J. DOUGLAS TOMA

J. Douglas Toma writes primarily about strategy and management in higher education, but also addresses qualitative research and legal issues in higher education in his scholarly work. His present research is on systems approaches to higher education management and strategies used by institutions to position themselves for greater prestige.

In Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University (Michigan, 2003), Toma addressed the uses by U.S. institutions of football in advancing strategic ends. Most recently, he is author, with Greg Dubrow and Matthew Hartley, of The Uses of Institutional Culture: Strengthening Identification and Building Brand Equity in Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2005). He authored The Academic Administrator and the Law: What Every Dean and Department Chair Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass, 1999) with Richard Palm, which he is presently updating into a second edition, and co-edited Reconceptualizing the Collegiate Ideal (Jossey-Bass, 1999) with Adrianna Kezar. Toma has contributed to the leading scholarly journals in higher education, including the Journal of Higher Education, the Review of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, the Journal of College Student Development, and the Journal of College and University Law. He is a regular presenter at national and international conferences on higher education.

Toma served as lead researcher on the Building Organizational Capacity project, funded by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), and several national higher education associations. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the U.S. Department of State have funded his recent work. He has served as a strategy and management consultant to over 25 higher education institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. In July, 2005, the Chronicle of Higher Education profiled Toma in a cover feature as one of ten “up-and-coming thinkers who have already made a mark on debates about American higher education and who are poised to influence national policies.”

Continuing his work over the past three years in Croatia, Toma has been named a Fulbright scholar, with a researcher-lecturer award during Spring and Summer, 2007 at the University of Zagreb. His research there will focus on the “Americanization” of higher education both in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Toma also works in China, including negotiating and directing the partnership between the Institute of Higher Education and Jilin University, the largest and one of the ten leading institutions in China, to provide management training to senior JLU administrators. He teaches an undergraduate seminar in Costa Rica each Spring semester. Working with Institute of Higher Education colleague Christopher Morphew, Toma is also beginning a project on reforming in East African higher education in partnership with Makerere University in Uganda.

In his professional activities, Toma was program chair for postsecondary education (Division J) for the 2004 American Education Research Association (AERA) annual meeting and chaired the annual outstanding dissertation competition for AERA-J for its first two years, 2005 and 2006. He is a member of the editorial board of Research in Higher Education; has served for six years as legal counsel for the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), presently chairing the search for and transition to a new office for the association; is on the advisory board of the ASHE Higher Education Reports series; is on the advisory board for the Boyer Center; and has served on the advisory board of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education. He is also a regular commentator in the press on higher education issues, having been quoted in the past two years in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Dallas Morning News, the Guardian (UK), the (Portland) Oregonian, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and USA Today, among other newspapers.

At the Institute of Higher Education, Toma teaches doctoral level courses on the organization and management of higher education and on research design. He also teaches sports law. In 2006, he was inducted into the University of Georgia Teaching Academy and was named a university senior teaching fellow for the 2006-07 academic year. Toma is also involved in management training and professional development. In addition to the IHE-Jilin University partnership, he co-directs with Morphew the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows program at UGA. With law school colleague Anne Dupre, Toma also co-hosts an annual conference inviting graduate and law students to present papers on education law and policy.

Toma came to the Institute of Higher Education in Fall, 2003 from the Graduate School of Education faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he organized and directed the Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management, the first program of its kind nationally. He began his faculty career in Fall, 1995 as assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he coordinated the doctoral program in urban leadership and policy studies. Prior to 1995, Toma practiced law for five years in New York and Ann Arbor.