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P A T R I C I A J. G U M P O R T
B R I A N P U S S E R
National Center for Postsecondary Improvement Stanford University School of Education 520 Galvez Mall, 508 CERAS Stanford, CA 94305-
The work reported herein was supported in part by the Educational Research and Development Center program, agreement number R309A60001, CFDA 84.309A, as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in the report do not reflect the position or policies of OERI or the U.S. Department of Education. NCPI Technical Report Number 1-05.
Restructuring the
Academic
Environment
A version of this essay appears as a chapter in Planning and Management for a Changing Environment: A Handbook on Redesigning Postsecondary Institutions, edited by M. Peterson, D. Dill, and L. Mets, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997.
the first time such calls have been driven by the perception of financial constraints. Nor are such corollary contemporary rationales for reform as increased competition, chang- ing demographics, and dire enrollment forecasts particularly novel. What is arguably new is the juxtaposition of so many of these contextual demands at one time. As a result, the contemporary environment in which research universities operate has be- come extremely turbulent (Cameron and Tschirhart, 1992; Dill, 1993-94; Dill and Sporn, 1995a); and the word “restructuring,” in many arenas of education has become a magic incantation (Tyack, 1990).
One of the planning issues we address in this chapter concerns whether initial university responses to fiscal constraint have contributed to the environmental turbulence universi- ties face today. At the end of the last decade university managers began to forestall the impact of fiscal constraints, particularly declines in state appropriations for higher educa- tion, through ad hoc planning (Gumport, 1993), tuition increases (Griswold and Marine, 1996), cost plus pricing, and budget discipline (Zemsky and Massy, 1990; Pew, 1993a). Initial institutional responses to declines in external revenue sources at once delayed the full impact of revenue shifts while at the same time generating additional stress. The short-term solutions of raising tuition and ad hoc cost cutting contributed to increasing conflict with state legislatures, and created additional political economic pressure on the institutions, as in the cases of Virginia and California (Breneman, 1995). Given accelerating demands for institutional restructuring and increased legislative intervention in higher education policy and planning, the issue of university autonomy moves to the fore. With- out a careful approach to demands for restructuring, postsecondary institutions of all types are in danger of losing control of the transformations that must be made in response to increasing environmental turbulence (Pew 1993b, 1993c).
Our analysis of the emerging literature on academic restructuring reveals a shift in the conceptualization of higher education institutions. Environmental demands have shifted from asking the university to do what it does for less money to asking the uni- versity to change what it does. The contemporary question is not whether higher educa- tion can continue “business-as-usual” given adaptation to increased environmental turbulence; rather the question is what sort of universities will emerge from adaptation to these inexorable demands.
In the first section of this chapter, we describe the factors that have led to the current planning challenges. Second, we sketch the demands for change. Third, we examine the nature of emerging restructuring initiatives, particularly those proposals drawn from management literature on organizational redesign, and their implications for core academic processes. Finally, we suggest what makes such academic restructuring prob- lematic, particularly the limitations of applying a corporate analogy to academic pur- poses and processes.
Historical Antecedents
Over the past century, higher education has been transformed by a relatively steady expansion of functions and structures, resulting in markedly increased enrollments and research capability. While there are many perspectives on what drives adaptation of complex organizations (Powell and Friedken, 1987), in this chapter we focus on differ- entiation and adaptation driven by environmental demands (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978). By taking this perspective, we are able to examine a variety of managerial initiatives ranging from adaptation for facilitating expansion to retrenchment for times of fiscal constraint.
Decades of university growth in the post World War II era have been driven in part by what Burton Clark has described as the accretion of environmental demands for complex- ity (Clark, 1993, p. 263): “With each passing decade a modern or modernizing system of higher education is expected and inspired to do more for other portions of society, orga- nized and unorganized, from strengthening the economy and invigorating government to developing individual talents and personalities and aiding the pursuit of happiness. We also ask that this sector of society do more in its own behalf in fulfilling such grand and expanding missions as conserving the cultural heritage and producing knowledge. This steady accretion of realistic expectations cannot be stopped, let alone reversed.”
