Suggests that management fads in higher education go through a predictable five-stage process, including creation, narrative evolution, time lag, narrative devolution, and resolution of dissonance. Finds that in the process of "virtual" adoption academic institutions may endorse management innovations for their symbolic benefits but isolate them…

The hypothesis analyzed in this study is that grade "inflation" may be reflecting real increases in student achievement, demographic factors that may be related to grading, or institutional grading policies that permit grade point averages to rise even if grading standards remain unchanged. (Editor/LBH)

The search for a leader is seen as a symbolic process through which institutional goals are discovered, political influence is negotiated, organizational values and myths are confirmed, uncertainty is reduced, and processes of choice are simplified. (Author/MLW)

Academic senates remain an important feature of higher education governance even though they have been criticized as being ineffective. Senates are examined from the perspective of alternative organizational models, and it is suggested that the functions of the senate are best understood by considering colleges as symbolic systems. (Author/MLW)

If leaders make a real difference, institutions should change as leaders change. Data collected from colleges and universities between 1970 and 1980 indicated that scores on the Institutional Functioning Inventory did not change when their presidents were replaced. Some implications of these findings for understanding organizational leadership are…

A program of planned organizational change based on the interventions of a neutral third party used organizational development and dispute resolution techniques to alter the structure and process of academic negotiations. Analysis indicates that the interventions had no impact on campus climate but did significantly imnprove campus bargaining…

A study is reported that found no significant relationship between unionization and changes in campus climate as described by faculty scores on the Institutional Functioning Inventory. Scores from 1980 are compared with those of a decade earlier for 18 unionized and 18 nonunionized campuses. (Author/MLW)

Study of the inclusion of students on boards of trustees. (IR)

A comparative case study of 32 institutions of higher education indicated that 75 percent of newly appointed presidents, but only 25 percent of presidents with longer terms of office, enjoyed full faculty support. The tenure trajectories of exemplary, modal, and failed presidents are described, and presidents are encouraged to remain enthusiastic…