| Reconciling Educational Excellence with Organizational Efficiency. Administrative Leadership to Advance High-Quality Teaching and Learning in Higher Education is a study that explores the ways that administrators in academic affairs lead others in advancing educational excellence following a college or university's adoption of fiscal strategies that can threaten the known practices for supporting high academic quality.; Actions undertaken for sustaining educational excellence by administrators in roles from academic program director to chancellor at five Midwestern public and private, non-proprietary universities were investigated to address the study's main research question: "To the extent that tension exists between institutional aims for organizational efficiency and educational excellence, what do administrative leaders do to sustain or enhance high academic quality?"; Administrative leaders facing the paradoxes related to declining resources coupled with increasing demands for student access, academic quality, and fiscal accountability often adopt a basic, efficiency plan of resource containment for solving compound institutional challenges. Efficiency plans can involve across-the-board cuts, organizational restructuring, or implementation of comprehensive technologies geared to measuring efficiency. Borrowed from business models, efficiency plans are not linked to educational practices and, thus; at the very least through failure to consider educational factors, these strategies can embody potential tensions that compete with or override the practices known for advancing educational excellence.; The study resulted in identification of a two-stage theory of administrative actions for sustaining excellence that can be reconciled with an institution's aims for organizational efficiency. Stage one actions involve establishing an institutional vision for excellence and the linked designs for achieving it; stage two involves administrative leadership that is consonant with an institution's established vision for excellence. The study also resulted in an ancillary finding that suggests threats to academic quality occur when tension between institutional aims for excellence and efficiency go undetected or unaddressed. In addition, diverting administrative attention and action from academic areas to the areas tied to solving fiscal challenges can diminish the educational quality of a college or university. |
