Institutional Change

Models and Theories

The Collegiate Way: Residential Colleges and Higher Education Reform
This web site was established by Dr. Robert J. O'Hara of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, a national leader in the contemporary residential college movement, to advocate the residential college model as ideal for providing students with the best environment for their personal and intellectual development, and providing graduate studentsand faculty with opportunities to contribute to education across the whole life of the university. The Collegiate Way Web site includes recommendations on how to establish collegiate communities within large universities, selected readings, and other resources.

Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities
This report from the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University assesses the problems and offers recommendations to stimulate new debate about the nature of undergraduate education in research universities and to produce widespread and sweeping reform. The report describes ten ways to change undergraduate education and includes both general statements on issues of particular importance and specific suggestions for achieving the improvements recommended. Together they envision a major overhaul of baccalaureate education and consequently significant shifts in the balance of relationships of research, graduate, and undergraduate education.

Second Nature: Education for Sustainability
Second Nature is a nonprofit organization that assists colleges and universities in expanding their capacity to integrate environmentally sustainable and just action into the foundation of learning, research, and interaction within the local, regional, and global community. Second Nature works to help higher education teach and practice how to achieve a sustainable relationship between humans and the environment.

Reconsidering Faculty Roles and Rewards: Promising Practices for Institutional Transformation and Enhanced Learning
This report, produced by the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education (CAPHE), summarizes results of a three-year CAPHE program, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, called Faculty Roles, Faculty Rewards, and Institutional Priorities. Through the program, 22 colleges and universities received grants to explore ways to clarify emerging new relationships between institutional mission and priorities and faculty roles and rewards, and to examine the process of wholescale institutional change. The report identifies the following issues and strategies for improving student learning: Learning and Assessment; Redefining Scholarship; Faculty Development; Faculty Evaluation and Rewards; Governance, Communication and Decision-Making; and Instructional Technology. The Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education is an operating unit of the Council of Independent Colleges.

Steps Toward Reform - Report on Project Kaleidescope, 1997-1998
This report from Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) outlines questions and issues that are addressed as colleges and universities endeavor to transform the environment for learning for their undergraduate students in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. It has its origin in the work of the Keck/PKAL Consultants and of teams from the over 570 institutions that have participated in various PKAL activities since its inception in 1992.

Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities
The commission was created in 1996 by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) to help define the direction public universities should go in the future and to recommend an action agenda to speed up the process of change. The commission was charged not only with defining and bringing to public attention the kinds of changes occurring at public universities today, but with analyzing necessary reforms and suggesting ways to accomplish them and monitor the results. A series of reports document the commission's findings.

AAC&U offers these resources only as possible models of interest and has not submitted each of them to any substantial peer or quality review. If you have questions about any particular resource, please contact the institution sponsoring it directly.