Patricia J. Gumport

Academic Restructuring: Organizational Change and Institutional Imperatives.

A perennial challenge for universities and colleges isto keep pace with knowledge change by reconsideringtheir structural and resource commitments to variousknowledge areas. Reflecting upon changes in theacademic landscape of public higher education in theUnited States over the past quarter of a century, theauthor diagnoses a macro-trend whereby the dominantlegitimating idea of public higher education haschanged from higher education as a social institutionto higher education as an industry. Threeinterrelated mechanisms are identified as havingadvanced this process: academic management, academicconsumerism, and academic stratification.This pattern of academic restructuring reflects multiple institutional pressures. Whilepublic universities and colleges have increasinglycome to rely on market discourse and managerialapproaches in order to demonstrate responsiveness toeconomic exigencies, they may end up losing legitimacyas they move away from their historical character,functions, and accumulated heritage as educationalinstitutions. Thus, responsiveness to compellingeconomic pressures that dominate contemporaryorganizational imperatives in an attempt to gainlegitimacy in one dimension may result in loss for another.Wholesale adaptation to market pressures and managerialrationales could thereby subsume thediscourse about the future of colleges anduniversities within a logic of economic rationality ata detriment to the longer-term educational legaciesand democratic interests that have long characterizedAmerican public education.

The Contested Terrain of Academic Program Reduction.

which decisions are based, when quality and centrality are not operationalized to the satisfaction of groups of organizational participants, when decisions appear to have been reached privately by the judgments of a few administrators, or when the decisions seem arbitrary and capricious because they contradict widely cherished meritocratic assumptions that rewards and sanctions are allocated on the basis of academic performances. 7 The United States was at war in the Gulf at the time, so these terms of battle were especially timely. 8 One consequence of production function thinking was that a Academic program reduction has become a common retrenchment strategy for coping with the economic recession of the early 1990s, especially for public research universities struggling with the tripartite mission of service, teaching, and research |17, 20, 45, 48, 63, 66, 68~. One recent report estimates that up to two-thirds of American public research universities have faced substantial budget cuts in the 1991-92 academic year alone |36~. Additive solutions are no longer a viable approach to resolving conflicting views over what knowledge to include in a campus curriculum, as was previously done with womens studies and ethnic studies during the 1970s. In these times of fiscal constraint, long-existing academic programs with tenured faculty can be targeted for reduction or dismantling, as occurred in the 1980s with occasional retrenchment of semiprofessional schools such as nursing and education as well as departments such as geography and sociology |14, 46, 49, 52, 51, 59, 62, 83, 84, 96~. That academic program reduction entails intraorganizational turmoil is an undisputed empirical finding.(1) However, the nature of that turmoil warrants further scholarly attention to account for ideological patterns among professional subgroups that may not be as apparent in times of abundance. Specifically, we need to identify and account for a confluence of interests and alignments that surface across campuses. This article seeks to make a conceptual and empirical contribution by examining academic program reduction as a site of contested terrain, where campuses are seen as arenas of organizational struggle among groups to define and control professional work |46, 79, 80, 85~. The exploratory investigation draws on interview data from case studies of two public research universities, each the flagship campus in its state, where administrators proposed retrenchment as a primary strategy for adapting to substantial cutbacks in state appropriations (in the 10-15 percent range over two years, in the 20-25 percent range over three years.)(2) Semistructured interviews with forty faculty and twenty administrators captured how they, as both informants and respondents, made sense of organizational actors interests in the budget crisis. Analyzing metaphorical imagery |56, 67, 77, 90~, I focus on explicit and implicit alignments, that is, with whom the interviewees aligned themselves to justify their location and to whom they appealed for legitimacy.(3) Five major patterns of language, and thus groups, surfaced among organizational participants, each with distinctive appeals to external referents for legitimacy. First, executive administrators on campus spoke in a corporate language of alterations (for example, downsizing, consolidation) calling for swift, centralized decision making in order to adapt to mandates from the state and the market. Second, subordinate administrators (for example, deans) in the tier below the executive decision makers aligned themselves with the top tiers discourse of alterations and, in a language of rationalization, tried to make sense of the content and process of budget decisions. Third, faculty research stars aligned themselves with the administrative language of alterations and justified their own entrepreneurial orientations with the language of the meritocracy in the context of national science policy. …

Access to What? Mission Differentiation and Academic Stratification in U.S. Public Higher Education.

Academic policy initiatives have long been apowerful lever for mission differentiationwithin U.S. public higher education. Althoughthe higher education literature has examinedbasic issues in the design of public systems,the tension between access and differentiationhas not been explored. Drawing uponcomparative case studies of public highereducation in Massachusetts and New York, thisarticle examines recent policy initiatives toterminate academic programs, eliminate remedialeducation, and promote honors colleges withineach state system. The analysis depicts howthese policies contribute to increasedstratification of programs and students withina state system as well as within particularcampuses in a system. The authors argue thatpolicy analysis in higher education shoulddevelop a more refined conceptualization ofaccess that examines the cumulative impact ofcontemporary policies on the stratification ofstudent opportunity.

Institutional Adaptation: Demands for Management Reform and University Administration

Higher education organizations around the world have always faced environmental changes. However, in the past decade altered societal expectations, new public policies, and technological innovations have created an unprecedented set of challenges for universities. Although the borders of universities have opened in new ways for their services and products, universities have been the subject of increased public scrutiny from diverse constituencies. While under such scrutiny, higher education institutions have been simultaneously identified for their potential as a key catalyst in the development of new knowledge organizations and the “digital” economy, especially in the Western world. Tending to these domains, their management has become increasingly significant at the turn of the century; as Peter Drucker admonished in a recent analysis: “The most important area for developing new concepts, methods, and practices will be in the management of society’s knowledge resources—specifically, education and health care, both of which are today overadministered and undermanaged. ” (Drucker, 1997)

For-Profit Higher Education and Community Colleges.

