Academic Leaders Talk About What Works. In preparing the book, Donald spoke to faculty and administration from four major American universities. The most important thing they talked about was the concept of the learning community, which places a focus on students.
Students are the key.
The learning community harkens back to the foundations of universities. A lot of people think about universities as a centre for research, but relatively few people think of it as an intellectual centre. It is much closer to the band of scholars that formed the early disciplines, but most evidently it is collaborative. Universities have strayed from this ideal partly because they cater to the career-oriented philosophy of their clientele. In more recent research I've been doing with students, I am investigating whether they are prepared to invest a great deal of time in structuring their learning, thinking and following a pattern of inquiry.