Governance in the Twenty-First-Century University E-Book

Dennis John Gayle

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: J-B ASHE-ERIC Report Series (AEHE)
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 218

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Explores approaches to effective leadership and strategic management in the twenty-first century university that recognize and respond to the perceptions and attitudes of university leaders toward institutional structures. It examines the differences between treating universities as businesses and managing universities in a businesslike manner, what kinds of leadership will best address challenges, and how to gain consensus among constituents that change is needed. From historical background to modern e-learning techniques, we look at governance to find systems that are effectively structured to balance the needs of students, educators, administrators, trustees, and legislators.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Trends in University Governance

Challenges to University Governance Structures

Governance Structures in Historical Perspective

Governance, Management, and Leadership

Depicting Institutional Structure

Shared Governance

AAUP Versus AGB Perceptions

Accountability and Program Review

Structural and Cultural Elements of Governance

Organizational Culture

Trustees’ Perspectives

Organizational Culture and Governance

Competing Perspectives and Expectations

Expectations of Faculty, Administrators, and Trustees

Facing the Fundamental Challenges

Governance from a Presidential Perspective

Evolving Issues in the Twenty-First-Century University

A Port for Every Pillow

Organizational Learning, Leadership, and Change

The George Mason Case

The Case of the Institutes of Business at the University of the West Indies

Governance: State and Campus Surveys

Toward a More Effective System

Governance: Attitudes and Perceptions

Emphases Emerging from the Literature

Governance and Teaching and Learning

The Environmental Context for Education

Organizational Culture and Learning

Governance, Information Technology, and Distance Education

The Impact of Information Technologies

New Models of Higher Education

Governance Structures and Educational Technologies

E-Learning: Policy Issues and Impact

Resource Allocation and Governance

Responsibility-Centered Management

Performance-Based Program Budgeting: The Basic Questions

Caveats and Adjustments to Responsibility-Centered Management

A Revised Model of Governance Structure in the Twenty-First-Century University

Appendix A: Public and Private University Enrollments, 1998

Appendix B: Survey of University Governance

Appendix C: Organizational Culture and Governance

References

Name Index

Subject Index

Governance in the Twenty-First-Century University: Approaches to Effective Leadership and Strategic Management

Dennis John Gayle, Bhoendradatt Tewarie, A. Quinton White, Jr.

ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report: Volume 30, Number 1

Adrianna J. Kezar, Series Editor

This publication was prepared partially with funding from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, under contract no. ED-99-00-0036. The opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of OERI or the Department.

Copyright © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, c/o John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River St., Hoboken, NJ 07030; [phone], fax [phone], www.wiley.com/go/permissions

ISSN 0884-0040 electronic ISSN 1536-0709 ISBN 0-7879-7174-X

The ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report is part of the Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series and is published six times a year by Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company, at Jossey-Bass, 989 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94103-1741.

For subscription information, see the Back Issue/Subscription Order Form in the back of this journal.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Prospective authors are strongly encouraged to contact Adrianna Kezar at the University of Southern California, Waite Phillips Hall 703C, Los Angeles, CA 90089, or [email protected]. See “About the ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Series” in the back of this volume.

Visit the Jossey-Bass Web site at www.josseybass.com.

Advisory Board

The ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Series is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), which provides an editorial advisory board of ASHE members.

Kenneth Feldman

SUNY at Stony Brook

Anna Ortiz

Michigan State University

James Fairweather

Michigan State University

Jerlando Jackson

University of Wisconsin

Elaine El-Khawas

George Washington University

Melissa Anderson

University of Minnesota

Doug Toma

University of Pennsylvania

Amy Metcalfe

University of Arizona

Carol Colbeck

Pennsylvania State University

This Issue’s Consulting Editors and Review Panelists

Pamela Balch

Bethany College

William G. Tierney

University of Southern California

Christopher C. Morphew

University of Kansas

James T. Minor

University of Southern California

Susan Frost

Emory University

Linda K. Johnsrud

University of Hawaii at Manoa

Edward Hines

Illinois State University

Executive Summary

This book explores approaches to effective leadership and strategic management in the twenty-first-century university, using a distinctive entry point: the perceptions and attitudes of university leaders toward the institutional structures and organizational cultures within which we lead and manage our universities, together with the implications of these attitudes for the central concerns of higher education. After reviewing the historical educational environment within which university governance evolved, we discuss twenty-first-century demands on governance, primarily but not exclusively in the United States of America. These demands include greater student access to educational opportunities, a key source of legislative, system, and trustee expectations for expanded accountability. In the higher education environment, public funding has been significantly reduced, encouraging the emergence of academic entrepreneurs working alongside teacher-scholars in a context of increasingly diffuse authority. At the same time, the evolution of distance education, from correspondence courses to e-learning networks, has added to the pressures acting on governance in higher education. These factors are changing the higher education landscape as well as traditional perceptions of governance at a previously unimaginable rate.

