By’s Musings New Foci

As I noted in previous posts, I will be restricting my future posts to the three broad areas of education, faith and religion, and organizational theory and operations. These areas should open up many opportunities for engaging dialogue.

Within the field of Education, I will begin by addressing a score of significant issues and dilemmas which have vexed contemporary society in general and the discipline of education in particular. Within these topics, there are numerous divergent and contrasting points of views. This diversity will hopefully engender much discussion. 

These topics include issues that relate to students, faculty, administration, curriculum, facilities, finances, policies, governance, and operations. Since they are too numerous to list in this post, I will include a preliminary list in a subsequent post.

Along with the list, I will invite the audience to participate in a poll to help determine which issues I should address first. 

Within the broad area of Faith and Religion, I plan to publish short posts that will be written in the form of testimonies, prayers, devotionals, and sermonettes.

I hope to achieve two goals with these posts. The first is to explicate Biblical principles and develop practical applications to the everyday lives of modern Christians. I hope that this will help those who use Christ’s name will be able to integrate spiritual practices and disciplines into their daily lives.

My second goal of this section is to counter the arguments of those who feel that any religious teaching, but particularly Christianity, impedes intellectual curiosity and hinders serious thinking.

One very active spokesperson for this group is David Silverman, a well-known atheist, who stated in his book, Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto in a Theist World, “Atheists seek truth; theists ignore it.” 

My essays will attempt to show that there are Christians in the intellectual arena who do not ignore truth but sincerely seek it. Hopefully, and prayerfully, I will demonstrate that we can rationally say that faith and reason do not have to be at odds with one another. At the end of the day, it is possible to reconcile them.

However, this task is much too large for one person. I fervently desire and will solicit audience participation in this mission. We can come closer to the truth as a community. As the Lord, speaking through Solomon, admonished us in Proverbs 27:17, “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” (KJV)

In the arena of Organizational Theory and Operations, I will be concentrating on how organizations come into being, how they maintain themselves, and how they expire. This work is based upon ongoing research into closed institutions within American higher education (IHEs). A colleague and I have been working on this project in one form or another for many years.

For the past ten years, we have concentrated our study on more than 1,600 colleges in the United States that closed, merged, were acquired by another institution, or otherwise disappeared. In the course of this study, we have identified eight factors that we believe were the major contributing elements in the demise of these IHEs.

These factors were

• Market
• Expertise
• Passion
• Leadership
• Values
• Resources
• Internal Culture
• External Environment

You may recognize the first three as the three factors that Jim Collins identified as the key components for organizations seeking to move from Good to Great.

As I looked more closely at the eight factors, I came to the conclusion that they were definitely descriptive of the cause of death of the IHEs.

Moreover, in most circumstances, problems in these factors did not appear overnight. Thus, it seemed reasonable that they could be the basis of a model that would serve as a predictor of future difficulties.

I was very excited at this point. Questions came fast and furiously. Firstly, could we develop a sustainability scale or a vitality/morbidity index, using these eight factors to determine whether an IHE was thriving, surviving or dying? Secondly, if this process worked for IHEs, could it work for other organizations? 

One of the biggest difficulties in this research was the lack of a consistent language to talk about colleges and their demise. The first posts in this arena will start the process of developing a consistent language to describe what we mean by a college and what happened to them.

The next set of posts will more fully define my eight factors and all of their subfactors. When we have completed this foundation, we will begin a series of posts that describe our sustainability scale and our vitality/morbidity index. We will save the details of our research for the website and later publication.

Watch for my October 2 post describing the changes coming to the Higher Ed By Baylis website.