Changing the Game: William G. Bowen and the Challenges of American Higher Education

How a visionary university and foundation president tackled some of the thorniest problems facing higher educationAs provost and then president of Princeton University, William G.Bowen (1933-2016) took on the biggest and most complex challenges confronting higher education: cost disease, inclusion, affirmative action, college access, and college completion.Later, as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he took his vision for higher education-and the strategies for accomplishing that vision-to a larger arena.Along the way, he wrote a series of influential books, including the widely read The Shape of the River (coauthored with Derek Bok), which documented the success of policies designed to increase racial diversity at elite institutions.In Changing the Game, drawing on deep archival research and hundreds of interviews, Nancy Weiss Malkiel argues that Bowen was the most consequential higher education leader of his generation. Bowen, who became Princeton’s president in 1972 at t