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The art and craft of university coordination

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this study is to understand the apparent acquiescence of senior officials at Alberta’s universities to legislation that might pose a threat to their institutions’ autonomy. In 1975 the Alberta government under the leadership of Premier Peter Lougheed attempted to introduce a mechanism for coordinating university programs in the Adult Education Act by placing Alberta’s four universities against their will within a system of provincial public post-secondary institutions. The 1975 Act failed to receive third reading due to successful lobbying efforts, yet in 2003 Lougheed's vision was finally realized with the passage of the Post-Secondary Learning Act (PSLA), which enlisted Alberta’s four universities without resistance as members of a provincial system that coordinates post-secondary programming. A historical analysis, this study was framed within the dimensions of Wenger’s Communities of Practice model to analyze the interaction and trust between and among senior university and government officials in their attempts to find agreement on matters concerning the coordination of university programming. The study found that, only where there was evidence of all three dimensions of the Communities of Practice model, was there mutual trust as well as agreement by the university officials on government initiatives regarding the coordination of university programming. The main conclusion of the study is that university officials responded well to the program coordination concerns of the provincial government when the university officials, treated as equals to their government counterparts rather than as agents of government policy, were given the opportunity to participate in the development of the program coordination legislation and policies in conjunction with government officials.

Text

2014-01-02

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/45690

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/