This volume contains six essays on higher education which provide lessons and successful techniques for meeting the challenges of the future. The first essay, "Academic Renewal at Michigan" (James Duderstadt), describes the modern research university as a complex corporate conglomerate in danger of diluting its core business. The successful university, it argues, will maintain the centrality of student learning and faculty scholarship while focusing on transforming these core functions to take advantage of new technologies and respond to changing societal needs. The second essay, "The Future of Academic Tenure" (Richard P. Chait), explains that academic tenure stands on two legs: economic security and academic freedom and both of these are unsteady in the current climate. Third,"Today in Higher Education" (Richard Lester) examines the implications of the wave of industrial restructuring for the academic world. The fourth essay, "Restructuring British Higher Education" (Graeme Davies), examines one country's approach to an important new development on governmental funding for higher education-performance-based resource allocation. Next, "Applying Contribution Margin Analysis in a Research University" (Daniel J. Rodas, and others) describes an internally developed financial statement--the Stanford Cost Model-- that summarizes cost and revenue data in a format highly useful for understanding and analyzing academic programs. In contrast to other cost analyses models, this one focuses on academic activity-the primary "business" of the institution. "Going for the Baldrige: Restructuring Academic Programs" (Dean Hubbard) discuses the Baldrige Criteria, and how Hubbard's institution began the process of incorporating the concepts and criteria into its planning process. Information on the authors is also provided. (JB)