J. DOUGLAS TOMA

J. Douglas Toma is associate professor at the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia and has an appointment on the School of Law faculty. He also serves as dean of Franklin Residential College and co-directs the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows program for the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Toma writes primarily about strategy and management in higher education, but also addresses case study research methods and legal issues in higher education in his scholarly work. His present research is on strategies used by institutions to position themselves, especially for greater prestige, and he recently completed a research project and book manuscript on strategic management and systems approaches for higher education. In Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University (Michigan, 2003), Toma addresses the strategic uses of college football made by research universities. Citing the work, the Chronicle of Higher Education profiled him in July, 2005 as one of eleven "up-and-coming thinkers who have already made a mark on debates about American higher education and who are poised to influence national policies."

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 the co-author of The Uses of Institutional Culture: Strengthening Identification and Building Brand Equity in Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 2005) (with Greg Dubrow and Matthew Hartley), and The Academic Administrator and the Law: What Every Dean and Department Chair Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass, 2000) (with Richard Palm). Toma co-edited Reconceptualizing the Collegiate Ideal (Jossey-Bass, 1999) (with Adrianna Kezar) and is editing a volume for publication in 2009 in the same series on the uses of intercollegiate athletics.

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), 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. In 2004, Toma was program chair for Division J for the American Educational Research Association annual meeting and twice chaired the annual outstanding dissertation competition for AERA-J. He has served as a strategy and management consultant to over 25 higher education institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Toma is also a regular commentator in the press on higher education issues.

Toma won a Fulbright researcher-lecturer award for spring and summer 2007, working at the University of Zagreb, and convenes an annual workshop on higher education management in Croatia. He is also involved in China, directing a month-long management-training program for senior administrators at Jilin University in 2006. Every spring semester he teaches an undergraduate seminar in Costa Rica. Working with Institute of Higher Education colleague Christopher Morphew, Toma is beginning a project on building capacity in East African higher education in partnership with Makerere University in Uganda, and works with the consortium of European researchers on higher education based at the University of Oslo.

Toma came to Georgia in 2003 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he organized and then directed the Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management, the first program of its kind nationally. He also contributed to Wharton-IRHE Executive Education for Higher Education while at Penn. His first faculty job was at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Toma earned his Ph.D. (1995) in higher education, M.A. (1993) in history, and J.D. (1989) from the University of Michigan and his B.A. in public policy and history, with honors (1986), from Michigan State University.