Clark’s characterization enables us to account for two levels of historical developments: change at the national system level (the expansion of institutions into diverse segments with differentiated missions) and change at the campus level (the expansion of missions to take on more functions with the ensuing elaboration of complex structures). The case of California provides a useful example of the complexity proposition_._ Higher education in California grew as part of an overall expansion fueled by the GI Bill (Kerr, 1987). The state system was formally segmented by the Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960 into three tiers: the University of California system, the California State University system, and the state Community College system. Over time each segment adapted its mission to do more, with the original land grant University of California at Berkeley developing into a type of complex institution that Clark Kerr later characterized as the “multiversity” (1994, 1963). At both system and campus levels the adaptation to complexity entailed budgetary growth, administrative growth, and expansion of enrollments, academic programs and research activities. Given the relatively steady expansion of resources for higher education in California, few university administrators faced the formidable task of setting priorities under fiscal constraint (Gumport and Pusser, 1995).
The adaptive capacity of a higher education system and the structural elaboration of higher education organizations must be accounted for with reference to not only what changes, but how and by whom. Two classic concepts from sociological theory enable
Into the 1980s, the activities of university management continued to focus on planning, and increasingly on strategic planning for linking goals and resources in an uncertain and complex environment. Economic perspectives and lessons from the for-profit sector were offered to university managers for thinking about costs, revenue streams, market considerations, and the deployment of human resources to achieve goals (Hearn, 1988), although additional political and social considerations specific to the academic arena were offered for conceptualizing retrenchment in the 1980s (Mortimer and Tierney, 1979; Mingle et al., 1981; Keller, 1983; Hyatt et al., 1984; Barak, 1984). Scanning the environ- ment and evaluating revenue sources were two important foci of analysis (Cope, 1978; Hearn, 1988; Cope and Delaney, 1991). Resource allocation reform designed to preserve excellence under retrenchment was seen as a central component of university manage- ment (Hyatt et al., 1984; Massy, 1994). Cost containment and the preservation of quality were key guides to the development of indicators and benchmarks of performance for institutions and their sub-units. Such planning efforts were at times focused on particu- lar fields of study, as in the case of re-organizing the biological sciences at the University of California at Berkeley (Trow, 1983).
By the close of the 1980s, a number of economic problems for higher education had been identified as continuing challenges. Tuition escalation (Gladieux, Hauptman, and Knapp, 1994; Griswold and Marine, 1996), rising administrative costs (Leslie and Rhoades, 1995), and low productivity (Anderson and Meyerson, 1992) were often ad- dressed, while innovative financial management strategies were sought to close the gap between long-run growth rates of expense and revenue. The following decision rule for competitive institutional advancement expressed the perspective of many planners: expand an activity as long as marginal value plus marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost (Hopkins and Massy 1981). It was widely agreed that, as financial stress increased, more precise alignment of resource dependent relationships would be a key strategy.
The nature of proposals for university re-alignment that emerged depended on whether the conceptualization and subsequent adaptation were guided by processes adopted from the for-profit sector (Guskin 1994a, 1994b; Mohrman, 1993; Dill and Sporn, 1995b), emerging networks similar to multinationals (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989; Ghoshal and Nohria, 1993), or principles inherent in the management of non-profits (Oster, 1995; Albert and Whetten, 1985). The adoption of restructuring practices developed in for- profit, particularly corporate settings, has become a central vehicle for the transition to contemporary university frameworks. However, this transition is not without its critics. As James (1990, p.77) pointed out, economic decision processes and priorities are based on assumptions that “clearly do not hold” for American colleges and universities. We will revisit this point in more detail in the final section of this chapter.
