What To Read

Editor's Note: Among the rituals on many campuses each fall is the Common Read — a book assigned to all first-year students to create a shared experience and spark intellectual dialogue. This year, Kansas State freshmen read Vivek Murthy’s exploration of the healing power of community and human connection; Mount Holyoke selected Octavia E. Butler’s prescient sci-fi masterpiece Parable of the Sower; and Auburn University is digging into Gabrielle Zevin’s wildly popular novel about friendship (and video game design), Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Each fall, the Common Read choices are an interesting snapshot of the cultural and intellectual mood of the moment.

But while freshmen are adjusting to new lives as undergraduates, college leaders are facing one of the most transformative eras in modern higher education. Declining enrollment, funding freezes, and fierce debates around DEI and free speech make steering a university in 2025 no small task. So we turned to higher education expert Elliot Felix to ask: what would a “Common Read” for today’s college administrators look like — the books that could offer focus, perspective, and inspiration amid their shared challenges? Here's what he had to say.

What belongs on a leader’s “common read” list? Start with the job itself: steering a campus through demographic shifts, tech upheaval, culture wars, and climate shocks. Today’s presidents have to be strategists, fundraisers, diplomats, and risk-takers. With an order so tall, it's no surprise their average tenure has shrunk from 8.5 years in 2006 to just 5.9 in 2022.

With so much in flux, it’s tempting to think a leader’s job is to create stability. In reality, it’s to drive change. That’s where leadership common reads come in. The list that follows draws on the bibliography from my own book on higher ed administration and my work with more than 100 colleges. Together, these books push leaders to rethink perspective, strategy, culture, programs, marketing, behavior, processes, and governance—and, most importantly, how everyone works together to make change happen.

Change your perspective

Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success

This book, by Tia Brown McNair, Susan Albertine, Nicole McDonald, Thomas Major, Jr, and Michelle Asha Cooper, flips the outdated mindset bemoaning a lack of "college-ready students" to focus instead on becoming “student-ready colleges.” It guides the redesign of policies and practices, the rethinking of student support, and the reimagining of institutional and industry partnerships to enable student success. 

Change your strategy

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin provide a playbook honed from their distinguished careers leading and consulting with successful companies, respectively. Their deceptively simple framework helps create what most institutional strategy lacks: focus and differentiation. When leaders make choices about “where to play” and “how to win” they provide the focus that helps teams succeed. Teams shift from conjuring data to create comforting forecasts to experimenting, evaluating, and adjusting.

Change your culture

The Caring University

This book by Kevin McClure offers an apt diagnosis of what ails faculty and staff at colleges and universities. It's also an insightful prescription for how to treat the problems, with a mix of cultural, structural, and operational changes packaged into six big ideas that gives institutions a path forward. It's packed with stories that hit home, stats to put things in perspective, and references if you want to dig deeper.

Change your programs

Who Needs College Anymore?: Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter

Author Kathleen deLaski draws upon a decade of work leading the Education Design Lab to offer a playbook for understanding the needs of students and society and then designing the programs we need for the future. It embraces the “new majority” learners that the current system wasn’t designed for and offers new pathways like bootcamps, apprenticeships, and skills-based learning along with design principles to guide implementation.

Change your marketing

Heart Over Hype: Transforming Higher Ed Marketing with Empathy

This accessible and actionable book by former higher education CMO Jaime Hunt, helps institutions understand students and create messages that resonate – and drive recruiting, retention, and revenue. It’s packed with practical examples and tips that are woven into stories of institutional transformations. It’s also full of observations that will become mantras, such as “People don’t just choose a college. They choose what that college makes possible.”

Change people’s behavior

Talk to the Elephant

Author Julie Dirksen applies her deep expertise in learning design to the elephant in the room: even if people learn a lesson, they may not change their behavior. It's a great resource to learn about the different change models out there, explore how to map the change journey, and then design the right interventions. Whether leaders need people to adopt new safety measures, have instructors embrace active learning, or get students to utilize support services, this book is a great guide. 

Change your processes

Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team

This practical guide to making progress draws on the experience of Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai transforming government policies and processes. It contains fifty-six practical tips for change within complex organizations whose structures and cultures are designed for stability, not agility. It curates and communicates common sense advice on topics like engaging stakeholders, defining metrics, pitching projects, getting commitments, and more. 

Change your governance

Practical Wisdom: Thinking Differently About College and University Governance

Authors Peter Eckel and Cathy Trower draw from their extensive experience evaluating and developing college and university boards to provide an insightful playbook to improve governance. It covers critical topics like board size and composition, meeting cadence and agendas, metrics to review, questions to ask, and more. It also has useful frameworks to think through what boards do; such as content, culture, and structure. 

Change how you work together

The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success

Lastly, my book provides an encouraging, evidence-based playbook for leaders to break down silos so that students succeed. With a chapter on each of the core functions of college or university, it provides the stats, stories, and strategies that institutions need to to focus and differentiate their institution, build community, connect courses and careers, and change how they work together across functions and with companies.

At a time when the very value of higher education is under scrutiny, leaders have the chance to reimagine their institutions to deliver on their purpose and promise: affordable access, equitable opportunity, engaging learning, coordinated support, impactful research, meaningful work, inclusive communities, and campuses that inspire. All of it is within reach—and all of it starts with shared ideas and common ground, the kind that great books can spark.

Elliot Felix is a student success author, speaker, and consultant to more than 100 colleges and universities who has helped more than 1,000,000 students. He leads Buro Happold’s higher education advisory practice and is the author of The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success, an encouraging, evidence-based playbook for busting silos so students succeed.