Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus 163 accepts the offer. Support programs, collégial interest and successful mentoring are critical to the retention of new faculty. A Help List: Information for New Faculty (Table 14:1) would be a most effective orientation tool for new faculty and mentors. From the outset, Perlman and McCann propose to provide a practical guidebook for recruiting faculty. They are most successful in their objective by providing clear suggestions, checklists and guiding principles to individuals who will be engaged in this important activity. In addition, the authors also provide a thoughtful and interesting perspective on the assessment of teaching and scholarship. Their emphasis upon the importance of departmental and institutional planning as preparation for hiring is also useful since a clear understanding of expectations for new faculty will assist in their adjustment and integration. The concluding focus on shared collégial, departmental and institutional responsibility in supporting new faculty to assist in their success provides a longer view perspective on recruitment. Recruiting Good College Faculty would be a valuable resource on any faculty member's or administrator's bookshelf. 4* 4f Madeleine Green (Ed.). (1997). Transforming higher education: Views from leaders around the world. Phoenix, AZ: American Council on Education and Onyx Press (Pp. xii, 339 ). Price: $57.00. Reviewed by Robert Pike, Department of Sociology, Queen's University It is almost a tautology that power is so diffused in universities that its loci are hard to locate. If by "power" is meant the ability to require obedience, then the point is well taken. If, on the other hand, one thinks of power born of persuasion, logical argument and perhaps charisma, then academic leaders with these talents can, in the right circumstances, have a powerful impact on policy formulation in their institutions. In this book, ten such leaders — presidents, rectors, vice-chancellors representing universities and one technical institute in ten countries — write of the major national and international forces for change which are impinging on their countries' higher educational systems. They offer also personal accounts of their successes and failures in guiding the process of academic transformation within their own institutions. The Canadian Journal of Higher Education Volume XXVIII, No. 2,3, 1998 164 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus The national studies cover the United States, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Britain, France, the Czech Republic, South Africa, China and Japan. They are preceded by four regional reviews of higher educational developments in Europe, Asia, Latin American and Africa, all written by scholars with expertise in the respective regions. The editor, Madeleine Green, is responsible for international initiatives at the American Council on Education (ACE), and obviously well-acquainted with world-wide issues of academic leadership. Her own contribution is an introductory overview of the main forces for change under the headings of access, funding, economic and social development, accountability, autonomy, technology and internationalization; and also a brief account of the main actors in the change process. The authors of the national studies were requested to write their chapters with an eye on these same forces, since their impact is evident in most higher educational systems, whatever the diversities of social, economic and political experience. Since this is a complex book, I will concentrate initially on two recurrent themes which are likely to leave lasting impressions on the reader. The first is a recognition that, in many regions of the world, the condition of the universities is perilous, and the opportunities of young people for quality higher education very limited. The worst case scenarios, as noted by Fred Hayward of ACE, are in most countries of subSaharan Africa where social, economic and political crises has reduced most of the region's outstanding universities to " pale reflections of their former selves" (p. 88). Nigeria is the nadir — "the system of higher education [there] has deteriorated to the extent that it makes little, if any, contribution to development" (p. 12) and thousands of academics have fled the country. Moving to the Americas, uncontrolled expansion in Mexican universities has resulted in an underqualified professoriate, with over 70 percent of faculty teaching undergraduate programmes holding only bachelor's degrees. In instances like these, and especially in those African nations where institutional heads have become subservient to those in power, the scope for leadership is often limited to a desperate holding action. In Hayward's words, "a high proportion of African universities are under such external pressure and control that there is little academic freedom" (p. 96 ). Yet, despite this grim scenario, another recurrent theme is the extraordinary capacity of universities and colleges to cope with, and even help initiate, dramatic social and political changes. Thus, one outcome of The Canadian Journal of Higher Education Volume XXVIII, No. 2, 3, 1998 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus 165 apartheid's demise in South Africa has been a great expansion of private colleges which, without government funding, are catering to 200,000 mainly black and coloured students. Another outcome is evident in the work of rectors like Brian Figaji who describes the success which he and his colleagues have had in making Peninsula Technikon, originally planned to give second class status to the coloured population, into a place which instills a sense of pride and self-respect into its students. In another political context, Josef Jarab, rector of Palacky University in the Czech Republic outlines the aftermath of the fall of communism: uncompetitive, dogma-bound universities and the legal nightmares associated with trying " to cleanse the institutions of intellectually impotent, immoral, if not outright criminal individuals" (p .266). Yet Palacky University won the Hannah Arendt Award in 1996 for its accomplishment in transformation in the post-communist era, and Jarab himself was a popular spokesperson for democracy during the so-called "Velvet Revolution." However, as he notes, all is far from well, since many qualified young Czechs are, as yet, unable to gain university admission, and prospective salaries are low. For these reasons, the rise of a hitherto alien market mentality amongst government officials, bringing with it a prospect of university tuition fees, is regarded by Jarab as a threat to social equity in a society which has relied so heavily on education for national survival. Jarab comes from a tradition where higher education is seen as an investment for the society rather than the individual. This tradition has powerful roots in Europe, being associated with public universities and colleges, low or no tuition fees, and students — notably in France.