Calls for Reform
By the early 1990s widespread fiscal challenges, particularly in state economies, prompted university planning literature to attend to shifting environmental demands. A recognition of a changing competitive context, environmental turbulence, and shifting demands led scholars and observers to suggest reforming delivery processes in order to make them better attuned to costs, quality and markets (Guskin 1994a, 1994b; PEW, 1993a, 1994; Dill 1993-94; Dill and Sporn, 1995a). In this context, demands called for institutional redesign, with goals of lower costs and better student learning, more atten- tion to teaching, as well as direct contributions to regional economic development (Guskin, 1994b; Massy and Zemsky, 1994; SREB, 1994). Demands for teaching students more effectively at lower costs, occurred across the higher education system and were assimilated under the banners of increased quality, productivity, and efficiency in higher education (Anderson and Meyerson, 1992; Massy 1994).
The push for quality and efficiency arises from demands for response to resource con- straints. In the early 1990s, public universities at every level faced declines in a funda- mental source of revenue, state appropriations, to a degree unprecedented in the post World War II era. Private and public universities alike were feeling a significant finan- cial pinch, due to a pattern of costs surpassing inflation and economic recession (Zemsky and Massy, 1990; Cole, 1993). At the time of this writing, a consensus is build- ing among scholars and administrators of higher education that unlike the demands for retrenchment of the eighties, the political economic demands for change reflected in declining state appropriations are part of a structural shift in funding for higher educa- tion that goes beyond belt-tightening and is unlikely to be restored in the event of general economic recovery (Barrow, 1993; Cole, 1993; Kennedy, 1993; Pew, 1993b). As Zemsky and Massy (1990, p. 22) have observed, “cost containment is much more than cost-cutting. Each of these institutions seeks a basic shifting of priorities along with substantial administrative redesign. They want to be not just leaner, but actually differ- ent institutions—more flexible, more able to focus their investments, simpler in their organization and management.”
University planners have had particular difficulty in coping with contemporary rev- enue shifts, as they have been accompanied by a multitude of contradictory, and often expensive, political economic demands generated by an array of competing interest groups (March and Olsen, 1995). These demands include: insistence that access be preserved and enrollments increased, calls for cuts in outreach and moratoriums on new construction, demands for increased institutional revenue generation and limits on tuition and fee increases, promotion of privatization initiatives and calls for a return to essential land grant missions, demands for new programmatic offerings, and of course, demands to reduce higher education costs.
Education and the Secretary of Education. To underscore the point, the state Education Secretary pledged to withhold funds from schools that failed to prove they were funda- mentally changing the way they did business.
Approaches to Academic Restructuring
Restructuring has emerged as an imperative at the nexus of resource constraints, market demands, and technological possibilities. University planners are attempting to devise new management strategies and decision processes to facilitate access and quality improvements, as well as to reduce costs through reductions in bureaucracy and the creation of administrative and academic production efficiencies.
It is noteworthy in the contemporary context that academic and administrative reform, traditionally treated as quite separate arenas, are linked in the name of restructuring. Contemporary proposals also broaden the scope of responsibility for academic reform to include wider university participation, and shift the locus of decision making on academic issues beyond faculty jurisdiction (Gumport, 1993; Guskin 1994a, 1994b). Although our focus is on academic restructuring, we will give some consideration to incipient efforts in the administrative domain as well.
In analyzing emerging restructuring initiatives we find it useful to identify three distinct strands of action: re-engineering, privatization, and reconfiguring. Taken together, these strands constitute the essence of contemporary restructuring.
Re-Engineering
Proponents of change have advocated that the administrative domain should be re- structured before the core academic processes of the university (Pew, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c; Hyatt, 1993; Guskin 1994a, 1994b). There are a number of rationales for this, including that the administrative actors who will implement changes in either domain can address their “own side of the house” with less resistance (Guskin, 1994a, 1994b), and that administrative expenditures have been growing more rapidly than those for instruction for some time (Gumport and Pusser, 1995).
The initial approach to the restructuring of the administrative domain in response to economic retrenchment was reminiscent of the financial management approach of earlier decades, relying on discipline in budgeting, monitoring resource allocations for effectiveness and cultivating new revenue streams. However, a new “re-engineering” orientation has begun to emerge (Pew 1994; Guskin 1994a, 1994b). When adapting corporate strategies that attempt to re-engineer core work processes (Hammer and
Champy, 1993), higher education organizations have been called upon to rethink the nature of the work to be done and to redesign processes as well as culture. The goal is to go beyond “cutting and combining” (Guskin, 1994a) and getting “meaner and leaner” for cost containment (Zemsky and Massy, 1990).
