Leadership Reconsidered: Engaging Higher Education in Social Change

This book was prepared over a period of two years. Most of us have worked together previously as members of an advisory committee for “College Age Youth,” a W.K. Kellogg Foundation initiative to develop leadership abilities in college undergraduates at 31 institutions. That program demostrated that colleges and universities can provide highly effective environments for the development of future leaders (Zimmerman-Oster & Burkhardt, 1999). The idea of writing a book that could address the application of transformative leadership to higher education was first conceived in November 1997. However, work on the book did not begin until the Spring of 1998. For this project, we chose to address four major constituent groups that form a major part of what we have come to call the academic community: students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and the CEO. The volume begins with a foreword by William Richardson, president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. He provides an overview of the Foundation’s perspectives, its hopes for this project, and its aspirations for making a difference in higher education and the larger society through its funding decisions.--Prefac