Higher education is undergoing profound change at an unprecedented pace in today's academic marketplace. This accelerating and precipitating change has motivated these distinguished authors - passionate observers of academe - to read well-chosen publications about meeting demands and responding to needs among our nation's historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). We have captured the essence of expediting the critical analysis to confront the challenges of academic administration, finance, student life, technology, and other areas in the academic enterprise. Today's administrators and academicians must be able to make balanced decisions based on a methodology that is compendious, intelligible, unambiguous, clear, and credible. The authors have provided this methodology based on their collective experiences in perhaps the toughest sector of the marketplace - the HBCU sector. The timing of this savvy book could not be better. Given recent media coverage of controversial and debatable decision-making at institutions of higher learning, this book can serve as a resource for meeting institutional challenges, approaching them with sequential structure, involving stakeholders in analytics (patterns) & informatics (processes) and formulating recommendations for future arbitration. The active research process for making these tough decisions provides a collaborative convergence to advance the process from a collegial examination of facts and issues. This process supports widespread advocacy in higher education for fostering organizational learning, leveraging human capital, institutionalizing human empowerment, and growing learning communities of practice for success.

Higher education is undergoing profound change at an unprecedented pace in today's academic marketplace. These authors have captured the essence expediting of the critical analysis processes needed to confront the challenges of academic administration, finance, student life, technology and other areas in the academic enterprise. Administrators and academicians nowadays must be able to make balanced decisions based on a methodology that is comprehensive, unambiguous, and credible. These authors have provided this methodology based on their collective experiences in perhaps the toughest sector of the marketplace - the HBCU sector. And while HBCU sectors will find this work especially rewarding in fact all institutions of higher learning can benefit from this desktop book. Given the recent media coverage about questionable decision making at institutions of higher learning in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida and many others around the world, this work and its research findings can serve as an alternative resource for meeting institutional challenges, approaching them with sequential structure, getting key stakeholders involved in the process, and formulating recommendations for future arbitration. The action research process, for making these tough decisions HEAR and NOW, provide a collaborative synergy to expeditiously move the process from a collegial examination of tacit as well as explicit knowledge. This process certainly supports the wide spread advocacy--in higher education and other business and governmental venues--for fostering organizational learning, leveraging of human capital, institutionalizing human empowerment, and growing learning communities of practice for success. Finally, this book is driven by intellectual prisms that often are overshadowed by political expediency, personal agenda, power positioning and other human inhibitors that cloud decision making centered from data authentication, internal consistency, and verifiable collaboration -- in brief, ""truth"".