This paper evaluates and critiques a recent restructuring initiative for a college at a Midwestern university in the United States in which three academic departments were reduced down to two departments. The case study presents the experiences and perspectives of three faculty members-- one from each of those departments--who participated in the…

The study focuses on the discussion of how universities middle managers perceive the effects of strategic plan's elaboration and implementation. The paper presents the institutional context of strategic thinking in the Russian higher education system, and the analysis of changes in universities' activities with the influence of the strategy…

New public management (NPM) has dominated the reforms in the higher education sector and the academic discussion on how universities should be governed since the 1980s. Besides, the introduction of accountability and efficiency measures in the form of performance measurement and pay-for-performance scheme, a key debated aspect of NPM is the…

Purpose: Athletic departments play an important role in sustainability-based collaborative processes due to their boundary spanning connections with both internal and external university stakeholders. As a result, athletic department representatives have become prominent members of university participant-governed network structures. The purpose of…

The present article is dedicated to the hyper-hierarchization of small-scale organizational spaces (and the most immediate ones for most academics)--university departments. By using the anarchist critique of hierarchies to deconstruct the architecture of an undisclosed department located at one of the South African universities, the author…

This article draws on multiple case study research of Australian academic governance to examine the role and place of chairpersons of university academic boards (also known as academic senates or faculty senates) within university executive leadership committees. A Bourdieusian analysis of the data suggests that while within the broader university…

This article examines the developments and challenges of higher education in developing countries. Using a thorough qualitative interview of deans, directors and heads of Department of the University of Ghana, this paper draws on their analysis to discover unexplored issues that affect the universities in developing countries. The study identifies…

Far from allowing a governance of universities by the invisible hand of market forces, research performance assessments do not just measure differences in research quality, but yield themselves visible symptoms in terms of a stratification and standardization of disciplines. The article illustrates this with a case study of UK history departments…

For more than 20 years, new public management (NPM) has been the guiding governance model of university reforms in Europe. One central aspect of this governance model is to strengthen the hierarchy within the universities. Recent research shows that the formal decision-making authority of university leaders and deans has increased in almost every…

This paper investigates how differences in resource endowments of universities shape variation in their response to regulatory pressures. Earlier research on higher education institutions tends to conceive regulatory rules as the primary basis of action and does not attend to differences in the salient characteristics of universities. This paper…

Chief academic officers of public universities in Texas were asked to comment on trends affecting general education on their campuses. The role of academic departments in furthering--and inhibiting--changes in general education curricula is analyzed. (PP)

In the sixties the crisis of the credibility and competence of schools resulted in the funding of programs to remedy school problems. The model for curriculum reform came from the university and, more particularly, from liberal arts departments having the capacity to improve curriculum content and teacher expertise. In a few instances attempts…

A random sample of 8,009 research university professors' paid consulting work was examined from the local-cosmopolitan framework. Analysis of the results, using four levels of consulting (none, mild, moderate, active) showed that: (1) 54 percent devote some portion of their normal work week to consulting; (2) the most active consultants (about 5…

Contents include descriptions of university organization (with organizational charts); faculty roles and responsibilities; the academic departments; policies for appointments, promotions, and tenure, and for compensation and benefits; and other general information about services and facilities. The appendixes contain the charter of the faculty…