Key dimensions of this re-engineering approach, particularly the effort to implement an organizational shift from a hierarchical bureaucracy to a network of interdependent work processes designed to address customer needs (Lembcke, 1994; Coate, 1993), have originated in premises from Total Quality Management (TQM) and similar re-engineer- ing processes (Seymour, 1992; 1994; Peterson, 1993). From this perspective, higher edu- cation managers can identify persistent quality problems and make structural modifica- tions to improve the organizational performance of administrative operations. It re- mains to be seen whether these strategies will address the changing nature of higher education administrative work itself, as new technologies increasingly challenge exist- ing notions of expertise and authority (Barley, forthcoming).
In one case of administrative re-engineering (at Antioch), the change process required that organizational units imagine themselves out of business, in order to envision the redesign of processes for delivery of administrative services. In effect this gave the administration the opportunity of “closing down one central administration and starting a new one.” (Guskin, 1994a, p. 28). In another case (University of Maryland at College Park), re-engi- neering was utilized as part of developing a multifaceted enhancement plan, assessing existing organizational processes and procedures, as well as for inspecting specific link- ages between revenue generation and resource utilization (Hyatt, 1993).
In a similar vein, late in 1993 the University of California convened a work group charged with exploring new approaches to human resource management that would address “unprecedented challenges by making unprecedented and fundamental changes in the structure and delivery of its administrative services” (UC Workforce for the 21st Century, 1993, p. 1). Two key facets of the proposal were the re-organization of campus information technology to provide enhanced communication and management information systems, and increased reliance on outside organizations, wherever cost- effective, to perform campus administrative service. The work group’s recommenda- tions included a comprehensive redesign intended to shift the norms of the workplace, including recasting the role of administrative leadership: “[S]enior management com- mitment and support will be essential to help managers and staff overcome the pro- found resiliency of the University’s bureaucratic culture” (UC Workforce for the 21st Century, 1993,p.2).
In each of these cases, cultural transformation is fundamental to the re-engineering process. As one observer describes it, traditional bureaucratic relations of hierarchy and control are ostensibly being challenged by those of market and exchange, and of cus-
technology can help lower the cost of education and make the delivery processes of teaching and learning more efficient by using electronic and interactive technology for transmitting course material and for communicating. Along the same lines, using techno- logical advances to replace the notion of “credit for contact” with “credit for knowledge,” will render the concept of “classroom time” a “quaint anachronism” (Pew, 1994, p. 3A).
Underlying this goal is the presumption that faculty need to be convinced to change how and what they teach. The issue from this perspective is not simply to get faculty to teach more students or to work harder; the idea is to get faculty to change how they work. As Massy (1992, p.1) states: “The problem is not whether professors are working hard, but rather how they are working and what they are working on.” A key focus in this transi- tion will be to encourage the academic departments to re-engineer the delivery of courses and programs to maximize efficiency and effectiveness (Pew, 1994). Re-engineering to reduce costs in the arena of student learning will presumably be applied in related aca- demic arenas as well—in the research enterprise (Kennedy, 1993; Shapiro, 1990), and to maximize the benefits of the service enterprise at a minimal cost (SREB, 1994).
Privatization
A second and central rationale for contemporary restructuring initiatives are adminis- trative redefinitions of just how much of the “business” of higher education should be handled within existing structures and competencies. In a highly competitive environ- ment, the thinking goes, certain traditional university operations can no longer effec- tively compete with for-profit entities offering the same services at lower cost. Although auxiliary enterprises that operate like for-profit entities have long been fixtures on many campuses, a growing trend towards private/public partnerships and direct private operation of university services has become increasingly apparent (Zusman, 1994). As one example of the expansion of auxiliary enterprises, in the University of California system, over the most recent twenty-five year period, expenditures on auxiliary enter- prises increased over 200 percent (Gumport and Pusser, 1995).^1 In the University of Virginia system, after the initial round of legislatively-mandated restructuring propos- als are implemented on campuses, private companies will provide food service at 12 of the 16 four-year campuses, eight campuses will have bookstores run by private firms, and on one comprehensive campus, George Mason University, over fifty campus ser- vices will be conducted by private contractors (Trombley, 1995).
