Building a Learning University: Creating a Community of Purpose With Educators and Stakeholder Groups

This is an unexpectedly deep Learning Abstract that we found on the website of the League for Innovation in the Community College. Written by Tony Gurr, it begins:

The type of university needed for the new age of higher education will have to engage in a continuous process of self-review and refocusing over its lifetime. This will require systematic and purposeful processes of strategic planning that draw on the active participation of a broad range of stakeholders who, in their work together, align the institution’s policies, processes, and practices to make them more responsive to the changing needs of students.

Before this, however, the university needs to commit to a core purpose centred on student learning and what this means to how it does business. How do we get to this purpose? Surely, developing an innovative mission statement, hiring the best practitioners money can buy, and mimicking best practices should do the job for us.

Sadly, it does not.