56 Strategic Leadership
STRATEGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION
AND THE CORPORATE WORLD
By the end of the 1970s, it had become clear that the long cycle of growth and
prosperity in American higher education was coming to a close. The end of the
Vietnam War and the oil shocks of the 1970s ushered in a period of economic
uncertainty punctuated by stagflation and soaring interest rates. Financial support
for higher education from both state and private sources started to become grudg-
ing and erratic and increasingly tied to restricted use. Universities also began to
see the first stirrings of more intrusive external control, both in federal regulation
and in accountability to state governments and accrediting agencies.
Academic Strategy
In his 1983 book Academic Strategy, George Keller struck a vital chord for a
large audience in describing how strategic planning could respond to these omi-
nous changes in the environment. Long in use in the military and in corporations,
strategic planning was just emerging in colleges and universities. Keller did not so
much describe the details of the process as situate and articulate a new possibility
at just the right moment.
Of course, universities had been involved in planning for many years and still
are. Larger institutions had long created planning staffs to help manage their
growth. Virtually every institution possessed a facilities master plan, and formal
planning had been applied to finances, enrollment management, and human
resources. In most cases, however, these forms of planning were one-dimensional
forms of linear projection. The only variables in the equation were under the
control of the institution itself. The motifs of contingency, of responsiveness to
change, and of coming to terms with a turbulent environment had been largely
absent.
At the other end of the spectrum, many institutions were accustomed to mak-
ing decisions piecemeal by responding to internal and external political pressures
and the dynamics of organizational culture. For them, however much data they
collected and however many projections they made, decision making was largely
driven by an opportunistic model fueled by growth and defined by the art of the
possible (Keller 1983).
It was in contrast to “ad hocracy” and static models of linear thinking that
strategic planning began to appear on campus, its methods and language largely
borrowed from the world of business. Whatever form it took, strategic planning
most importantly brought with it a new paradigm of self-understanding for aca-
demic institutions, whether recognized or not. Their identities were now coming
to be seen as taking form at the point of intersection with the competitive and
changing world around them. This new contextual model shifted the whole pat-
tern of collegiate planning and decision making. At the heart of the new way of
thinking was the presupposition that successful institutions would have to respond