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Organizational Change
Within an Academic Setting
We separate Organizational Change within an Academic Setting from other cases of Organizational Change. CedarCreek VRC is heavily involved in all areas of organizational change, but academic settings contain a different set of variables steeped in a long history set in tradition.
What we discover is that students have one set of expectations which may or may not be shared by the faculty. In fact, one aspect of many educational institutions is that the faculty spends a significant amount of time trying to convince the student body that their expectations (the faculty's) are the expectations that should be held by the students. In the meantime, the administration very likely has a completely different worldview from either the students or the faculty.
From the perspective of organizational change, it is rarely greeted with enthusiasm. Tradition and history within educational institutions are values that have great energy. Change appears to want to take away from tradition and history, and is strongly resisted in most cases.
The approach at CedarCreek VRC in dealing with organizational change within an academic setting is to first do an analysis of the historical documents. This allows us to clearly state -- for the benefit of all parties -- accepted tradition and historical values for that particular institution. Once consensus is achieved on this point, then we can look at the proposed change and attempt to put it in a positive framework related to the traditional values for that institution.
This is a difficult change process, but not impossible. If you would like to read about one such example, click here. This document as four tables and is complex. Download will taken several minutes on a 28.8 modem.
