alice lee williams brown
SMALL COLLEGE LEADERSHIP EXPERT & FUNDRAISING CONSULTANT
BOOKS
Fifty Million for Faculty and Students:
My Fundraising Years
by Alice Lee Williams Brown
Released in the summer of 2021, this memoir describes Brown’s 25 years of developing the Appalachian College Program at UK into the Appalachian College Association with its own endowment of $25 million.
With little experience in fund-raising at the outset, Brown built the association into a powerhouse. When she retired, she left an endowment of $25 million, a reserve fund of about $250,000, $3 million for active grants, and contacts with roughly 20 foundations and federal agencies that had funded the association.
This memoir can be a good reference for those interested in learning about supporting faculty and students in college, raising money for worthy causes, working with legal systems, avoiding problems with college presidents, and recognizing the benefits of collaboration, especially for small colleges.
How Boards Lead Small Colleges
by Alice Lee Williams Brown with Elizabeth Richmond Hayford
In How Boards Lead Small Colleges, Brown and Elizabeth Richmond Hayford explain the basic responsibilities of boards while demonstrating how some develop practices that fulfill these responsibilities more effectively than others. The book emphasizes strategic planning and collaboration between the board and central administration—advice useful to those governing colleges and universities of all sizes and strengths.
For decades, the authors led consortia of small colleges and served on boards of multiple nonprofit organizations. Here, they interview trustees and presidents at dozens of small colleges across multiple states to identify the role governing boards play in building strong private colleges. Encouraging presidents to consider new approaches for working with their boards based on mutual dedication to strengthening institutions, Brown and Hayford also urge trustees to challenge new thinking from their presidents without interfering in internal operations.
Cautionary Tales: Strategy Lessons from Struggling Colleges
by Alice Lee Williams Brown and Contributors
In Cautionary Tales, Brown focuses on narrative examples of survival and closure, recounted by real people in actual colleges, and reports the lessons learned. She presents examples of strategies involving mergers, partnerships, or “going it alone,” and their outcomes, that illustrate principles that can serve as guides for fragile colleges struggling to address their social and economic challenges.
This book also offers guidance by seasoned scholars and administrators on issues as varied as leadership, the roles of the president, governing boards, faculty, and staff in articulating and implementing mission and strategies for survival.
This book is of immediate practical value for trustees and leaders of small colleges as they look toward and plan for the future. It is also for anyone aspiring to an administrative position in higher education.
Changing Course: Reinventing Colleges, Avoiding Closure: New Directions for Higher Education, Number 156
by Alice Lee Williams Brown
Institutions of higher education are constantly facing economic challenges to their survival. Nowhere are the challenges greater than in small private colleges and universities across America. None of these colleges can assume that its stability is assured in perpetuity. No thriving college is immune from unforeseen disaster, just as no struggling college is irreversibly destined for closure.
This issue presents stories of colleges in crisis and considers what makes the difference between a college that closes and one that nearly closes but manages to remain open. It offers a range of revealing, hard-won experiences of college presidents who led their campuses in times of crises. Some colleges found no way out, and their stories offer lessons that are just as valuable as the stories of colleges that reinvented themselves and survived.
This is the 156th volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Higher Education. Addressed to higher education decision makers on all kinds of campuses, it provides timely information and authoritative advice about major issues and administrative problems confronting every institution.
Staying the Course: How Unflinching Dedication and Persistence Have Built a Successful Private College in a Region of Isolation and Poverty
by Alice Lee Williams Brown
Staying the Course is about a college that many describe as being the way colleges used to be: beautiful, well-maintained buildings and grounds; caring, capable faculty; administrators who manage frugally and compassionately; a bright, energetic president willing to dedicate his life to assuring a solid future for the institution; and students who study hard and work hard to serve those in need. Still the college struggles to maintain what it has built and to increase its endowment, small by comparison to many private institutions, at the same time it continues to hold tuition low and provide funding to students who, even with Pell grants, need extra help to go to and stay in college.
This book shows how merging the values of the past with the information and strategies available today can enable a small college in a region of poverty and with a population of students with limited financial resources can rise above those threats and limitations to become a model for the future of such institutions.
ARTICLES SINCE 2008
“Higher Education Reputation,” in Paul Conn: Honoring A Legacy, Lee University Torch, Fall 2020, pp. 38-41.
“The Campus with a Lazy Creek,” Inside Higher Ed, April 11, 2018.
“Saving Struggling Colleges: The Role of the Board,” The Evolllution, November 6, 2017.
“Seven Lessons Other Struggling Colleges Can Learn from the Struggle at Sweet Briar,” The Evolllution, April 25, 2017.
“Reluctance to Change is the Greatest Impediment to Long-Term Success,” The Evolllution,
August 15, 2016.
“Reflections on the Future of Small, Private, Rural Liberal Arts Colleges,” The
Evolllution, Part I, May 12, 2016; Part II, May 19, 2016.
Seeking Clarity in the Briar Patch: The Almost Closing of Sweet Briar College, 2015, a confidential report funded by the Spencer Foundation.
“Reinventing Sweet Briar,” Inside Higher Ed, June 22, 2015.
“Closing With Grace,” Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2015.
“Strategies that Strengthen: Lessons from Colleges that Have Struggled,” Trusteeship, July/August 2012, pp. 33-36.
“Time to Close the College?” Inside Higher Ed, June 26, 2009.
“Collaboration Across Colleges: Impossible Mission?” Inside Higher Education, August 19, 2008. Reprinted in Higher Education Consortia, Fall, 2008.