Conflict and Change 249
the intended audience for some of the studies, while in other cases it is faculty
members or academic administrators. Above all, no one reading these reports, and
the many others like them, could ever conclude that contemporary higher educa-
tion in America is a special intellectual preserve free of the full-bodied realities
of economic, social, cultural, educational, and technological change. Echoing
a perspective offered repeatedly throughout this work, they show that colleges
and universities have a contextual identity like every other institution and are
enmeshed in nets of social forces and webs of accountability.
Resistance to Change
Enough has been written here and elsewhere about the difficulty of planned
change in higher education that it requires little new argumentation. One of
the ironies of change in colleges and universities is that it occurs continually,
but by no means uniformly, in the work of individual faculty members and many
academic units. Yet the institutions that house these changes at the micro level
often face agonies of change at the macro level, especially in academic programs
and policies.
We have traced how the well-known characteristics of professional autonomy,
loose coupling, shared governance, and fragmented decision making produce
organizations that resist change, especially if the change has not been initiated
by academic professionals themselves. The general human tendency to resist the
threat of the unfamiliar is especially evident in academic communities. Since
academicians define themselves through their professional identities, change fre-
quently challenges important sources of self-respect.
The reports and projects we have referenced offer trenchant diagnoses of the
need for change, offer worthy proposals to improve institutional performance,
and describe successful change processes. Yet one has to wonder whether they
have seized the critical importance of effective methods of interactive and inte-
gral strategic leadership as the enabler of intentional and sustained change. In
most studies, there is frequent reference to the responsibilities of official leaders,
but much less to the ways change occurs as part of a reciprocal direction-setting
leadership process. Bok (2006) writes sagely about the ways presidents and deans
can use their positions to define a vision for the improvement of undergraduate
education, including the assessment of student learning. If enthusiasm for these
tasks does not take root among the faculty, however, it is doubtful that top-
down strategies will be sustainable or widely influential. On Change V insightfully
describes some aspects of a reciprocal leadership process, yet undoubtedly because
the report is focused on the change process, it tends to describe change as if it
were an end in itself (Eckel, Hill, and Green 2001).
Many of the things that official leaders do to encourage and effect change are
precisely the components of an integral approach to strategy, which provides
the content of change. They facilitate change by anchoring it in legacies and
cherished academic values, and by building trust and taking the long view. They