Changes in Quality among Public Universities

Abstract

At a time when decentralized management is gaining favor in the business world, many public institutions of higher education and state governments are examining the wisdom of current oversight practices. To what extent should organizational authority be decentralized, and what are the appropriate mechanisms of accountability and control? These questions have become important issues in the 1980s and are under active review by corporations, governments, and multicampus systems alike. Contemporary organizational theory stresses the important role of the organization's environment [1, 13, 25]. If public universities are viewed as complex, loosely coupled organizations, their regulatory relationships with state governments form an important feature of the external climate within which these institutions pursue their goals. The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, in its 1973 report on Governance of Higher Education, concluded that campus autonomy had declined substantially since the end of World War II [6]. In 1976 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published a report on The States and Higher Education which identified five major concerns two of them were the increasingly centralized control of public higher education and the erosion of campus autonomy.