Such change leads to several instrumental questions: How are governance systems most effectively structured, and how is the interplay of organizational culture, institutional mission, and university governance structure best specified? What exactly is the difference between managing universities in a businesslike manner and treating universities as businesses, or between education and training? What kinds of institutional leadership will best address the challenges discussed? The stage is thus set for a return to the concerns posed by competing perspectives and expectations on the part of university stakeholders. Based on content analysis of the literature, we identify three core governance-related issues for further discussion: teaching and learning, information technology and distance education, resource allocation and accountability. The conclusion recapitulates the key findings of this work regarding university leadership and management, provides a new model of governance structure and process, and explains what policy directions readers might want to carry away. Only real difficulties can be overcome, whereas imaginary ones remain insuperable. The conclusion further clarifies the rationales for our initial suggestions with the aid of several flexible frames of reference. Improved communication naturally remains a key imperative. This work is rooted in both realist and pragmatic approaches to the internal and external institutional environment. The goal is to encourage and assist higher education leaders to do all we can, where we are, with what we have to improve the quality of governance in higher education institutions. We take a practical view of things, examining the realities, assessing their implications, and suggesting possible ways forward.

In examining the evolving structure and process of governance in the twenty-first-century university, we take a three-pronged approach. First, we examine the literature on the state of university governance. This examination primarily focuses on those issues that bear on higher education leadership and management, technology, teaching and learning, and budgeting, given their centrality for higher education. The overview includes a discussion of the key concepts, issues, and indicators that impact the effectiveness of governance systems.

Second, we recognize that the first step toward effective change is at least emerging consensus among leading constituents that change is needed. Consequently, we review several surveys of faculty leaders and administrators, explore trustees’ perspectives and discuss inferences drawn from a range of minicases, including those from George Mason, Adelphi, Dubuque, Hollins, Auburn, Florida International, Toledo, and Southern Mississippi Universities. This approach enables us to better understand observations and perceptions regarding governance issues, and to recognize coherent patterns across governance models, constraints on, and opportunities for fundamental governance reform.

Third, we identify sources of continuing conflicts in attitudes toward governance, inside and outside the academy, taking into account interests of various stakeholders. A better understanding of prime stakeholders’ perceptions—compatible and conflicting alike—is a requisite condition for devising improved governance models. Yet understanding is necessarily incomplete when issues are examined from one perspective or by a single audience (Kezar and Eckel, 2000). Finally, it is our hope that the reference list serve as a basis for future studies of university governance and reviews of possible further research directions.

Foreword

In recent years, the higher education literature has been filled with calls for institutions to respond to a myriad of changes in technology, student demographics, globalization, and declining funding, to name a few. Moreover, almost every part of the institution has been affected. Curricular innovations include community service–learning. Assessment has altered the character of administrative work. New notions of scholarship have expanded the role of faculty. Changes in core functions—teaching—and roles—faculty contracts—are becoming part of the academy. Yet the character of academic governance has changed very little.

Certainly, calls for change have been sounded over the past few decades, including Keller’s suggestion (1983) to develop joint big decision committees to make more strategic decisions or Benjamin and Carroll’s recommendation (1998) to redesign and restructure campus governance to be more responsive and less bureaucratic. Trustees, policymakers, and administrators are becoming more concerned that governance processes are no longer functional and cannot carry out the work of contemporary institutions. Yet little change in the structure or process of governance has occurred.

Some trustees, legislatures, and higher education associations suggest that academic governance limits an institution’s agility and flexibility, creates obstructions, sluggishness, and inefficiency, and fosters a predisposition toward the status quo. Some campus leaders are reported to be bypassing traditional academic governance structures or substituting corporate approaches to make quick changes. But supporters of traditional academic governance believe that the distinctive dynamics (consensus building and dialogue) are what help institutions arrive at better, more thoroughly examined conclusions. Supporters of traditional governance worry that administrators have become fixated on meeting political and social pressures for finances, efficiency, and accountability and have lost touch with education-based decision making, quality, and the real purposes of higher education. Tension is growing between traditional academic governance and corporate approaches to decision making, with most commentators concluding that neither approach in its current form will successfully meet the challenges of today’s environment.

