d the Knight Collaborative. Drawing on the experience garnered by those organizations over the last two decades, The Learning Alliance is becoming higher education's decisionmaking hot line for higher education executives--a number they can call to work through their most pressing problems. This issue of The Landscape draws upon the substance of those phone calls and the titles of the callers, as a gauge indicating where higher education is most likely to need help and who is most likely to ask.For most executives in private industry, help is only a phone call away. Faced with decisions and needing counsel or expertise, they have but to pick up the phone and dial for direction from the host of services providing the just-in-time expertise that is now a standard feature of their industries. Their counterparts in higher education are not so lucky. There are few places campus leaders can turn to for practical help--at the very time when they need it most. As they battle increased competition, tougher markets, and less public support, where is the help they need to answer today's most pressing questions? Before 2002, when the University of Pennsylvania launched The Learning Alliance for Higher Education, that question was difficult to answer. While, for a decade or more, a near army of private consultants and management gurus have explored the possibility of providing management expertise to academic institutions, too few have had sufficient experience with how colleges and universities are organized to provide adequate counsel. Even fewer have understood the extent to which these institutions are committed to the pursuit of public purposes. To them, it has been enough to teach higher education the art of being market smart without corresponding lessons in how to remain mission centered. Too many experiments and hefty invoices later, institutions have been left with a nagging sense that they can't afford, either financially or politically, the help they need most. What higher education really needed was a way to strike the balance between academic pursuits and the realities of the market--in large measure by coupling the leadership skills the academy has traditionally valued with the kind of expertise that focuses on markets, technology, and management practices. Such was the logic underlying the launching of The Learning Alliance for Higher Education as the successor to Penn's Institute for Research on Higher Education, the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, an