The past 25 years have witnessed an ebb and flow of the accountability movement in the United States as national interest in and concern about the quality and effectiveness of higher education have moved in and out of the forefront of public consciousness. Today Democrats and Republicans alike are critical of higher education and calling for…

Behavioral science strategies offer an alternative to bureaucratic and political strategies. The weakness of a bureaucratic or political approach, the professor as social learner and as problem-solving adult, strategies for increasing faculty productivity, and ways for creating a learning institution are discussed. (MLW)

The Dutch quality improvement model in higher education has successfully maintained the delicate balance between internal improvement and external accountability, but the faculty's clear ownership of the system (as contrasted with government ownership in some nations) has made continuous quality improvement a dominant feature of the current Dutch…