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Institutional Transformation As Scholarly Activity: The Experience Of Portland State University, Charles R. White, Judith A. Ramaley

Public Administration Faculty Publications and Presentations

In American higher education, change is continuous but occurs most often at the margins, generally taking the form of piecemeal or isolated efforts and programs. Only rarely are change projects comprehensive in their scope and transformative in their effects. In this chapter we describe the context for comprehensive curricular change at Portland State University and offer a more general theoretical construct about institutional change in higher education. That there are so few examples of comprehensive institutional change in American higher education is indicative of the complex mix of internal and external factors that constrain change efforts. We have found that …