The recent growth of for-profit educational providers has been one of the most watched trends in higher education (Blumenstyk, 2000; Burd, 1998; Selingo, 1999; Strosnider, 1998). Despite the widespread attention, surprisingly little concrete information exists about the for-profit phenomenon. Although the for-profit sector is not the only source of new competition in higher education, the highly publicized growth of some for-profit institutions has generated increasing anxiety among both private non-profit and public colleges and universities. To develop a better understanding of how these institutions compare to public community colleges with respect to their students and programs, the Community College Research Center joined with the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement (NCPI) to conduct a two-year study. The objective was to determine whether these two types of institutions are competitive or complementary and how community colleges have responded to the growth of the for-profits. The study contrasted national data on for-profits with national data on private non-profit and public postsecondary institutions, and examined case study data comparing a high-quality for-profit chain—which we call Tech College—to three public community colleges located near branches of the chain. Overall, the study identified two significant conclusions. Our analysis of available data indicates that although for-profit enrollments are growing, the market share remains small. The for-profits are not likely to become a major competitive threat to overall community college enrollments in the foreseeable future. The increase in community college enrollments in the midto late-1990s exceeded the total for-profit enrollment in the twoyear sector. But our case study suggests that the for-profit experience has important lessons for community colleges, especially with respect to student services, program flexibility, the use of data for program improvement, curriculum development, and a focus on outcomes.

A Case of Bureaucratic Accretion: Context and Consequences.

It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow. C. Northcote Parkinson The dramatic expansion of the higher education enterprise in the United States over the past half-century is a well-documented phenomenon [7, 17]. It has also been observed that administrative structures have grown with this expansion [25, 27]. However, whether the administration of higher education organizations has grown in proportion with the increased demands on the enterprise is unclear. Although popular perceptions of administrative growth in public research universities have reflected widespread concern over the nature of that growth [20, 26, 34], there has been little empirical research that directly documents administrative growth, its context, and its consequences [25]. To shed light on this issue, we examine a twenty-five-year period of sustained financial and systemic growth in the University of California through an analysis of budget data and relevant archival documents.(1) Using classical Weberian concepts of bureaucratization as well as more recent literature on adaptation and economies of scale, we analyze the data from a number of perspectives. Primary among them is the proposition that adaptation to environmental complexity has demanded an increase and differentiation of university functions and hence the need for a more complex administrative component. We also consider some unexplored functions of complexity, primarily that under a broad university mission the process of adaptation to complexity may have served as de facto university policy-making. In addition to applying these concepts to the case of the University of California, we examine challenges that have emerged in the transition from an era of rising resources to a subsequent period of retrenchment. The Case, the Concepts, and the Methods The University of California The University of California provides an ideal case study opportunity for examination of administrative growth. Founded in 1868, the University of California was created as a public land-grant university and is administered under the authority of an independent board of regents. At present, the university consists of nine campuses: Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz. Eight campuses provide undergraduate, graduate, and professional education; a ninth, San Francisco, focuses on the health sciences. Throughout the state the university has established teaching hospitals and clinics, as well as over one hundred fifty university institutes, centers, and research laboratories, including contract laboratories for the Department of Energy.(2) National Science Foundation data reflect that five University of California campuses (Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Davis) ranked in the top twenty-two universities nationally in 1992 for R&D expenditures.(3) Annually, the university awards over twenty-seven thousand bachelors degrees, and over eleven thousand advanced degrees. Since its founding the university has awarded over a million degrees. Current enrollment is over one hundred fifty thousand students. In the twenty-five-year period under examination for this study, a defining characteristic of the University of California (hereafter also referred to as UC) has been growth. The nine campuses, systemwide administration, and auxiliary enterprises taken together had total fund expenditures just over

The Formal Organization of Knowledge: An Analysis of Academic Structure

3,700,000,000 (1993 HEPI) in 1966-67.(4) For 1991-92 these UC entities accounted for expenditures of just over

University Restructuring: The Role of Economic and Political Contexts

9,800,000,000.(5) This is an increase of 164 percent in constant dollars(6) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Student FTEs rose from 79,293 for 1966-67 to 156,371 for 1991-92, an increase of just over 97 percent.(7) The number of employees also shows marked growth. The permanently budgeted system staff in 1966-67 of 33,305 can be compared to the permanently budgeted system staff in 1991-92 of 68,024. …

The Demand-Response Scenario: Perspectives of Community College Presidents

This article provides a rationale and illustrative data for the longitudinal study of the formal organization of knowledge. Focusing on two dimensions of academic structure, the authors find an increase in degree programs offered in contrast to relative stability in departmental structure. This pattern indicates a structural capacity for academic organizations to respond to divergent expectations for change and stability.

In Search of Strategic Perspective: A Tool for Mapping the Market in Postsecondary Education

Within the study of higher education, restructuring is a term commonly used to characterize contemporary university responses to financial stress. While the study of responses to fiscal challenges has been prominent in the higher education literature since the 1970s, this chapter proposes that the substantive focus in the literature must shift from studies of retrenchment and cost containment to analyses of university repositioning and selective reinvestment in light of changing environmental demands (Gumport and Pusser, 1997).