高校使命陈述是有用的吗——来自美国学者的研究

使命陈述是对使命的文字陈述,它在美国高等教育中普遍存在.但是在当前美国学者中,存在着高校使命陈述有用论和无用论的争论.美国学者墨非通过对美国不同类型高校使命陈述的研究得出结论,美国不同类型高校使命陈述有其自身的特色和特点.这在一定程度上证明了高校使命陈述存在的必要性,也给我国高校提供了一定的借鉴.     

The organizational identity of Ukrainian universities as claimed through their mission statements

After the Revolution of Dignity (2014), Ukraine signed an Association Agreement with the European Union. In the context of European integration, new legislation on higher education has been adopted. Changes in the institutional environment expect responses from higher education institutions, in particular changes in the organizational identities of Ukrainian universities that are claimed through the mission statements. As Ukrainian universities are in the stage of transition from the Soviet past to the European future, it is of primary importance how they interpret and respond to the changes in the institutional environment, claiming their organizational identity through mission statements. To answer this question, sociological institutionalism is applied as a theoretical framework for the exploration of how institutions shape the organizational identities of universities. A content analysis of the mission statements of 46 Ukrainian universities was conducted: 26 defined before the adoption of the new legislation on higher education in 2014 and 20 formulated after this date.     

An institutional North Star: the role of values in presidential communication and decision-making

Mission statements have been a staple of higher education institutions for decades, but little is known of how they are used as a tool for institutional decision-making. Using three distinct data sources, this study relies on framing theory to analyse the perceptions of university presidents in the United States on the role of mission statements in deciding when and how to communicate. Further, we compare the espoused values of university mission statements to the statements university presidents made following the 2016 US presidential election. Findings indicate presidents view mission statements as central to their decision to communicate and our analysis reveals some congruence between mission statements and public statements.     

The role of statements of institutional purpose

This paper assesses the utility and role of institutional purpose statements. If they are as effective as one is led to believe, what intrinsic facts or elements make them so? Is there value in having a purpose statement, or is the value attributed to the exercise of creating and discussing it? If there is such a value, what forms and circumstances create the value? What forms do mission statements usually take? Do different forms have different attributes? In addressing these questions, two methods are employed. One is conventional in that literature documenting the theory and research of others has been carefully reviewed, but from the particular perspectives of form and effectiveness. The other is to examine a series of actual statements of institutional purpose, with particular regard to form, content, and context of planning. To elucidate the context of planning, a series of master plans and mission statements for systems of higher education are also examined. In total, 32 institutional statements and 12 system plans or statements are examined. (The plans that are examined are listed in Appendixes A and B.) The paper observes that mission statements are effective in some situations, but not in all. In some situations they may be disadvantageous. Although planning theorists suggest that mission statements follow an approximately common form, the study of actual statements indicates several different types.     

Class,capital, and competing academic discourse: a critical analysis of the mission/s of American higher education

In this paper, we critically analyze institutional mission statements as discursive texts replete with symbolic meaning, as we believe these texts reveal a great deal about the ways in which higher education remains increasingly stratified. We argue that beneath the generalized rhetoric of institutional mission statements, lie powerful messages seemingly coded with varying forms of class-based academic capital. We further argue that these messages reflect two distinct, competing discourses surrounding the purpose and value of higher education, that parallel the stratification of the larger system itself. Findings reveal evidence of these competing discourses and contribute to larger discussions surrounding educational inequality.     

Defining mission statements in higher education: Towards a genre perspective

Mission statements provide educational institutions with the legitimacy to market and promote services through positive statements. This study applied genre analysis to examine the function of promotional rhetoric in top 100 international universities' mission statements. Bhatia's rhetorical moves of promotional genre was triangulated with Pearce and David's components for mission-writing. It was seen that international universities rely on promotional rhetorical moves to articulate their self-concept and services. Moreover, universities actively compete against each other to secure a high position in the international ranking lists. This ensures that they obtain additional incentives that help them gain economic stability and build a reputation. Promotional genre has become a practiced culture in the professional discourse community of higher education. Hence, there is a need to allow mission statements genre membership. We suggested a genre model that can be taught and used for writing mission statements. The most recurrent moves employed suggest that the communicative purpose for mission-writing used by international universities is to target the international market and build a public image to reel in more students, thereby improving their financial status while ensuring a good reputation. Based on this study, institutions can get guidance on designing and drafting effective mission statements.     

Mission and Diversity Statements: What They Do and Do Not Say

For this study we used institutional web sites to examine the mission statements of 80 higher education institutions for messages about diversity. Of the 80 institutions, 59 (75%) referenced diversity in their mission statements; but only 19% defined diversity in racial or ethnic terms. In addition to mission statements, 52 (or 65%) of the 80 institutions had a separate diversity statement; but only 18 of these were an official institutional statement. These treatments of diversity are interesting in light of the changing demographics of the incoming college student population and the recognized need for greater cultural development or awareness on campuses. If mission and diversity statements reflect the priorities of the institution, 35% of the institutions in the sample said nothing about diversity.     

