What pushes a college to the brink of closing? Warning signs? Too late? Can you help? Online Feb3 free tlt.gs/frlv

BOOK DISCUSSION tlt.gs/ABrownChngCrs

Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure, Alice W. Brown  Jossey-Bass 2011 Friday, Feb 3, 2:00pm ET  Register Free: tlt.gs/frlv  

Brown, Past Pres. Appalachian College Assoc, will be interviewed by  Steve Gilbert.

“No thriving college is immune from unforeseen disaster, just as no struggling college is irreversibly destined for closure.” Sadly, if you are part of a college or university community -- student, alumni, board member, faculty, president, any other academic professional -- you can no longer be fully confident of the stability of your institution or of your role within it.

In this live online session, we’ll discuss the dangers, the warning signs, and how to deal with them.  Alice Brown will summarize and extend the ideas in her new book Changing Course in which she “... presents stories of colleges in crisis and considers what makes the difference between a college that closes and one that nearly closes but manages to remain open.”   First Brown, then other participants, will be invited to share their observations and insights in response to these questions:

• What pushes a college to the brink of closing? What are the warning signs?
• How can a college avoid the brink? Come back from the brink?  When is it too late?
• What are the differences between colleges that “reinvent themselves” or barely avoid closing, and those that disappear? Who cares? Who should care?
• When a college is nearing the brink, what info is especially difficult to hear, accept, and act on? For whom? From whom? Who needs to be "shielded from" what kinds of info?
• How can anyone help? Are there any positive opportunities that can be grasped in these crises?

IMAGE selected by Steve Gilbert 20120131
Photo of painting (1803) "Avalanche in the Alps" by Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg the Younger (1740–1812)
The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._003.jpg/512px-Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._003.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._003.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Philipp_Jakob_Loutherbourg_d._J._003.jpg
Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg the Younger [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
"The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License."