Organizing Higher Education for Collaboration: A Guide for Campus Leaders

Organizing Higher Education for Collaboration: A Guide for Campus Leaders by Adrianna J. Kezarand Jaime Lester Jossey-Bass 2009 290 pages ISBN 978-0-470-17936-9 Reviewed by Connie D. Foster Adrianna Kezar and Jaime Lester's Organizing Higher Education for Collaboration makes a unique contribution to the literature by focusing on the connections between collaboration in higher education, institutional change, and campus culture. Creating a collaborative campus is an intentional and deliberate process. It does not happen by accident and, according to Kezar and Lester, it will not occur until major organizational systems are intentionally redesigned. The book provides a framework that is likely to make collaboration, or any change initiative, a reality on campus. The authors bring considerable expertise to the subject. Adrianna Kezar is an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, where she serves as associate director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis. Jaime Lester, an assistant professor of higher education at George Mason University, has been involved with research projects focusing on the transfer and retention of community college students, in which collaboration emerged as a critical factor in student learning. The book is divided into three sections: the first provides an introduction to collaboration, the second shares results of the authors' research, and the third presents a model for collaboration in higher education. Part one describes the existing research on why higher education must become more collaborative and why such collaboration is remarkably difficult to achieve. Kezar and Lester build a strong case for the advantages of collaboration. They draw on evidence from business, government, and higher education and on results from studies on student learning and teaching that illustrate how collaborative efforts such as learning communities and community service learning enhance student performance on many learning measures. The authors also address the challenges to collaboration, naming departmental silos and bureaucratic or hierarchical administrative structures as the primary barriers. Leaders with a change agenda must be both aware of and knowledgeable about the existing structures, processes, and routines operating on their campuses. Many institutions have attempted to create a new initiative, such as team teaching, only to find that the traditional structures and processes and the existing campus culture hinder both the initiative's creation and its success. While most administrators already know about many of these structural problems, Kezar and Lester do an excellent job of articulating the significant number of challenges and barriers, such as specialization, professionalization, disciplines and departments, reward systems, the clash between academic and administrative cultures, and responsibility-centered management and budgeting. Throughout the book, the authors use as their framework a model of collaboration from the corporate sector developed by Mohrman, Cohen, and Mohrman (1995). This model proposes that to support collaboration, organizations must move from "a context designed to support individualistic work. to a team based organization or design. The organizational context features that need to be redesigned to enable collaboration include structure, processes, people, and rewards" (p. 36). To test this collaboration model, Kezar and Lester conducted a study of four comprehensive regional public institutions with a variety of existing collaborative initiatives. They visited each of the institutions and interviewed faculty, staff, and administrators. They also observed meetings of collaborative campus groups and reviewed mission statements, strategic plans, accreditation reports, minutes from meetings, and Web sites. Based on their observations, interviews, and document analysis, the authors determined the number and type of collaborative activities in which the institutions were engaged, the systems in place to support collaboration, and what institutional members believed contributed to their success. …