Mission Statements, Physical Space, and Strategy in Higher Education

The effectiveness of higher education institutions has bases in institutional structures and cultures. However, structure and culture represent abstract concepts while institutions realize high performance in practice. Given their salience in higher education, mission statements and campus space bring structure and culture into the realm of practice. Moving from abstract to concrete, this paper shows how mission statements embody structure and culture and how physical space, in turn, enacts mission in day-to-day institutional life. By harnessing the mission-space linkage, strategy can access structure and culture for the purpose of increasing effectiveness.     

Beyond the Mission Statement: Alternative Futures for Today's Universities

ABSTRACT

Many post-secondary institutions utilize the mission statement as the key tool for positioning and marketing their strategic direction. Unfortunately, most mission statements found in higher education are far too simplistic and general to give substance and direction to differentiation and positioning of universities. This paper presents findings from a three-month participatory action research process at a large urban Canadian university seeking to establish a marketing mind set. Five possible futures reflecting the range of thinking regarding the role of universities emerged from the research process. Each alternative represents separate and different possible directions, the implications of which become more evident by contrast.     

A corpus-based discourse analysis of the vision and mission statements of universities in Turkey

This article presents findings from a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of mission and vision statements of 105 state and 66 private/foundation universities in Turkey. The paper combines a corpus-based approach with critical discourse analysis to interpret the data in relation to its institutional as well as socio-political context. It argues that the mission and vision statements are marked by a need for reassuring their legitimacy and the demands of a growing tertiary market. The historical and cultural backgrounds of the development of universities in Turkey, as well as political and economic conditions, are also decisive in the shaping of mission and vision statement of universities.     

Corporate-university linkages in Canada: transforming a public institution

In the early 1980s, following a decade of financial retrenchment in Canadian higher education, government policy statements and various scientific and research funding organizations began to articulate a new direction for universities. This new direction, referred to in this paper as the corporate agenda, heralds a new era of cooperation between universities and the corporate sector which, its proponents argue, will be mutually beneficial to both.These growing linkages between corporations and universities in Canada are transforming the structure and the mission of the university system. This paper focuses on economic, political and institutional changes that have affected the universities as public institutions. The development of this new agenda is influenced by what we refer to as third party networks, groups which are neither universities nor businesses. Our paper explores the process and discusses its effects on the organization of academic work, research and the emerging image of the university as a corporation.     

Knowing through reflective practice in higher education

This article explores the use of reflective practice statements as sources of data. Under certain conditions reflective practice statements can be interpreted as providing insight into the underlying mechanisms at work in organisations. The article presents an analysis of reflective practice statements produced by lecturers in higher education who have participated in a course for research supervisors. Reflective practice in higher education has not yet become institutionalised as a form of professional socialisation and the article argues that participants were actively engaged in meaning making. Such statements can be seen as productive of real insight. The data is analysed in terms of the craft skills involved in supervision, the contradictions of maintaining a sense of expertise in modern universities, the significance of emotion at work and in terms of institutional power relationships. The article concludes that properly contextualised reflective practice can produce knowledge of the mechanisms at work in the contemporary academy.     

美国高等教育发展进程中的院校研究

“院校研究”是流行于美国高等教育领域的一个重要术语。美国高等教育发展进程中的每一次重大变化都对院校研究实践产生了直接或间接的影响。院校研究在美国的产生和发展源于来自高等学校内部和外部两个方面的驱动力。高等学校基于改进院校管理的需要是院校研究得以产生的内在动力，而政府和社会公众对于高等教育质量和效益的关注所施加于高等学校的压力，则是推进美国院校研究大规模、制度化开展的根本原因。几十年来，院校研究的功能和领域不断扩展，为美国高等学校改进管理决策、提高办学效益、履行说明责任、赢得外部支持发挥了应有的作用。     

Professional Negligence and Public Administration

This paper argues that the Dawkins programme has signalled the end not only of the binary system but also the distinctive mission of the former advanced education sector. The transfer of many of the CAEs to the custodianship of universities will lead to increasing homogeneity in Australian higher education. The indiscriminate emphasis upon research and postgraduate education, in recent institutional assessments, not only diminishes these important fields qualitatively but reduces essential pluralism in higher education and a basic commitment to undergraduate education.     

Accession or Exclusion? University and the Disabled Student: A Case Study of Policy and Practice

Students who are disabled are under-represented in higher education. One reason for this may be that education is not covered by the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and disability statements to government made by individual institutions are more for information than an expression of mission or committed action. The growing empowerment of disabled people themselves has radically shifted thinking about the disabled in society and in this paper student views on provision in one large UK University are collected. Questionnaire and interview data highlight the existing shortcomings in terms of physical access but also in terms of disability awareness among those whose job it is to provide effective university education for all. The findings are broadly in line with researches elsewhere. The paper urges that further research be undertaken and that all universities urgently examine their own situation.     