— ready to protest volubly at the prospect of fee increases. Yet, the catch is that many governments are increasingly unable or unwilling to meet the growing costs of rapidly expanding higher educational systems and, even with reduced financial support, want far more say in the financial affairs of the university sector. Such is another theme which is pervasive throughout this book. In some countries, notably Britain and Australia, government intervention in higher education restructuring has been massive. The federal government which dominates higher education in Australia recently amalgamated 67 diverse universities and colleges into 35, sometimes thereby creating constituent campuses some hundreds of kilometres apart. Bryan Wilson, vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland, views the potential cost savings of this move with scepticism The Canadian journal of Higher Education Volume XXVIII, No. 2,3, 1998 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus 166 (think of the travel costs!) but notes that 35 institutions can be more easily controlled by a new government department with no prior experience of managing higher education. In Britain, the binary system of universities and polytechnics has been abolished in the context of an extraordinary doubling of the postsecondary participation rate — from 15 to 30 percent — during the past few years. Yet, over the same period, per capita student funding in real terms fell 26 percent, and Kenneth Edwards, vicechancellor of the University of Leicester, notes that however undesirable it might be for British students to pay more than minimal fees for their education, "the alternative would be too awful to contemplate" (p. 233). Parenthetically, a large fee increase for British students was announced after the publication of this book. Edwards is one of the academic leaders who points out that the tradition of overwhelming reliance on government funds makes universities remarkably vulnerable in tough economic times. From this perspective, K. George Pedersen, long-term president of the University of Western Ontario, looks at the Canadian higher education sector with a critical, and uneasy eye. Canadian universities, he notes, are acutely vulnerable in their reliance on governments, and whilst the educational experience of our students is "uniformly quite high" (p. 155), an outcome of the reliance is complacency whereas " the competition afforded by private universities, including the flexibility of market-driven tuition fees, would be an added incentive toward excellence in both teaching and research" (p. 155). Reflected here is some admiration for the American mix of public and private institutions, though, as Rector Jarab noted, an increased market orientation brings social inequities — most private universities are inherently socially elitist — and, it is also doubtful that Canada would have much success in developing a financially viable private sector, given its culture of public support. On the other hand, our universities could certainly have done more to increase their economic independence, not least through the recruitment of foreign students willing to pay full fees. Australian universities have attracted 450,000 such students, a number which makes the recruitment efforts of our universities, hampered by disparate jurisdictional controls, look thin indeed. Obviously, one cannot to full justice to this book in a short review. So a few summary observations in closing. First, many academic leaders are justifiably critical of governments which want greater access for fewer resources, and which may have little understanding of the culture The Canadian Journal of Higher Education Volume XXVIII, No. 2,3, 1998 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus 167 of the academy. (Not surprisingly, however, the vice-president of Shanghai's Jiaotong University stays away from such criticisms.) Secondly, there is some tendency to see new technologies as a way out of economic hard times, though most leaders are not naive enough to believe in technological utopianism. Still, since university CEO's are relatively conservative by the nature of their trade, one will not find in this book much awareness of the growing preparedness of mega-corporations in the knowledge business to profit from the "university industry". Third, it is quite evident that meaningful institutional change in higher education does not come easily, so one can learn much from Pedersen's account of the problems which he faced in supporting the abortive attempt to close the School of Journalism at UWO just as from other leaders' accounts of their successes. Fourth, the book would have benefitted from an account of the current state of Russian higher education, given the ideological and economic disintegration of the former USSR. Fifth, the regional reviews are a mixed blessing. Notably, not too much understanding can be gained of higher educational trends in 30 Asian countries in the space of 16 pages. And finally, an error on pages 283-284 leaves a frustrating gap in the account of South African higher education, and probably had Madeleine Green tearing her hair. However, let me not end with thin praise. This book is intended primarily for those institutional change agents working in the field of higher education. But it has much to offer readers who are interested in knowing what is happening in higher education around the world, even if they do not expect to move institutional mountains. And some pieces — notably Kenneth Edwards' brief outline of a role for the university in, say, the year 2020 — are alone worth the price of admission. ^ ^ The Canadian Journal ofHigher Education Volume XXVIII, No. 2,3, 1998