The Politics of Public Higher Education

The Politics of Public Higher Education: Strategic Decisions Forged From Constituency Competition, Cooperation, and Compromise is the third in a set of three books that provides higher education leaders, faculty, and system and institutional planners a reality-based view of decision-making in higher education. The focus is on how issues and related problems are translated into strategic initiatives that become the basis for leadership solutions. How the decisions are arrived at is very much influenced by the constituencies within higher education such as faculty, staff, students, and institutional leaders and their interaction with those external to higher education, like a governor and legislators. The interactions are political. On one level, they represent the internal politics of higher education constituencies seeking to highlight their priorities, and on another level, they represent the external politics of elected officials and their representatives seeking support from the public. There is often substantial conflict and competition to gain advantages in funding or as an organizational priority. In this book, we assess the politics within and between the internal and external parties and how those politics should be defined within any strategic planning process. The Strategic Decision-Making Model (SDMM) is applied to help identify and resolve problems. The model consists of six components that ensure that all constituencies are heard and that alternative solutions recognize the key variables necessary to guide a leader's final choices. The six model components are strategic thinking as an organizational mentality, maximizing the amounts and quality of data and information for comprehensive reporting, scanning the future globally, implementing comprehensive strategic planning, supporting transparency of process and decision-making, and using a framework to consistently assess all planning issues, strategies, and outcomes.

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