From the Eye of the Storm: Higher Education’s Changing Institution

In order to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary - the third lustrum - of our Center, we at CHEPS decided to collectively write a book on the issue of how higher education institutions deal with the demand for change. Institutional change is without any doubt one of the burning issues for researchers in higher education and policy studies in general, but even more so for administrators at the institutional level (institutional leadership, deans) and planners of higher education in public life (government agencies, intermediary organisations, international organisations). Whereas the lustrumbook we wrote for our second lustrum concentrated on comparative policy studies, many of them focusing on comparisons between different national higher education systems, this time the object of our analyses is the institution itself. Today's higher education institutions are faced by demands from a multitude of actors - from inside the institution (students, staff) as well as from the institution's environment (governments, employers, research councils, sponsors). These demands require changes in policy, practice, systems, and culture. The ways in which institutions respond to these demands and how their behaviour may be understood and predicted is the challenge tackled by the authors of this volume, each from their own perspective and each looking at different aspects of the educational organisation.