The first type, sustaining innovation, makes something bigger or better.

If you have a Ph.D. and you enter most universities and colleges, they assume you know how to teach and so on. We don't assume that. We have a training program. We have an evaluation program; we have feedback on this, so we're constantly evaluating—almost month by month—the quality of what we're doing.

In particular, he noted how scholarly activity tends to distance professors from the undergraduate teaching and learning process.

For example, online course developers not only add features such as video conferencing that make the online course more like a classroom setting, they also create online tutorials and student discussion forums that the traditional face-to-face course doesn't provide.

clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education.7

BYU-Idaho determined to serve only undergraduates, with the goal of providing even ordinary students a first-class education via a focused set of academic offerings.

To the contrary, success in an increasingly competitive higher education environment requires each institution to identify and pursue those things it can do uniquely well.

He introduced himself to faculty members as “a teacher who is now working as a president, not a president who used to be a teacher.”1

At the same time, he argued, the desire to attract and satisfy students as though they are mere customers leads to academic coddling, in the form of easy grades and expensive facilities and entertainments, such as intercollegiate athletic teams.