THE UNIVERSITY MANAGING CHANGE
SO far in this series on higher education for development, I made the following observations:
(1) Dr. Cheddi Jagan firmly believed that a university is inextricably linked with national development and that access to higher education should be available to all; this thinking guided the creation of the University of Guyana (UG) in 1963.

(2) The PNC-UF Coalition Government in 1964 exhibited enormous indifference to UG, and pursued severally the reintegration of UG with the University of the West Indies (UWI).

(3) And a few years later, according to the then Vice Chancellor Dr. Dennis Irvine, the PNC Government, after ridding itself of the UF, established a committee, that included a well-known senior UG staff, to determining the course of action for effecting this reintegration, aimed at ending UG as a Jagan-created institution.

(4) Then, I wrote about the Baldridge model of higher education that the University of Guyana could critically use to address its fiscal restraint; respond to the 21st century demands on higher education governance; and take action on any real, perceived, or imagined stagnation at UG.
And

(5) in a knowledge-based world, research linkage is critical for enhancing national development as well as ensuring that there is an efficient deployment of human and physical capital.
This week I want to examine change within universities. Today, there are new dynamic factors at work in higher education; these are:
* greater student numbers accessing educational opportunities
* mounting pressures to reduce public funding
*  increased education costs
*  the growing and troubling issues of quality instruction and quality outcomes
* demand for teaching innovations
* the evolution of distance education
* Globalizing effects on the university
* enhanced need for a strong University/Government partnership
* a vigorous push for promoting broad-based participation in policy-formulation and decision-making
* powerful yearning to restore public confidence, inter alia.

How well universities manage these issues is the subject of a Report titled ‘The Role of Universities in the Transformation of Societies: An International Research Project (2004). This project was started by the UK Open University’s Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) and subsequently in collaboration with the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU). What follows is critically drawn from the CHERI/ACU Report.
The resilience of traditional academic cultures is quite strong at universities, according to Henkel (2000), making change a difficult commodity to transact. The research literature shows that there is a risk in presuming that policy intentions and approved policy decisions at the level of a governing body will be faithfully implemented by the implementing body, the administration; chances are that significant revisions to the approved policy will take place at the implementation stage; also, there could be a remarkable slowness in implementing a policy decision.
What this means is that universities with a traditional academic climate would not be inclined to generate change or even to adjust its modus operandi to new dynamic factors in higher education; this type of university would be more comfortable with a conservative role of preserving its traditions. But the contradiction of whether universities should have a ‘change’ role or a ‘preservation’ role could be resolved by having universities playing multiple roles in both areas.
At any rate, the universities’ change agent role suggests the following questions: Who (the access question)? What (the curriculum question)? Where (the placement question)?
Access to education is a basic right in most countries. Therefore, where educational credentials determine a person’s social status, then access to education would be key to understanding that society, according to the Report. However, if advantage in society is based on ethnicity, class, etc., then clearly some groups are more likely to gain access to higher education than others.
The curriculum question has significant consequences for universities’ input to social change. What is important here is what courses are taught and researched. A university’s impact may be gauged through what it sees as valuable to be researched, transmitted to other people, and maintained for future generations; whether the university provides sustainable development, meaning whether the university meets the needs of the current generation and will not compromise the interests of future generations.
And so if university courses are really different cultures, with different values (Maassen, 1996), then the curriculum becomes fundamentally a problem about the types of people universities would produce (Brennan, King, & Lebeau, 2004). A curriculum, therefore, has to embody the parameters of nation building.
The placement question for university graduates is critical in terms of the level of their absorption in the labour market. Graduates’ ideas and values could impact society both negatively and positively. Also, a sustained level of dissatisfaction could lead to opposition and dissent, producing change. In any case, a university’s strategic plan must be related to the direction of its society’s nation building efforts and that society’s labour absorption capacity. A strategic plan devoid of this developmental relationship makes graduate placement problematic and creates fertile ingredients for discord.
*Previously published.