Higher Education 39: 67–91, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 67 Academic restructuring: Organizational change and institutional imperatives PATRICIA J. GUMPORT Stanford University, USA Abstract. A perennial challenge for universities and colleges is to keep pace with knowledge change by reconsidering their structural and resource commitments to various knowledge areas. Reflecting upon changes in the academic landscape of public higher education in the United States over the past quarter of a century, the author diagnoses a macro-trend whereby the dominant legitimating idea of public higher education has changed from higher education as a social institution to higher education as an industry. Three interrelated mechanisms are identified as having advanced this process: academic management, academic consumerism, and academic stratification. This pattern of academic restructuring reflects multiple institutional pressures. While public universities and colleges have increasingly come to rely on market discourse and managerial approaches in order to demonstrate responsiveness to economic exigencies, they may end up losing legitimacy as they move away from their historical character, functions, and accumulated heritage as educational institutions. Thus, responsiveness to compelling economic pressures that dominate contemporary organizational imperatives in an attempt to gain legitimacy in one dimension may result in loss for another. Wholesale adaptation to market pressures and managerial rationales could thereby subsume the discourse about the future of colleges and universities within a logic of economic rationality at a detriment to the longer-term educational legacies and democratic interests that have long characterized American public education. Introduction A perennial challenge for higher education institutions is to keep pace with knowledge change. In addition to investing in new faculty positions and launching targeted fund-raising activities, a prominent set of responses at the local campus level is to alter the academic structure by adding, or conversely by deleting, courses, degree programs, and departments. While the prevailing image of knowledge change in higher education has tended to be either inertia or expansion, those who have made their professional lives within higher education settings during the recent past also know otherwise – that is, they understand the threat, if not the reality, of selective consolidation and program elimination, particularly for those academic areas that are deemed of insufficient centrality, quality, or cost-effectiveness (Gumport 1993).