Strategic Governance 81
system. Nor does it have a decision-making mechanism to set agendas, define
priorities, and allocate resources that respond to the most pressing issues that are
shaping its future.
Marginalized Faculty and Administrative Roles
We see again in this case many of the structural and organizational realities
that make leadership in colleges and universities so difficult. The neat separation
between “academic” and “administrative” issues has become increasingly artificial.
In this example, the problems with general education trigger lower enrollment,
increase demands and costs in admissions, and cause a drop in tuition revenues.
Countless other problems ripple through the organization from this source. Yet
because general education is considered to be an academic problem, it is studied
in isolation rather than as part of an organizational system.
The president is frustrated as an academic leader, as his complaint made clear.
He has studied many successful general education programs and is a respected
educator. Yet he is also aware that good ideas about academic programs and
practices often count for little. On his campus, like most, academic matters are
decided by groups and committees that live in a world with their own rules, expec-
tations, and proprieties. Even with so much at stake for the institution, he feels
marginalized.
Yet this case and many like it reveal something else. The forces that are shaping
the wider society and higher education do not pause to differentiate themselves
around the disjointed decision-making protocols of academic organizations. Pow-
erful sweeping realities like technological innovation, market forces, demographic
shifts, social change, economic cycles, internationalization, and political trends
happen as they will. As these changes have swept through the halls of higher
learning in the last twenty-five years, the identities of colleges and universities
have become ever more contextual. The outside world has insistently shaped the
inside world. As we have seen in the images and models that we explored earlier,
some educational institutions increasingly mimic the market-driven realities of
corporate decision making. Among other things, these trends have created a new
depth and density of administrative decision making. Increasingly specialized and
professionalized, it has by force of necessity assumed responsibilities that were
once the faculty’s.
In many spheres, including the initiation of new academic units and institutes,
the implementation of governmental regulations, the planning of facilities, and
the management of financial resources, administrative decision making is domi-
nant. Often to their relief, faculty members on most campuses—although there
are exceptions—no longer play a decisive role in policies on student life or in
decisions related to admissions and financial aid, especially since the latter are
now dominated by marketing plans and computer models. Just as academic admin-
istrators and trustees often feel frustrated by their inability to move the academic
agenda, so do many faculty members feel marginalized in their organizational