Princeton University Press
Changing the Game: William G. Bowen and the Challenges of American Higher Education
Key Metrics
- Nancy Weiss Malkiel
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691247823
- -
- -
- Biography & Autobiography > Educators
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
How a visionary leader, as provost and president of Princeton University and president of the Mellon Foundation, tackled some of the thorniest problems facing higher education
As provost and then president of Princeton University, William G. Bowen (1933-2016) took on the biggest and most complex challenges confronting higher education: cost inflation, inclusion, affirmative action, college access, college completion. Later, as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he took his vision for higher education--and the strategies for accomplishing that vision--to a larger arena. Along the way, he wrote a series of influential books, including the widely read The Shape of the River (coauthored with Derek Bok), which documented the success of policies designed to increase racial diversity at elite institutions. In Changing the Game, drawing on deep archival research and hundreds of interviews, Nancy Weiss Malkiel argues that Bowen was the most consequential higher education leader of his generation.
Bowen, who became Princeton's president in 1972 at the age of 38, worked to shore up the university's financial stability, implement coeducation, and create a more inclusive institution. Breaking through the traditional Ivy League demographics of white, Protestant, and male, he embraced equal access in admissions for women and men and actively sought Black, Hispanic, and Asian American students. To increase the intellectual muscle of the faculty, he used targeted recruiting and enforced higher scholarly standards. In 1988, Bowen moved on to Mellon, where, among many other accomplishments, he developed digital research tools, most notably JSTOR, and promoted racial diversity through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. Attacking problems with tenacity, insight, and deep knowledge, Bowen showed the world of higher education how a visionary leader can transform an institution.
Author Bio
Nancy Weiss Malkiel is professor of history, emeritus, at Princeton University. A scholar in 20th century American history, she joined the Princeton faculty as an assistant professor in 1969, was promoted to associate professor in 1975 and to full professor in 1982. She transferred to emeritus status in 2016.
Professor Malkiel is the author most recently of “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2016), a study of the cascade of decisions for coeducation at elite institutions of higher education in the period from 1969 through 1974 – in the United States, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Vassar, among many other colleges and universities; in the United Kingdom, the first three men’s colleges at Cambridge in 1972, and the first five at Oxford in 1974. The objective is to understand why these decisions occurred when they did, how these very traditional, conservative institutions came to embrace such significant change, and what happened when the women students (or, in the case of Vassar, men students) arrived.
Professor Malkiel's previous publications (as Nancy J. Weiss) include Whitney M. Young, Jr., and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Princeton University Press, 1989), Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton University Press, 1983), and The National Urban League, 1910-1940 (Oxford University Press, 1974).
From 1987 to 2011, Professor Malkiel served as Dean of the College, the senior officer responsible for Princeton's undergraduate academic program. All matters relating to the curriculum, academic advising, academic regulations, and scholastic standing fell under her aegis. As dean, she also had oversight responsibility for the offices of Admission, the Registrar, Undergraduate Financial Aid, and Teacher Preparation, as well as for the Princeton Writing Program, the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, and the residential colleges.
From 1982 to 1986, Professor Malkiel served as the founding master of Dean Mathey College, one of Princeton’s six residential colleges.
Professor Malkiel is a trustee of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She served previously as a commissioner of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and as chair of the assembly and a member of the board of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. She is a former trustee of Smith College, Princeton Day School, and McCarter Theatre in Princeton.
Professor Malkiel received a B.A. (1965) and an honorary degree (1997) from Smith College and an M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1970) from Harvard University.
Source: Princeton University
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