Leadership for World-Class Universities

Challenges for Developing Countries

Philip G. Altbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415800280
• eBook ISBN: 9781136903830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Leadership for World-Class Universities reveals how "world-class" thinking and policy can help university leaders employ modern solutions to the challenges facing higher education today. Readers will benefit from best practice advice offered by distinguished international contributors who have excelled by thinking globally without losing sight of their respective national and local environments. Their essays are grounded in empirical research and written to engage the reader, stimulate reflection and enhance performance. This book focuses especially on developing and middle-income countries, which face special problems where higher education is expanding most rapidly.

Key themes include:

• strategic planning
• governance of academic institutions
• the role of the academic profession
• fundraising
• student access and equity
• the impact of globalization

Leadership for World-Class Universities is a valuable resource for senior university administrators. At the heart of this volume is a focus on how academic leaders can work towards resolving the complex issues facing universities today.

1
Strategic Planning for Higher Education

FRED M. HAYWARD AND DANIEL J. NCAYIYANA

[T]he strategic plan … was in the true sense of the expression, an act of liberation, not just a plan or framework for action.

—Njabulo Ndebele¹

A fundamental purpose of strategic planning in higher education is to provide an ongoing process of examination and evaluation of an institution’s strengths, weaknesses, resource requirements, goals, and future prospects and to set out a coherent plan to build a stronger, better, and more effective institution. That plan needs to be one that can be altered and shaped as goals are achieved, the environment changes, or new goals are identified. Strategic planning is intended to strengthen and enhance the performance and quality of an institution. It should not occur in a vacuum but should take place within and be shaped by the higher education environment, national higher education policy, and available resources, as well as the needs and goals of the faculty, students, community, and the nation.

The Whys and Wherefores

Leaders in higher education know that the path to success will be long and difficult—calling for new ideas, hard work, and the ability to mobilize the best minds in the institution and the nation. The pressure for immediate action by a leader, especially a new leader, can be overwhelming. And yet, one of the most important attributes of successful leadership consists of hearing the calls for change, yet listening to the voices of people who know the institution well, to critics as well as supporters, and in particular to those who have demonstrated creativity and talent essential to effective change. One of the best ways to begin the process of listening is through strategic and financial planning,

a conscious process by which an institution assesses its current state and the likely future condition of its environment, identifies possible future states for itself, and then develops organized strategies, policies and procedures for getting to one or more of them.

(Peterson 1980, 113)

Strategic planning seeks to answer the questions: What is this university about? What would we like it to be? What would that entail? How can we get there? (Hayward and Ncayiyana 2003, 7)

The strategic-planning process helps to provide an overview of the institution in an open and transparent way that is often not possible in individual interviews or meetings. It allows leaders to explore current values, missions, and goals and to examine them in the context of the current state of the institution, the community, the national economic and political setting, and the international environment. Understanding the current context, existing goals, and institutional aspirations marks an important starting point for thinking about the future. This process provides a sounding board for ideas and a context in which the leaders of an institution can make their own critical contributions to a creative vision for the future. This is a moment when planners should dream—what would we like the institution to look like in 5 to 10 years? What might we do to realize those dreams? The task then is to put those dreams into a strategic plan and if necessary temper them to meet the context in which the institution operates.

Strategic and financial planning allow higher education leaders to take the pulse of the institution, review and assess its current direction, and create a new vision for the future that will mobilize the university community in new, creative ways. The process will also allow new leaders time to become a more integral part of the institution, to listen to colleagues, staff, students, supporters, and critics throughout the community and to develop strategies and goals for change in the context of where the institution is at the moment and where leaders hope to take it.

If done well, the results can be revolutionary, as they were in the example cited in the quote at the beginning of this chapter from Prof. Njabulo Ndebele shortly after the end of apartheid and the establishment of a democratic government in South Africa. That process brought together people who had been on opposite sides of the struggle, had different values, and, in some cases, contempt for those who had opposed them. Yet, during the strategic-planning process they became united in their effort to create a new, high-quality university in the North—an institution in which the future was defined not by an elite backed by force, as in the past, but by the university community as a whole. Although the 60 participants (administrators, faculty, staff, and students) on the strategic-planning committee differed on many aspects of the plan, the most important institutional condition they achieved as a result of their deliberations was to meet a “shared understanding” of their needs and goals. As Vice Chancellor Ndebele recalled some years later:

This becomes the basis on which the roles of various institutional partners are discovered and embraced rather than assigned. Intervention for change then has a greater chance of being self-motivated and self-directed, either at the level of individuals or at the level of organizational units.

(N. Ndebele, personal communication, March 4, 2007)

The results of this effort included changes that were truly revolutionary in the context of apartheid South Africa.

To what extent is this experience relevant to other circumstances? One’s environment may seem more benign, but in the experience of the authors, the conditions on most campuses echo many of the conflicts, differences, and tensions mentioned here. Where such tensions exist, they need to be resolved before a shared understanding can be achieved. The strategic-planning process can help create that understanding and develop consensus, set the stage for a new vision for the future, and spell out the process for successful change in the long run.

