Academic Planning and Organizational Design: Lessons From Leading American Universities

The emerging competitive environment of higher education, both within and between countries, is requiring universities in Europe and other pans of the world to emulate American institutions by becoming corporate entities with an independent capacity to make strategic choices among academic programmes and activities. A number of the leading American universities have developed comprehensive planning processes that offer suggestive guidance for managing in this new environment. These processes have emphasized: clarifying and articulating norms essential to the legimacy of planning; grouping and consolidating functions; promoting reciprocal communication; encouraging the development of a planning capacity within each strategic unit; and increasing direct communication and the sharing of information among members of the academic community. Essentially these universities have conceived of comprehensive planning as a problem of organizational design, systematically seeking means of promoting integration in a highly differentiated organization. The specific mechanisms by which this integration has been accomplished are reviewed.