This new ASHE-ERIC monograph helps to move past this stalemate of views, seeking an alternative perspective that incorporates both critics’ and supporters’ perspectives of traditional governance. Dennis J. Gayle, Bhoendradatt Tewarie, and A. Quinton White set the context for this complex discussion by describing how changes in the environment directly affect governance and then developing a detailed analysis of the reasons governance may need to be altered. They present an overview of the literature on the state of university governance, focusing primarily on leadership and management, technology, teaching and learning, and budgeting. The authors focus on the relationship of governance to teaching and learning; one of their primary assumptions is that governance structures should be continually evaluated from the perspective of their contribution toward the strengthening of a learning culture.

A key insight of this monograph is that faculty, administrators, and trustees tend to see and understand governance differently. These differences are traced through empirical data and revealed through surveys. These distinctive beliefs are a significant part of why governance structures have not evolved. As the authors note, “Actual or potential clashes among academic, political, and corporate cultures only further increase the difficulty of addressing university governance structures. . . . University trustees, administrators, and faculty leaders continue to exemplify differential perspectives on the scope of their respective authority and responsibility.”

In conclusion, the authors argue that “there is no substitute for community dialogue that includes trustees, administrators, faculty, and students about the relationship between teaching, research, and governance structure. Yet leaders must also be prepared to find that such dialogue might reveal new differences in attitudes and values that might not have been previously anticipated but need to be addressed.” They also suggest a new model for governance in the twenty-first century. This decentralized model that builds on earlier scholars’ work places various expectations and values of stakeholders at the center. Without some agreement and discussion, no governance process can be functional. The model also relies heavily on authentic leadership and the effective use of technology. The ideas presented in this model help constituents of the governance process to reenvision their work.

Adrianna J. Kezar

Series Editor

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the excellent advice and support unstintingly given by my host and mentor, former President Patricia Ewers of Pace University, as well as the many helpful suggestions made by several other 1997–1998 ACE fellows, particularly Toufic M. Hakim, Vijendra K. Agarwal, and Peter J. Alfonso. This work was significantly informed by the unique opportunity to discuss institutional structures and strategic plans in relation to the higher education environment with many presidents, vice presidents, and other university and system leaders during invited visits to more than thirty universities in the United States and Australia as part of my ACE fellowship. The editorial assistance of Bernadette E. Warner and Sophia F. Gayle was invaluable. I benefited from the thoughtful comments of several colleagues and the incisive insights of Richard Chait during my participation in Harvard University’s 2001 Institute of Educational Management and a seminar dealing with educational entrepreneurship. (Dennis J. Gayle)

I wish to express sincere thanks to the chancellor of the University of the West Indies, Sir Shridath Ramphal, and the vice chancellor, the Honorable Rex Nettleford, for their support and guidance, especially during my first year in office as pro vice-chancellor and campus principal. I wish also to thank senior management and the deans and heads of departments who have given unstinting support in operationalizing the university’s 2002–2007 strategic plan at St. Augustine. Sincere thanks are also due to the board of directors and the management and staff of the Institute of Business of the University of the West Indies’s St. Augustine campus in Trinidad, where I first had the opportunity to consider and experiment with issues of governance in a higher education institution. (Bhoendradatt Tewarie)

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of Jesse S. Robertson, former vice president for academic affairs, and Joan Carver, former dean of arts and sciences, at Jacksonville University, and the wise counsel of Gerald Francis, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Elon University. Their reflections on shared governance were extraordinarily helpful, as were the comments of other 1997–1998 colleagues during my experience as a fellow of the American Council on Education. (A. Quinton White)

Introduction

What are the Forces that influence university governance in the twenty-first century, and how do university leaders seek to respond? Let us begin by defining such governance. University governance refers to the structure and process of authoritative decision making across issues that are significant for external as well as internal stakeholders within a university. Effective governance provides institutional purpose, clarifies strategic direction, identifies priorities, and exerts sufficient control to manage outcomes. The attitudes and values of individual leaders, together with the underlying organizational culture, are at least as important for governance as institutional structure. Successful governance, however, also depends on the extent of agreement concerning institutional mission and the degree of consensus as to the implications of institutional culture. It may also become a means of retarding, if not halting, undesired institutional change until internal conversations concerning goals and objectives, given the nature of the environment, encourage the necessary adjustments in direction. Often there is an interplay of forces within a university, which, in favorable circumstances, can facilitate productive internal exchanges, dialogues, and debates concerning goals and objectives in the context of a particular environment. In turn, this can facilitate agreement on action and strengthen the governance structure of the institution.