In this process, the undertaking is based on where we are to what we want to be, taking into account the external environment and the internal environment. Part of the planning process includes consensus building and a shared understanding of the current situation. Do we have a consensus for the desired change? If not, what can we do to create the consensus needed? What are the major institutional values? Do they accord with our stated mission? Do we have the human and monetary resources needed to meet our goals? Do we have the capacity to effect change? If not, what can we do to foster it? What mechanisms should we set in place to monitor implementation and adjust to unforeseen challenges? How can we institutionalize the process? These questions set the stage for a discussion of the components of strategic and financial planning, which will be elaborated in the sections that follow.

Why Strategic Planning becomes Tangential and Unimportant in Many Institutions

Universities are Intrinsically Resistant to Change

Universities are, by their very nature and tradition, conservative organizations and thus resistant to change. Universities of today “stem from the same historical roots” of the medieval European university, particularly the faculty-dominated University of Paris (Altbach 2007, 24). The university remains one of the most resilient and enduring of human institutions, thanks in large part to its dogged dedication to the preservation of its traditions and ways of doing things. Clark Kerr (2001, 115) observes that of the human institutions established in the Western world since 1520, only 85 have persisted to the present day, including the Catholic Church and some 70 universities. Of these institutions, the universities have seen the least transformation:

Higher education institutions, steeped in historical origins and precedence, are more likely than most organizations to have a culture that naturally resists change. With their long history of practices and tradition based on an accumulation of consistently acted out values … higher education institutions are often too entrenched to change easily and prefer the comfort of the status quo.

(Freed, Klugman, and Fife 1997, 120)

Consequently, few universities have succeeded in “transform[ing] themselves dramatically.” Others have been able to make important changes in parts of their operations. … But many institutions have stumbled, dissolved into controversy, or lost their nerve.

(Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence 1997, 54)

The professoriate, largely strong-willed and sometimes fiercely independent members with a track record of individual achievement and success in freely chosen fields of endeavor and endowed with a strong sense of certainty regarding their goal, will generally be more competitive than cooperative and value independent enterprize more than “joining the herd” in a quest for common objectives. Senior faculty members are likely to be quite resistant to planning perceived as setting boundaries and dictating direction. Some senior managers, used to being in control and calling the shots at their whim, may be another source of resistance to change.

Constraints Embedded in the Governance System

Authority and power—the intangible elements that ultimately determine what can or cannot be accomplished at a university—and the manner in which these are distributed will have a significant bearing on the success or failure of strategic planning at a higher education institution. For this reason, it is useful to begin by reviewing the stereotypical governance models of universities internationally in order to better understand the interface between governance and the capacity to plan.

Burton Clark has described three models of authority distribution in international higher education systems (Clark 1983). The first is the continental (European) model, which tends to be strongly state controlled and state steered and in which real planning authority is vested in the government (the ministry of education), with the university operating essentially as a government department. In this model, the university management structure is thin on the ground with little or no planning capacity or authority. Funding is tightly controlled at the center, and the government determines what academic programs are offered. Although the most extreme versions of this model were to be found in the Warsaw Pact countries before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, varying shades of it characterized many western European education systems such as in Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands, and particularly in France in the écoles superiors. While European higher education policies have gradually if unevenly shifted toward greater institutional autonomy in recent years, many universities in Africa, South Asia, and other developing countries continue to adhere to this model and to be severely constrained by lack of management autonomy and control over their finances.

Clark’s second model is the British tradition of weak state control and constitutionally entrenched institutional autonomy, coupled with a powerful professoriate. This so-called “collegial model” vests much authority and power in academic governance structures dominated by the professoriate such as faculty boards and senates. The executive head of the university is the vice chancellor who belongs to the professoriate, to which he or she is accountable, and is vested with moderate authority as a primus inter pares—first among equals— to facilitate and coordinate the running of the university largely in the interests of the “community of scholars.” In this model, laissez-faire is the rule, university development is somewhat haphazard with minimal planning, and there is little accountability to society at large. This model was particularly extant in the epoch of elite higher education systems.

As this model has changed in recent years from a collegial to a managerial form, driven by “the central realities of higher education in the twenty-first century—massification, accountability, privatization, and marketization” (Altbach 2007, 138), the university administration has also grown in numbers and power. The vice chancellor now fulfills the role of a chief executive officer with enhanced powers, supported by a large number of nonacademic management professionals in fields ranging from...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Strategic Planning for Higher Education
• 2 Governing Universities in Times of Uncertainty and Change
• 3 The Funding of Universities in the Twenty-First Century
• 4 Unlocking the Benefits of Higher Education through Appropriate Governance*
• 5 Mission-Driven Higher Education in Emerging Academic Systems
• 6 Higher Education’s Landscape of Internationalization*
• 7 Where the Quality Discussion Stands
• 8 Global University Rankings and their Impact
• 9 Fund-Raising as Institutional Advancement
• 10 The Challenge of University Leadership in the Developing World
• 11 Access and Equity
• 12 The Academic Profession
• 13 The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Research Universities in Developing Countries*
• Index