Although the implementation of privatization initiatives on campus to date has been primarily in the domain of administrative services, a number of proposals and shifting financial arrangements have also brought elements of privatization to the academic arena as well. In the case of UC, in 1994 differential student fees were implemented for selected professional schools, with a portion of the increases remaining in those schools.
At the same time, introductory Spanish language classes were eliminated at the UC Berkeley campus, and subsequently “outsourced” to the campus Extension program. The UC Office of the President also intends to explore outsourcing a number of other introductory courses to outside providers (Gumport, 1994).
On a much larger scale, early in 1996 the University of California Office of the President requested Regental approval to merge the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center and a number of UCSF hospitals and clinics with the Stanford Univer- sity Hospital and various Stanford clinics, along with the clinical practices of the full- time medical faculty of both universities. The proposal called for the formation of a new non-profit public benefit corporation to be known as “NEWCO.” Under the proposed governance arrangement for “NEWCO,” the University of California would hold six seats on a seventeen member board, and consequently the governing board’s actions would not be subject to the state open meeting laws or public records act. Under the proposal the University of California would also transfer over one hundred million dollars of assets into “NEWCO,” an enterprise the Regents’ General Counsel described as “not a public entity in the same sense as the UC.”^2
The higher education privatization trend is part of a broader shift in the provision of welfare functions in the United States, in which aid is increasingly delivered directly to consumers. A prominent example in higher education is the widespread adoption of “high-tuition/high-aid” financing models in public higher education institutions (Hauptman, 1990; Griswold and Marine, 1996). The past decade has seen a significant shift of the responsibility for funding student enrollments from the states to individual consumers in the form of tuition and fee increases, in some cases tied to increases in direct student loans (Gladieux, Hauptman, and Knapp, 1994). Non-profit institutions are also increasingly shifting from direct provision of services to financing or arranging the provision of traditional services by third parties (Salamon, 1995). We will address some of the implications of the privatization shift in greater detail later in this chapter.
Reconfiguring
The third strand of re-organization initiatives encompasses the reconfiguration of uni- versity structures utilizing strategies adapted from corporate models. In essence, reconfiguring aims to reshape organizational structures in order to facilitate the imple- mentation of re-engineering processes. As with re-engineering, the ostensible goal of reconfiguring is to enhance organizational efficiency, flexibility and response.
The network conceptualization is one of the more prominent examples of corporate restructuring strategies that may be applied to higher education. Extending the premise of adaptation to an increasingly competitive marketplace (Powell, 1990; Provan and
mission. Strategies are designed to focus on clarifying and internalizing organizational values. The focus on horizontal processes is intended to yield better access to informa- tion, more entrepreneurial activity, and ultimately a more competitive institution.
A recent University of California initiative offers a useful example of the network vision of reconfiguration as applied to higher education administration. As part of a compre- hensive review of its human resources management, a University task force presented a set of recommendations that were intended to “embody the paradigm shift from the University’s existing bureaucratic environment to a proposed network vision” (Devel- oping the UC Workforce for the 21st Century, 1993, p. 4).3^ Recommendations included the implementation of localized systems of administrative decision-making, a move away from a focus on central administration to a focus on the department level of decisionmaking, and a redistribution of roles and responsibilities between the Office of the President and the individual campuses.
Another personnel challenge at the University of California, the large numbers of senior faculty taking advantage of early retirement incentives, is increasingly common across the nation and at multiple levels of the higher education system (Gilliam and Shoven, 1996). The extent of early retirements, and the necessity for replacing those faculty in an innova- tive manner, hints at the potential scale of the application of network reconfiguration. Over the past three years, nearly two thousand UC ladder faculty have taken advantage of voluntary early retirement programs. A number of initiatives have been discussed as part of efforts to replace and realign those faculty positions. A systemwide Academic Planning Council has begun to pursue the emerging concept of “one system thinking.”^4 The intent of the one system approach is to find ways to increase inter-campus coopera- tion, to examine redundancies in curricula, and to reconfigure existing academic person- nel commitments in order to sustain quality curricula while creating a more adaptable academic workforce and achieving broad cost savings.