The structure of university governance may be visualized in several ways, for example, as a series of concentric circles or as a set of overlapping circles. In any case, an extensive group of stakeholders seek to influence university rules and policies in the United States. These stakeholders include higher education associations, funding organizations, the U.S. Department of Education, related congressional committees, accrediting institutions, system-level offices, governors, state departments or boards of education, state legislators, students, alumni, local community members, trustees, senior administrators, faculty leaders, and presidents. In other countries, the names or labels of the stakeholders may change, but the variety of stakeholders involved, the power and influence that they wield, and their significance and value to the university as an institution remain about the same.

We posit that universities and their governance systems have been subject to break-point change since the early 1980s, when neoliberalism became the global economic orthodoxy. Multinational corporations, intracorporate trade, and intercorporate trade assumed greater salience in the global economy as communications and transport technologies made distance an increasingly unimportant factor. The World Trade Organization, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, joined the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in a Washington Consensus underpinning trade and financial liberalization, together with privatization, deregulation, and a marked reduction in the economic role of governments as accepted international norms. The demand for flexible and adaptable knowledge workers and the speed of economic change expanded as information itself became an increasingly critical production factor. Yet knowledge also tended to be more specialized than ever before as interest in cross-disciplinary research expanded, requiring more and more work across disciplinary and departmental boundaries (Ewell, 1997).

As the twentieth century ended, institutions of higher education were challenged by declining public investment, growing criticism of management in the academy and elevated tuition costs, demands for new measures and methods of accountability, unprecedented advances in instructional and communications technology, competition from for-profit providers, increased faculty and student mobility across international borders, and the expanded exports of educational programs and services (Ward, 2003). As a result, universities have been forced to make strategic choices concerning their competitive edges in both teaching and research, while placing an unprecedented premium on institutional flexibility. For instance, in April 2000, Fairleigh Dickinson University set out to operationalize a new mission statement with the goal of preparing students to function effectively in an environment characterized by diversity, global interrelationships, extensive digital information access, and rapid change.

In many countries, a combination of rapidly growing demand for access to higher education and limited capacity has led to increased tuition and other costs for students, while driving publicly funded institutions to seek expanded revenue flows by entrepreneurial activities at home and abroad, including distance education and the establishment of host country campuses. At the same time, public universities are requesting more autonomy from government regulation in the interests of greater flexibility, and a growing number of private universities are entering the market. Indeed, the application of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to higher education has generated new controversies regarding the meaning of most-favored nation, national treatment, transparency, mechanisms for settling disputes, monopolies, quality assurance, accreditation, and the role of government in education.

The articulated U.S. position on the application of GATS to higher education is that private education will continue to supplement, not displace, public education systems. Skeptics continue to argue that the expansion of cross-border educational services, typically from advanced industrial to developing countries, is likely to challenge efforts to formulate and implement national education objectives, including the preservation of cultural identity and academic quality rather than revenue potential as a superordinate goal (Knight, 2002). It is also instructive that those pressing for the application of GATS to higher education tend to be motivated by potential profit rather than educational opportunities; several U.S. educational organizations, including the American Council on Education and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, have strong reservations, contending that GATS encourages universities to emphasize commercialization rather than their core missions of teaching, research, and service, and their contributions to sustainable development and civil society (Altbach, 2002, p. 16).

Across national higher education sectors, however, the scope of stakeholders’ demands for access, quality assurance, and government regulation has significantly expanded. Education itself became a significant growth industry, essential to support the requirements and demands of the information age. Today, advanced educational technologies have become more and more ubiquitous. Knowledge, if not necessarily wisdom and understanding, continues to increase at an exponential rate. For instance, the number of scientific articles published in scholarly journals is now doubling almost every fifteen years.

