Welcome to The University Transition (TUT) homepage
at UCLA.
A Study of the Core Processes and Outcomes of a Major Research University
During a Time of Change
A research project sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of "The University as a System and the System of Universities" initiative.
Today's research universities are faced with heightened demands from society, limited resources and escalating costs. Fiscal restraints have led to higher tuition, yet members of the public perceive a lower rate of return on their investment. At the same time, universities are expected to contribute as never before to increasing national security, improving human health and stimulating economic growth. Striving to respond more effectively to the changing needs of our society, universities are struggling to find the appropriate balance among the missions of teaching, research and public service.
This two-year study, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, will examine how three academic units at UCLA are responding to the dramatic changes in the university's environment. It will study how university leaders make choices between available resources, processes and outcomes to respond to growing external demands -- and how such decisions are constrained by the university's existing structure, culture and incentives. The study will produce research methods and tentative results that will lay the groundwork for a larger, future study of UCLA. Results of this expanded study can help universities become more results-oriented, and thus more responsive to the changing demands from the environment.
The study will conceptualize the university as an "open system" which, while separated from its environment by an arbitrary boundary, must interact with its environment to survive. A model will be constructed using a combination of research methods, each of which is designed to elicit different kinds of data. Process maps will model the university as a collection of processes -- both formal ones, such as teaching and research, and informal ones, such as faculty mentoring and collaborative research. Interviews with the university's leaders and stakeholders will be conducted to understand society's expectations and UCLA's significant outputs. Ethnography will be used to identify the hidden assumptions, beliefs and values that guide people's behavior and create the university's culture. Time budgets, in turn, will document how and why faculty and staff allocate their time to various activities. Finally, network maps will examine how social relationships between people contribute to academic productivity. Findings produced by each method will be triangulated, or compared and contrasted, to serve as a form of validation.
Initially, the study will focus on three organizational units: (1) the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies; (2) the Physics Department of the College of Letters and Sciences; and (3) the Anderson Graduate School of Management. Each of the study's three principal investigators is a faculty member in one of these units, and each unit is a pilot in implementing Responsibility Center Management, UCLA's new planning and resource management model that shifts financial authority and responsibility to individual academic units.
In 1997, an invitational workshop will be convened for other researchers in higher education to examine the study's design, methods and instruments, and to make early corrections and improvements. The workshop will include researchers from other universities and from the RAND Corp., which recently received a complementary grant from the Sloan Foundation to study higher education as a whole across the nation. Also invited will be members from the Sloan Foundation as well as other foundations, industry representatives, and others who can contribute to a critique of the study.
The three Principal Investigators on the study are: C. Kumar Patel, Vice Chancellor of Research and Professor of electrical engineering, chemistry and physics; Uday Karmarkar, Times Mirror Professor of Strategy and Policy, Anderson School of Management; and Wellford Wilms, Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. The research team includes Professors Karen Stephenson and Donald Chisholm, and Assistant Vice Chancellor of Research Gayle Byock who will provide specialized knowledge; Project Manager Deone Zell; and graduate students Nabil Abu-Ghazaleh, Cheryl Teruya, MaryBeth Walpole, Suzanne Stauffer, and Karen McClafferty.
For more information, please contact Deone Zell at
dzell@ucla.edu.
The entire proposal is available on the World Wide Web at
http://www.research.ucla.edu.
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Please send suggestions, comments, and
reports of non-functional links to:
nabil@ucla.edu
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
Last modified: February 3, 1997.