Contemporary Restructuring: Challenges and Implications
Taken together, the practices embodied in contemporary re-engineering, privatization, and reconfiguring initiatives provide a guide to emerging academic restructuring pro- posals. They also point to a definition of restructuring as a managerial imperative, emerging from political economic demands for cost-cutting, efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. Perhaps the most comprehensive set of restructuring proposals ad- vanced to date emerged from the public higher education institutions of Virginia re- ferred to earlier in this chapter. Under legislative mandate the state’s public senior institutions and its community college system were required to prepare plans that would “effect long-term changes in the deployment of faculty, to ensure the effective-
ness of academic offerings, to minimize administrative and instructional costs, to pre- pare for the demands of enrollment increase, and to address funding priorities as ap- proved by the General Assembly” (Virginia General Assembly, 1994).
The plan submitted by George Mason University is an excellent example of the juxtapo- sition of forces and forms that engage contemporary planners. With regard to adminis- trative functions the report includes sections on “Privatizing for Better Service, In- creased Effectiveness;” “Innovative Outsourcing;” and “Managing for Maximum Effi- ciency.” In the academic domain the sections include, “Public-Private Partnerships For Mutual Benefit;” “Serving the Region: The Distributed University;” “Technology’s Role At The Distributed University;” “Breaking the Faculty Mold;” “From Input to Output Measures;” and “The Virtual University” (GMU, 1994). Under George Mason’s aca- demic reconfiguration students will be able to take courses at twelve universities in the Washington Metropolitan area, receive instruction from faculty via electronic hookups, participate in instructional units located outside both departments and colleges and access a new curriculum in new ways. Taken together, it is hoped that these changes will significantly alter the university’s academic culture.
Plans submitted by other Virginia universities include detailed sections on improving faculty productivity through incentives and technological innovation, curricular reform, economic development programs, and reconfiguration of academic disciplines, includ- ing the elimination of 47 degree programs (Trombley, 1995). The Virginia Community College System’s (VCSS) plan began with a commitment to a complete review of cur- ricula, over six thousand courses, in order to reduce redundancy and speed time to degree. VCSS also proposed a number of innovative applications of technology, includ- ing the transformation of learning resource centers into instructional technology centers, and the development of comprehensive databases to track student progress over time and across cohorts.
The various Virginia plans demonstrate the extent of the contemporary shift in univer- sity management strategies. Moving beyond planning for resource constraints and rapidly changing environmental demands, a new set of university management initia- tives is being developed that would reposition and reconceptualize the higher educa- tion industry. These developments need to be considered in historical perspective and combined with lessons already learned from long-range strategic planning efforts (cf. Schuster et al., 1994). Taking a long view, we are reminded that, while much has changed in university life, much has remained the same; and the essential conservatism of academic structure and culture has protected universities from short-sighted adapta- tions (Kennedy, 1993; Kerr, 1995). Proponents of restructuring models adapted from contemporary corporate organizational reforms must also confront the enduring aca- demic norms of individual entrepreneurialism and autonomy, a bundle of formidable
A related and equally significant concern for academic restructuring proposals is the challenge to academic autonomy. Universities must accommodate demands to maintain institutional competitiveness in a postindustrial environment while adapting to prepare students for competition in a changing global economy (Dill and Sporn, 1995a). The latter demand is for constructive and fundamental change, particularly in curricula and degree programs that will enable students to be proficient in new competencies for a global marketplace (Pew, 1994). Consequently, universities are called upon to simulta- neously reduce the costs of their degrees and remain flexible in resource allocations to academic programs. As we have noted these calls are increasingly taking the form of external mandates linked to university appropriations. Such shifts in the locus of control over the nature and pace of academic program change raise powerful questions for university autonomy.
