The Contested Terrain of Academic Program Reduction

Institutional Adaptation: Demands for Management Reform and University Administration

“…Managerial prescriptions have positioned administrators as experts wielding tools of forecasting, cost-benefit analyses, and modeling techniques facilitated by access to technology that enables careful scrutiny of centralized data. The expansion of administrative authority has been facilitated by declaration of a crisis, in which longer range academic governance procedures could be bypassed in favor of swift centralized decision making (Hearn, 1988;Gumport, 1993).…”

“…In practice, the combination of shared authority principles has not been without strain, especially given the politics of scarce resources (Hearn, 1988;Gumport, 1993). Even since the 1960s, when division of academic labor in universities gave faculty increased jurisdiction over academic matters and administrators the responsibility to coordinate the means of the major activities carried out by the professionals, over the past several decades there has been a move away from democratic faculty participation to strategic policymaking (Keller, 1983;Dill and Helm, 1988).…”

“…Within the higher education literature, researchers have examined several dimensions of institutional adaptation, including retrenchment (Cameron and Tschirhart, 1992;Hearn, 1996;Zusman, 1994), restructuring (Gumport, 1993;Rhoades, 1995;Slaughter, 1995), improved performance, redefined missions, reorganization (Cameron, 1984;Dill and Sporn, 1995a;Gumport and Pusser, 1997;Peterson, 1995), mandated change, governmental reforms, institutional autonomy and accountability (Berdahl and Millett;Van Vught, 1989), diversification of funds, strengthened administrative core, entrepreneurial periphery (Clark, 1996a;Clark, 1996c;Clark, forthcoming;Slaughter and Leslie, 1997), transformational leadership, and quality management (Cameron and Tschirhart, 1992;Dill, 1993b;Van Vught, 1995).…”

Academic Advising During Program Discontinuance

“…Although "no one has studied program discontinuance from a student perspective" (P. Eckel, personal communication, March 7, 2002), particularly as this perspective relates to resultant student advising needs, Gumport (1993) conducted one of the few studies focused on the perspective of faculty involved in program discontinuance. She found that faculty members reacted to plans for program reduction either as powerless victims or enraged defendants, commonly expressing shock, grief, and betrayal.…”

Influence, policy formation, and higher education in Florida : 1989-94

“…Floyd (1985) has reviewed faculty participation in decision making across the institutional, system, and state levels. Slaughter (1993), Gumport (1993), Rhoades (1993),…”