Research and the Universities’ Image

Traditionally, and from a Humboltian perspective, research was conceived as an important part of the tripartite mission of universities, with teaching and services to the community being the other two. The traditional idea of universities as cultural and social institutions is increasingly being replaced by another: the entrepreneurial, capitalist or, even, industrial university. In the new university, research also changes in line with the economic instrumentality of higher education. In this article, we shall analyse if these new ideas were institutionalised in Portuguese public universities. To do this, we analyse the way in which research is signified in communication processes by analysing the content of universities' websites. In the main webpages, the dominant implicit social meaning of research seems to be a traditional one. However, a more specific analysis reveals the presence of entrepreneurial elements. In Portuguese public universities, creating and commercialising intellectual property could be an institutional objective, but it was not used in the web communication as such. One could say that, despite the New Public Management influences on universities, the idea of research as an entrepreneurial issue was not yet completely institutionalised and, consequently, communication tools such as websites showed hybrid meanings of research.     

A content analysis of top-ranked universities’ mission statements from five global regions

In general, a mission statement reflects the context in which a higher education institution operates. It’s also a direction setting statement indicating the direction required for effective strategic and operational decisions. This study examines how the highest ranked universities in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America compare in terms of their mission statements and how they communicate to their stakeholders and to the public about what their main purposes, values, goals, and objectives are. Having downloaded each university’s mission statement from the Internet, we then classified them into five main categories of Asian, African, European, Latin American, and North American universities and analyzed them separately using the text mining and analysis tools available in SAS Enterprise Miner, a powerful commercial business analytics program. Results show that although we found similar terms and themes in the mission statements across the five different regions, there is great variability in the mission statements with respect to how they communicate their core values, main purposes, and value propositions.     

Does the Affiliation of Universities to External Organizations Foster Diversity in Private Higher Education? Chile in Comparative Perspective

The expansion of private sectors of higher education has usually been regarded as a factor of diversification in higher education systems. Some of this differentiation has been found to arise from the affiliation of private institutions with organizations outside the field of higher education. This article reports the results of a study of this form of interorganizational relationship in private universities in Chile. Cases include universities founded or sponsored by religious, business and military organizations. A typology of private universities is proposed, on the basis of the forms affiliation (or its absence), was observed to take in the cases examined. Weak and strong forms of affiliation are described, and affiliated universities are compared to “proprietary” universities, i.e., those owned by individuals who govern them from their positions in the board of directors, and “independent” universities, in which governance lies with internal – academic or administrative – constituents. Albeit derived from the case of Chile, the typology could be applied to the analysis of private higher education in other national systems. The second part of the article seeks to ascertain whether affiliation operates as a source of differentiation in Chilean private higher education. Results show that, compared to the other types of private universities, the affiliated ones possess distinctive mission statements and declarations of principles, consistent with the orientations of their sponsor institutions, they tend to be smaller, and to have more full-time and better qualified faculty. Some receive financial support from their sponsor organization or its members. Distinctiveness was not found in indicators of prestige and student selectivity, nor in tuition levels, program offerings, curriculum design, the weight of research and graduate programs in their functions, student socioeconomic profile, and faculty involvement in governance. This is not to say that there are no differences in these dimensions among private universities: much diversity exists, but most of it cuts across all categories of interest for our study. Overall, affiliation does not appear to be a strong factor behind the diversification that exists in the Chilean private university sector.     

Looking for Mature Faith in the Missions of Religiously Affiliated Institutions of Higher Education

In this study, we investigated Benson, Donahue, and Erikson's (1993) concept of faith maturity as expressed by institutions of higher education (IHE) claiming religious affiliation. We examined the institutional mission statements of 87 schools affiliated with six Protestant denominations in search of evidence of their intention to develop the Vertical (V) and Horizontal (H) dimensions of faith maturity (Benson, Donahue, & Erikson, 1993). Contrary to this conceptualization of a mature faith, expressions of V and H dimensions were negatively correlated. There was considerable variability in the expression of both V and H dimensions, with Southern Baptist institutions being highest in the V dimension, and United Church of Christ and Lutheran institutions being highest in the H dimension. Although expression of V and H characteristics did not match Benson et al.'s definition of a mature faith, there was some evidence these dimensions corresponded with institutional practices related to relevant student experiences. Overall, the H dimension was emphasized in the mission statements more than the V dimension. These findings have implications for reviewing institutional practices regarding student curricular and co-curricular experiences.     

Enlightenment and minority cultures: Central and East European higher education reform ten years later

The article discusses general trends of the higher education reform in the Central and East Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union over the last decade. Author notices that reflections on the reforms have not reached deeper levels than first diagnostic articles of the early 1990s have. It is explained as a result of the literal lack of the reforms as planned and purposeful changes. While many agencies are interested in continuation of the reform discourse, the actual activities are not coordinated. Discussing the issues of changing relationships between higher education and the State, financing, staffing, quality assurance, content of studies and institutional mission, author finds similarities between current political statements and those made earlier this century under different circumstances. Author concludes that the gap between the official reform discourse and realities of higher education threaten the very existence of public higher education in the region.