EBOOK: Sustaining Change in Universities

Book excerpt: ·What can be done to ensure universities are well positioned to meet the challenges of the fast moving world of the 21st century? This is the central question addressed by Burton R. Clark in this significant new volume which greatly extends the case studies and concepts presented in his 1998 book, Creating Entrepreneurial Universities. The new volume draws on case studies of fourteen proactive institutions in the UK, Europe, Australia, Latin America, Africa, and the United States that extend analysis into the early years of the twenty-first century. The cumulative international coverage underpins a more fully developed conceptual framework offering insight into ways of initiating and sustaining change in universities. This new conceptual framework shifts attention from transformation to sustainability rooted in a constructed steady state of change and a collegial approach to entrepreneurialism. It contains key elements necessary for universities to adapt successfully to the modern world. Lessons for reform can be drawn directly from both the individual case studies and the general framework. Overall the book offers a new form of university organization that is more self-reliant and manages to combine change with continuity, traditional academic values with new managerial values. Essential reading for university administrators, faculty members, students and researchers analysing higher education, and educational policymakers worldwide, this book advocates a highly proactive approach to university change and specifies a new basis for university self- reliance. Burton R. Clark is Allan M. Cartter Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. During his career, he has taught at five leading US universities: Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, Yale and UCLA. He has published widely on the nature of university organization and the realistic possibilties of reform, linking research for understanding with research for use.