innovative administrator at a major public university. Offering a sobering view of what may lie ahead, Annette Kolodny explains the reasons for the financial crisis in higher education today and boldly addresses the challenges that remain ignored, including changing demographics both on campus and across the country and the accelerated globalization of higher education and advanced research. The volume features practical solutions and workable programmes for change. Among her insights, Kolodny offers a thorough defence of the role of tenure and outlines a set of procedures to ensure its effective implementation. She proposes a structure for an "Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment Policy" and provides a checklist of family-sensitive policies that universities can offer their staff, faculty and administrators.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix A Personal Preface: Reflections on Five Years in a Dean’s Office I 1. Facing the Future: An Introduction 33 2. “60 Minutes” at the University of Arizona: The Polemic against Tenure 53 3. Raising Standards While Lowering Anxieties: Rethinking the Promotion and Tenure Process 81 4. Paying the Price of Antifeminist Intellectual Harassment 98 5. Creating the Family-Friendly Campus 131 6. Teaching and Learning in a World of Cognitive Diversity 159 7. Setting an Agenda for Change 173 8. Failing the Future; or, How to Commit National Suicide at the End of the Twentieth Century 214 A Closing Refrain: Reflections at a Graduation 249 Appendix 1. University of Arizona College of Humanities Promotion and Tenure Procedures 257 Appendix 2. Summary Checklist of Selected Family-Friendly Initiatives and Programs 269 Notes 273 Works Cited 281 Index 291

About the Author :
Annette Kolodny is the College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at The University of Arizona. She is the author The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 and The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. She is the editor of Joseph Nicolar's The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
“Annette Kolodny has turned her articulate mind and her marvelous imagination to the world of academic leadership. Failing the Future is personally moving, with a sharp and honest focus, and it should be read by all those who care about the future of higher education.”-Barry Munitz, President and Chief Executive Officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust and former Chancellor of the California State University System “This book should lead to an opening of the American mind. It is possibly the best book on higher education in the last decade. It is full of ideas that one needs to wrestle with, discuss, and chew over in faculty lounges, over e-mail, in journals, and in faculty senates. Failing the Future shows us not only what we must do, but explains HOW.”-Emily Toth, author of Ms. Mentor’s Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia “This is a welcome and outstanding work. Particularly at this time, with the avalanche of right-wing and largely mindless criticism of universities, this book clearly sets forth the actual situation, the real problems, and suggests useful and possible solutions to the complex situation of higher education in our country today.”-Carolyn Heilbrun, Avalon Professor in the Humanities Emerita, Columbia University