President James J. Whalen was one of three keynote speakers featured at the recent higher education conference sponsored by the international accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick. At the conference over 200 college and university executives examined issues of institutional positioning and leadership in a time when unprecedented challenge is demanding unprecedented change. According to a 1994 survey by the American Council on Education, more than 60 percent of the nation's colleges and universities have undergone or are in the process of undergoing institutional restructuring to reduce costs.
The other keynote speakers were Fred Wiersema, a renowned management consultant and coauthor of the best-seller The Discipline of Market Leaders, and G. Wayne Clough, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
In his remarks Whalen noted that higher education's "traditional evolutionary model is not an adequate vehicle for urgent change in today's world," but he questioned whether the model employed by business would prove a "workable template" for colleges and universities. The challenge, he said, is to bridge the "chasm in organizational culture" between the two "if we are to talk seriously about fundamental reform in the way we do business in academe."
Whalen offered 10 "cautions" based on Ithaca's experience, reflecting, for example, matters of communication, leadership, governance, and the roles and responsibilities of various constituents participating in the process. Drawing upon several contemporary corporate models, including those developed by Wiersema, Whalen contrasted and compared to business the education sector's ability to effect organizational change.
Regardless of whether and to what degree an organization adopts any particular vehicle for change, Whalen said, "the one simple message I believe all of us must reinforce on our campuses is that change must be embraced as a constant in our institutional lives. It should not be seen as a sporadic process, featuring downsizing or restructuring, by which we achieve a desired end state and rest there until it becomes necessary to change again.
"Rather," he concluded, "change should be a current that runs through our institutions, continuously energizing the whole enterprise."