Melissa Druckrey

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.

This collaborative book by five distinguished scholars in overlapping fields suggests that fruitful living is extremely hard work and that social harmony requires the unlocking and the emancipation of the human brain – the core cerebral source for advancing human coherence, connectivity, cohesion and civility. The stakes are simply too high for stakeholders across our country not to respond to the ongoing and escalating crisis of human division and the desperate need for engagement, enlightenment, and acceptance of human diversity. The authors strongly encourage academic and practitioner psychologists, as well as other students and social scientists, to join a timely framed narrative for greater progress in diversity.Neurodiversity aims to encourage dialogue, discourse, and discovery about what may be obvious to many but avoided by most – because its forces us to look inward instead of outward. We can make such inward observations, through the lenses of psychology, cognition, mindfulness, and underleveraged brain capacity amid modern cultural neuroscience. This is critically important – particularly in a time marked by the widespread amplification of ambiguity, angst, ambivalence, and anger.This book focuses on “crucial thinking” versus “critical thinking.” The authors pose fundamental questions -- about what we are calling a form of cognitive “levitation” and taxonomical “climbing” (CBDT) -- to think about purposes of intellectual discourse, not necessarily to seek empirical evidence. A special feature of this book is the inclusion of sample student learning outcomes as “provisos” throughout the narrative. We have attempted to integrate the student learning outcomes in the text’s narrative and connect them to the sections where they are inserted for the reader. The book’s embedded taxonomies can also facilitate the instruction, composition, and conceptualization of targeted student learning outcomes.

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"".