Understanding Authority in Higher Education

(Hardback)

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Within the complex environment of higher education, administrators and faculty members face daunting challenges in their unique domains of institutional governance. Many of the greatest challenges arise from basic misunderstandings of authority and its limitations by administrators and faculty members alike. These misunderstandings are the primary source of disruptive confusion, mistrust, and mismanagement. Consequently, an institutions governance would improve significantly if its personnel clearly understand the fundamental principles of authority. To bring about this improvement, Understanding Authority in Higher Education clarifies issues of authority in an academic setting. Throughout, it introduces basic concepts of higher-education administration and then examines the limits of authority in context. Pedagogically, the book strives continuously to ascertain whether authority is used properly from a legal perspective, emphasizing the influence of academic cultural norms on legal principles and vice versa. But, Understanding Authority in Higher Education goes further than law textbooks by using real and anecdotal case studies to examine aspects of authority that dont appear in court proceedings those that lie beyond the reach of the law. In these cases, the book explores the anthropology the behavior and the culture of authority in the academic environment.

Reviews

Trenchant, incisive, and nuanced, Understanding Authority in Higher Education is the most lucid and comprehensive explanation of how various constituents in colleges and universities derive their legal authority to take actions and why. A veteran in higher education administration, Dean Smith systematically explicates how authority flows throughout an institution, including in the context of shared governance. This book is a must read for everyone in academe faculty and administrators alike. -- Gary A. Olson, president, Daemen College, Amherst, NY
Given our increasingly litigious society, this book is a 'must-read' for students and faculty in higher educational administration and for university administrators and decision-makers. The author has done a truly masterful job of presenting, dissecting, and analyzing the full spectrum of decisions in higher education that frequently end up in court. Relying on recent case histories or anecdotes, the author does an excellent job of clearly and systematically describing the chronology of events from administrative decision-making to court decisions, and the ramifications of those decisions. -- Judith K. Inazu, acting director, Social Science Research Institute, and Director, Office for Evaluation and Needs Assessment, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Dean Smith has given us an outstanding analysis of the amorphous nature of authority in the academy. In 12 chapters he merges theoretical concepts with specific examples and case law about the actual functioning of academic culture and tradition. The specific chapter summaries make it a useful tool when a quick overview of a complex topic is required. Graduate students in Higher Education will find this a practical guide to a difficult set of issues. Administrators and faculty will want to keep it on their shelf for reference when considering the crucial question of 'Who Governs the University' -- Kenneth P. Mortimer, president emeritus, Western Washington University and the University of Hawai'i and chancellor emeritus of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Author Bio

Dean O. Smith has been a professor of physiology for thirty-seven years at the University of Wisconsin Madison (twenty years), the University of Hawaii (eleven years), and Texas Tech University (six years). For twenty-two of those years, he was in the higher administration as an associate vice president for research, a vice president for research, an executive vice chancellor, and a system senior vice president. Over the years, he has published 135 scientific articles and a definitive book on university research management. He is now professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii.