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Abstract
New Zealand universities have undergone significant structural change accompanied by declining public funding and increasing demands for accountability in recent years. In 2000, one of the country’s largest universities redirected resources and funding in a ‘repositioning’ exercise that resulted in redundancies and other consequences affecting staff. Legal action led to an out‐of‐court settlement to review academic policy making, the first such review in the country. This case study of institutional change to constitutional structures and decision processes illustrates ongoing tensions between conventional academic processes of collegial participation in governance versus managerial approaches influenced by business sector models. Implementation of agreed change was slow, and accompanied by signs of persistent and deep divisions in philosophy regarding the purpose and nature of the university. Nevertheless, preliminary evidence suggests limited but successful outcomes that promise both shared academic governance as well as effective management. Relevant theory and research on collegial and academic decision making offer some validation for the longer timelines that occurred, as well as support for the value of problem‐solving alternative models of academic policy making in a modern university.
Notes
An earlier version of this article was presented at the OECD Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) Biennial General Conference on Choices and responsibilities: higher education in the knowledge society, Paris, September 2004. Portions of this work were completed while the author was affiliated with Massey University, New Zealand.