PASSHE Governance: Implications of its New Techno Savvy Corporate Style.

Market-oriented management styles in Higher Education aim to increase enrollment, create “brand names” (image identification), and incorporate for-profit sub-entities.  Inevitably, these efforts can affect the organizational structure of governance in the systems of Higher Education and alter its core values (pursuit of knowledge, social good, public benefit).  This is especially true when shared governance and community based models of education are replaced by trustees and administrators who seek to circumvent traditional channels of governance and implement new criteria of program evaluation using two proven socio-political strategies: 1) divide and conquer and 2) power lies in the control of information or the “spin”. 

Any Education Program under an administrative scrutiny based on “enforced accountability” will find itself frequently “out of the loop” and defending its educational value in terms of economic criteria or standards of popularity. 

Ironically, corporate leadership is not selected using the same standards of popularity, nor are political leaders held to such high standards of approval ratings as those of student evaluations that are supposed to top 70%. 

Moreover, what measures exist for the administrative accountability?  What standards are they being held to?  When and how will administrators be evaluated by student and faculty bodies?  Will this evaluation be as timely as the administrative record keeping that underlines the new measures of “enforced accountability”? 

Furthermore, where and how are the educational “profits” being reinvested?  When are low-profit-returning educational enterprises justifiable? 

Can educational for-profit strategies anticipate the real business sector’s needs and create new expanding educational markets? 

Can educational-skill-delivery and faculty regrouping / recruitment keep up with the pace of changes while maintaining the same levels of quality?  Will the pace and nature of these changes be cost effective? 

Will the push for entrepreneurial educational institutions ultimately clash with corporate-like educational centralization? Can any subsidiary institution remain culturally autonomous?

Finally, it seems that the key to corporate-like educational centralization is Distance Education.  Because of this reliance on technology, the Distance Education administrator assumes an important role as arbitrator of institutional culture/s.  More importantly, the success of this administrative role is dependent on clear articulation, description, and explanation of the Distance Education learning model and its ability to include faculty input in terms of program design.  This means from start to finish and includes upper and middle level administrative management.  Legitimizing such an initiative means guaranteeing  some residual form of shared governance and subsidiary autonomy.