curated reading

The works below provide historical and contemporary context, as well as practical tools, relevant for leaders navigating change within the legal, financial, and institutional realities of U.S. based research institutions.

Capped at 50 works to maintain focus, this collection provides a foundation for our Advisory Services and Perspectives essays. Recommendations always welcome.

Section 1: Fiduciary Foundations

Administrative, legal, and financial fundamentals that ground institutional leadership

  • Baum, Sandy, and Michael McPherson. Campus Economics: How Economic Thinking Can Help Improve College and University Decisions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023.

  • Das Acevedo, Deepa. The War on Tenure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

  • Guard, Louis H., and Joyce P. Jacobsen. All the Campus Lawyers: Litigation, Regulation, and the New Era of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024.

  • Rabban, David M. Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024.

  • Shulman, James L. The Synthetic University: How Higher Education Can Benefit from Shared Solutions and Save Itself. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023.

  • Smith, Dean O. University Finances: Accounting and Budgeting Principles for Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

  • Swensen, David F. Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment. New York: Free Press, 2009. *See especially chap. 2, "Endowment Purposes," and chap. 10, "Investment Process."

Section 2: Governance & Decision Making

Formal structures and informal power dynamics that shape decision-making

  • Bowen, William G., and Eugene M. Tobin. Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

  • Chait, Richard P., William P. Ryan, and Barbara E. Taylor. Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005.

  • Douglas, Mary. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

  • Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  • Pierce, Susan R. Governance Reconsidered: How Boards, Presidents, and Faculty Can Help Their Institutions Thrive. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014. *See especially chap. 1, "Shared Governance: Its History and Its Challenges."

  • Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

  • Skarbek, David. The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

  • Yale University. Office of the President. Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. April 2026. *See especially section 9, “University Governance.”

Section 3: History & Context

Professional norms and precedents that inform institutional leadership

  • Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

  • Lamont, Michèle. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

  • McNeely, Ian F. The University Unfettered: Public Education in an Age of Disruption. New York: Columbia University Press, 2025. *See especially chap. 4, “Administrators,” and pages 237—50 on academic capitalism and technology transfer.

  • Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

  • Slaughter, Sheila and Larry L. Leslie. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

  • Thelin, John R. A History of American Higher Education. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. *See especially the superb bibliographic essay that concludes the book.

Section 4: Innovation, Technology & AI

Grounded analysis of how innovation and technology integrate into complex systems

  • Agrawal, Ajay, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Rev. ed. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2022. *See especially pt. 4, “Strategy.”

  • Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  • Hao, Karen. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. New York: Penguin Press, 2025. *Note: Case study on the evolution of OpenAI’s governance structure and shifts in institutional oversight. 

  • Narayanan, Arvind, and Sayash Kapoor. AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.

  • Nelson, Alondra. "Disrupting the Disruption Narrative: Policy Innovation in AI Governance." The Bridge 55, no. 1 (2025): 42-48.

  • Sellen, Abigail J., and Richard H. R. Harper. The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Section 5: Leadership

Strategic and ethical frameworks for leading in distributed authority environments

  • Cohen, Michael D., and James G. March. Leadership and Ambiguity: The American College President. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1974. *See especially chap. 9, "Leadership in an Organized Anarchy."

  • Dirks, Nicholas B. City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

  • Keohane, Nannerl O. Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

  • Kezar, Adrianna J., and Jaime Lester. Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership: An Examination of Grassroots Leaders in Higher Education. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

  • Kolodny, Annette. Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

  • Selznick, Philip. Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.

Section 6: Libraries, Presses & Knowledge Institutions

Situating libraries within the historical and contemporary knowledge enterprise

  • Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

  • Csiszar, Alex. The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. *See especially chap. 6, “Access Fantasies of the Fin de Siècle.”

  • Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

  • Johns, Adrian. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

  • Marcum, Deana, and Roger C. Schonfeld. Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.

  • Marcus, Hannah. Forbidden Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and Censorship in Early Modern Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

  • Ovenden, Richard. Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

  • Thompson, John B. Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021.

  • Wellmon, Chad. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2015.

Section 7: Strategy, Culture & Change

Insights into aligning organizational strategy, culture, and operations

  • Dobbin, Frank, and Alexandra Kalev. Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022.

  • Heifetz, Ronald A., and Marty Linsky. Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Change. Rev. ed. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2017.

  • Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. *See especially chap. 6, “Leverage Points — Places to Intervene in a System.”

  • Neilson, Gary L., Bruce A. Pasternack, and Karen E. Van Nuys. “The Passive-Aggressive Organization.” Harvard Business Review 83, no. 10 (October 2005): 82-92.

  • Rivera, Lauren A. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. *See especially the ethnography of a specific hiring and evaluation process, chaps. 5–8.

  • Rosenberg, Brian. "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It": Resistance to Change in Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2023. *See especially chap. 3, “Incentives,” and chap. 5, “Shared Governance.”

  • Rumelt, Richard P. The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists. New York: PublicAffairs, 2022. *See especially chap. 13, “The Challenge of Organizational Dysfunction.”

  • Turco, Catherine J. The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. *See especially chap. 2, “Open Communication,” and chap. 3, “Open Control,” on the distinction between voice rights and decision rights and implications for change management. ‍

- Greg Eow, revised May 2026