Light, R. and A. Jegla. 2022. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 256 PP.
Reviewed by Stephen J. Handel
I watch This Old House on my local PBS station on Saturday afternoons. Each episode profiles the challenges of remodeling a single house. I’ve always enjoyed the program because it honors craftsmanship. The program highlights the expertise of carpenters, plumbers, roofers, electricians, landscapers, window installers, and others who collectively work to improve a home in ways that celebrate the structure’s history while upgrading its components to sustain it for future inhabitants.
For some viewers, This Old House must seem like a quaint, even retrograde exercise in home-envy. The show never touches on—nor was it designed to address—societal housing issues. I imagine that urban planning policy wonks trained at UCLA or MIT would find the show, at best, adorable in its treatment of our country’s struggle to eliminate housing insecurity, especially among our most vulnerable citizens.
Becoming Great Universities is a little like This Old House. It is a kind of faux “how-to” guide for faculty members, deans, and student services staff who want to improve the campus experience for undergraduate students. Readers of this book—like viewers of This Old House—may be charmed by its narrow treatment of issues specific to the unique workings of higher education. In place of plumbers and electricians, Becoming Great Universities enlists the craftsmanship of an entire cadre of higher education artisans who are essential to the improvement of campus life. These artisans include departmental deans, teaching faculty, student affairs officers, institutional researchers, and students themselves. These on-campus constituencies constitute the construction crew needed to bring an old dwelling up to code—one campus at a time.
My analogy is, of course, strained. Still, the frustration I had reading Becoming Great Universities is the same one that occasionally bothers me when I watch This Old House. It all happens on such a small scale and for a limited number of individuals. I have to believe that the positive ripple of such efforts must dissipate quickly.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me at least tell you a bit about the book.
Becoming Great Universities begins with the premise that “Each college or university… is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results it gets” (5). This preamble sets the stage for a recurring refrain: campus leaders—faculty, staff, and students—must develop a shared sense of responsibility to improve campus life. “An overarching theme that guides this book is that excellence is not about being something. It is about becoming something” (authors’ italics, 17). The authors believe that campus culture is the driving force that either impedes or advances progress in undergraduate education. If there is no collective action, there can be no authentic improvement. In the double talk of motivational gurus, “If you want to keep getting what you’re getting, keep doing what you’re doing.”
Becoming Great Universities contains eleven chapters. Each chapter addresses a specific challenge or issue likely to be relevant for college leaders who work with students in and outside of the classroom. Topics include: “Experimenting with Teaching to Improve Student Learning Outcomes,” “What are Students Actually Learning?” and “Inspiring Students to Think Globally.” The authors then expand on the topic and offer recommendations to spur student success.
The authors’ recommendations form the core of the book and serve as the essential contribution to the literature on campus improvement and student success. By design, their recommendations are inexpensive and relatively easy to implement. If some of their suggestions sound simplistic, the authors assert no moral or professional authority in making them, recognizing that campuses and students are diverse entities and appropriate solutions will need to be tailored accordingly.
The authors, Richard Light and Allison Jegla, both attended Harvard University as undergraduates, although 50 years apart. Light is the author of Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds (2001), a short and often charming book that is required reading for student affairs professionals. (The last time I checked, the book was in its tenth printing).
The authors’ earnest intentions are abundantly clear from the outset. Refreshingly, their approach to the complex topic of campus reform is open-handed and positive, with no hint of dogmatism, orthodoxy, or cant. The prose style, the authors’ assure the reader on page four, is “conversational.” Unlike most books on higher education, these authors have nothing remotely discouraging to say about higher education. The first author asserts, for example, that most colleges in America are “genuinely pretty good” (2). From their perspective, college campuses already possess the talent available to improve the undergraduate experience. No special consultants or software are needed to boost student outcomes. The authors are seemingly open to all potential solutions so long as there is an underlying ethos that supports data-driven change and that faculty, deans, students, and others seek answers collectively, actively, and collaboratively.
Becoming Great Universities is the flipside of The College Dropout Scandal, reviewed by me in these pages in 2020. That book presented persuasive evidence of what was wrong in higher education but offered few solutions. Becoming Great Universities says almost nothing about current challenges facing higher education, yet it offers a variety of strategies to boost student success. Although neither approach is entirely satisfactory, I was especially adrift reading this book because it is not grounded in current issues that trouble our colleges and universities. Instead, readers are offered solutions for “problems” that, while earnest, struck me as generic and occasionally precious.
Perhaps the authors’ intention was to create a book that would be palpable to higher education insiders, such as faculty and departmental deans. The book’s minimal context may be strategic; an authorial maneuver to help faculty and other student service personnel embrace reform in ways that do not judge current or past practice. It can’t be lost on any reader that the book advances a singular notion that improvement is best achieved by focusing on only a handful of students at a time. And I am willing to entertain the idea that this approach is worthy of non-specialist insight, a return, perhaps, to a kind of teacher-student interaction that is almost always misunderstood by people who are not immersed in the daily routine of postsecondary teaching. That work, Light and Jegla seem to be saying, is neither theoretical nor abstract. It is personal.
Despite my ambivalent assessment, Becoming Great Universities pleads its case most convincingly in its post-colon subtitle: Small Steps for Sustained Excellence. That it is a modest book in its aims, recommendations, and intended audience is hardly dishonorable. In fact, the book’s virtues are obvious. It is clearly written. The recommendations to improve higher education are unambiguous. Best of all, the authors’ intentions recognize that higher education has always been a place where change has been, if not embraced, then understood as a central characteristic of its existence. Surely there is room for a book whose approach to reform is rational, unargumentative, and collegial.
Those of you who have restored an old house—or maybe just the laundry room—know that it is an act of singular devotion. Perhaps our collective efforts to remodel higher education require a similar and more personal act of fidelity.
About the Author
Stephen J. Handel is an experienced admissions and enrollment leader. He writes regularly on higher education issues.
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