Education, Science and Technology > Education, Training, Science & Technology > Education
Institutional Reform in Mexican Higher Education: Conflict and Renewal in Three Public Universities
By Rollin Kent (02/98, EDU-102, En)
This paper provides a process analysis of institutional turnaround in three public universities in Mexico (Universities of Sonora, Guadalajara, and Puebla). The focus is on policy reform at the governmental level and on changes at the institutional level, especially on the political and management dimensions. The point of departure is Moisés Naím's proposition that, in the wake of macroeconomic reform in Latin America, hard questions need to be asked about public institutions, whose necessary reform he calls part of the "second generation of change" (Naím, 1994, 1995). How are public institutions responding to the higher education policy reforms initiated in the early 1990s in Mexico?
In the universities examined here, reform came on the heels of conflict resulting from institutional collapse. These organizations had seen their internal control systems dissolve and their external legitimacy relationships crumble. Although turmoil is not seen here as a necessary catharsis that must precede institutional renewal, it constituted an important ingredient of the three experiences. These are not just stories of crisis but also of renewal. The means by which each university went about this painful process, the structural outcomes (such as can be identified so early in the game) and the redefinition of their institutional missions are the object of this paper.
Thus, a premise that underlies this analysis is that higher education reform is a complex social process. Adaptation to the market is undoubtedly a crucial dimension of this experience, but this factor surely acts through a web of institutional factors that have different expressions in various national contexts. Change, in this context, may on occasion resemble the rapid organizational innovations that some of the recent literature describes as postbureaucratic or postentrepreneurial. However, for the most part, the universities examined here have struggled to raise themselves to a plane of acceptable contemporaneous behavior in higher education.
This paper looks at how this is happening in some public institutions of higher education in Mexico, and it will ask the question: does management matter? The analysis is biased toward structural change at the level of upper management, as opposed to change in academic practice and organization. The emphasis is on visible change, rather than on the cultural dimension or resistance to change, although these aspects will be addressed. The sources used were documentary evidence, official statistical data and, especially, interviews with members of institutional leadership teams.
Last updated: 04/06/07