While prior challenges to university autonomy have been characterized as an internal struggle between administration and faculty or as a struggle between campus and external political actors (Berdahl, 1990), it appears that the preservation of autonomy from increasing market demands has also become a central challenge (Slaughter, 1994; Altbach, 1994; Williams, 1995). University planners will continue to be hard pressed to respond to market demands for curricular change, while at the same time maintaining local control of academic programs.
The situation is further complicated by differing perspectives on academic purposes and processes among faculty as well as between faculty and administration (Peterson and White, 1992; Gumport, 1993). Academic restructuring proponents have stated that the fragmentation and entrepreneurialism of research faculty will need to be mitigated in order for effective teamwork and horizontal integration to develop (Massy, 1994; Dill and Sporn, 1995b). In that light the challenge goes beyond merely shifting organiza- tional architecture, to a deeper level, where it manifests as a call for faculty resocialization and integration (Shapiro, 1990; Kennedy, 1993; Hastorf, 1996).
The mechanism for achieving this integration is not clear. Although attention in recent restructuring literature is paid to faculty and faculty culture as impeditments to aca- demic restructuring (Massy and Zemsky, 1995; Massy, 1995), we suggest that such resistance as is found in the academic realm results from a complex of historical tradi- tions and contemporary interactions (Clark, 1987; Altbach, 1994). A number of groups, including external resource providers, legislatures and coordinating councils, adminis- trators and institutional governing boards, employee unions, and students, also possess distinctive cultures and interests in the shaping of a broad institutional academic culture that will need to be reconciled for innovative restructuring proposals to succeed. As Wilson explains it, (1989 p. 371) “in defining a core mission and sorting out tasks that either fit or do not fit with this mission, executives must be aware of their many rivals for the right to define it.”
Further, it is not clear that new forms of organization will reduce the intrinsic competi- tion in higher education between groups with varied interests and objectives. In the case of the University of California’s proposal to create “NEWCO,” litigation was com- menced by employee labor groups before the proposal had even been adopted. With those obstacles in mind, it appears that the involvement of a variety of interest groups, as part of a collective deliberation about academic purposes and values, will be critical to the implementation of academic restructuring initiatives.
Another challenge to contemporary academic restructuring comes from an enduring set of political economic demands that have not yet been sufficiently addressed by re- engineering, privatization, or reconfiguration proposals. Recent restructuring literature addresses political economic challenges by suggesting that universities establish a position close to “the market” for higher education, as represented by demands from students, funders and other political economic actors (Pew, 1993a; 1993b; Williams, 1995). Positioning for “the market” remains problematic on at least two dimensions: first, “market demand” in higher education is poorly defined, while the supply and relative quality of university “outputs” particularly difficult to quantify (James, 1990). Second, public higher education has a unique history of public ownership shaping its dimensions. Private higher education is similarly bound by tradition and unique con- stituencies that render projections on the “commodification” of the “product” of limited utility. This is not to say that strategic positioning is not important for higher education institutions, or that market considerations will not influence the reshaping of academic priorities and programs. A key to successful planning will be the recognition that posi- tioning in higher education is extremely difficult, and will be shaped by a multitude of demands that are, as noted, often contradictory.
Within the mix of political economic demands pressuring universities, the call for qual- ity management strategies, the demand for excellence, and the directive to cut costs deserve special consideration. The way to enhance academic quality while cutting costs is not yet clearly defined. The mandate to lower costs comes with widespread enthusi- asm for new technologies intended to enhance delivery of educational products and services. However, whether technological advances for academic work will lower costs is not clear (Callan, 1995). Nor does the implementation of quality management prin- ciples assure lower costs (Seymour, 1994), or improvement in the quality of academic processes of universities (Fienberg, 1996). What is clear is that additional research and evaluation is needed on the efficacy of quality improvement programs for higher educa- tion (Fienberg, 1996).
A similar case can be made for increased research into the changing nature of academic and administrative work (Barley, forthcoming). While much has recently been written about the potential influence of technology on the delivery of educational services