In the United States, for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix constitute the most rapidly growing sector of higher education, even as a wave of consolidation has washed over smaller companies in this sector. More graduating high school students than ever before seek admission to colleges and universities, while almost every college is spending more than it charges to educate undergraduates. Traditional students, those from eighteen to twenty-three years of age, are increasingly a minority of the total student population. Inflation-adjusted growth in public sector funding of higher education has ended, even as legislators and governors require greater accountability and curricular relevance. The changing environment of higher education in the United States is also reflected in other areas of the world as globalization spreads, the knowledge economy becomes a reality, and universities everywhere are forced to meet the challenges of information technology and distance education, resource allocation and accountability, and the need for reassessing the teaching and learning environment.

In this climate, there is a growing consensus that university governance structures require significant adjustment; the question is in what ways, through what sequence, and by whom? (See Astin, 1993; Rosenzweig, 1994; Healy, 1997; Tierney, 1998; Hakim, Gayle, Agarwal, and Alfonso, 1999.) Yet how seriously can universities pursue change when fundamental decisions about the essence of a university have to be confronted. For example, should traditional universities emulate for-profit institutions by competitively eliminating unprofitable courses and slashing services to disadvantaged students? And given that shared governance is frequently advocated and accepted as desirable, should a university completely operationalize mutual interdependence among students, faculty, staff, administrators, and trustees when full application of this concept is more than likely to slow the rate of required change? Curricular matters present a particularly significant flash point, because faculty tend to regard the management of such issues as a core prerogative, whereas trustees typically see the need to approve all major instructional program offerings, given their implications for the mission and finances of any university (Committee T on College and University Government, 1964; Dykes, 1970; Floyd, 1994; Dickeson, 1999). Actual or potential clashes among academic, political, and corporate cultures only further increase the difficulty of addressing university governance structures. Meanwhile, academic entrepreneurs coexist with traditional teacher-scholars. University trustees, administrators, and faculty leaders continue to exemplify differential perspectives on the scope of their respective authority and responsibility.

The directions in which and rapidity with which the higher education environment is changing suggest that all university leaders have a common stake in the reform of governance systems. It may be clearest in the intensity of the debates regarding the relative weights applied to teaching and research and the utility of information technology in enhancing student enrollments and retention. These debates have generated questions concerning identity, purpose, and market positioning, in many cases without necessarily fostering climates of civility and trust between higher education leaders, including faculty, administrators, and trustees. Yet such a climate is essential to successful change.

Some observers have projected the advent of what has been termed the new university, which would use information technology effectively to promote decentralized responsibility, accountability, authority, and inclusiveness while creating governance systems that can set priorities, focus missions, and implement choices rather than simply identify winners and losers at any given time. Distinctions between traditional residential universities (brick), for-profit institutions (click), and brick-and-click universities remain relevant (Levine, 1997), as do the categories public and private universities, although both increasingly seek support from private donors as well as state and federal governments. Further, both can collaborate to advance public as well as private purposes as exemplified by customized research undertaken by public research universities and subsidized by private corporations, or customized worker training at community colleges or within colleges of continuing education. There remains the challenge of encouraging adequate public investment in higher education, even as the viability of private alternatives at least potentially diminishes the willingness to make such investments.

As the higher education environment continues to evolve, questions emerge more rapidly than responses can be developed. Will at least some faculty entrepreneurs no longer need universities, as other faculty members assume roles analogous to mentors, or course facilitators, or teaching assistants? Alternatively, will significant numbers of faculty become sought-after designers of effective learning experiences rather than traditional teachers? Will faculty sovereignty over the curriculum diminish to the point where clients will designate both required content and desired instructor? Will a few hundred small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, large research universities, and online institutions, with widely recognized brand names and access to investor capital, eventually provide most education and training in America? And if these brand name institutions have unrestricted access to the best and wealthiest students in the world, what would be the likely implications of such a development?

The concept of university may itself become an issue with regard to university governance. From a historical perspective, the word university may be traced to the corporate structure of the medieval guild—tenure itself being a doctrine of medieval law that emerged as a means of protecting the freehold rights of nobles and clergy to land and public office against royal assertions of privilege. More recently, although some may emphasize the discovery, transmission, and application of knowledge in communities of scholars and teachers as core university functions, others may focus on issues related to economics, budgets, and market responsiveness. Some may even view the institution as an ordered sociopolitical community that must constantly make distinctions between ideas, on the one hand, and individual achievements, on the other. In such cases, trustees, administrators, and faculty need to work creatively within particular organizational cultures to resolve emerging internal conflict rather than assume that expectations are standard, rely on established environmental trends, or assume agreement as to the lessons of institutional history.