This brief and accompanying Funder's Sustainability Assessment Tool is intended to help foundation leaders address the challenges of sustainability. The brief begins with a framework for thinking about sustainability, introduces an assessment tool funders can use in a variety of ways to support sustainability in their grantmaking, and concludes…

Examines a specific program termination (in social work) to determine how universities interpret and apply the goals of their strategic plans. Finds that institutional actors hold different perceptions of the strategic plan goals and their relevance to the terminated program. Suggests that colleges and universities need to clarify strategic plan…

Several hierarchical and sequential reduction options are discussed. The institutional shrinkage process implemented at the University of Michigan is described, including across-the-board cuts, reduction of nonacademic programs, long-range faculty reduction procedures, and program discontinuance. (Author/MLW)

The themes of the 1982 annual conference of the American Association of University Professors are outlined. They include the importance of planning, selective versus across-the-board retrenchment strategies, definitions and problems of financial exigency, program reduction, and affirmative action claims. (MSE)

Rowan College of New Jersey has adopted an "enterprise model" for strategic planning that is seen as central to attaining the mission of the college during a time involving a substantial decline in state support. Rowan pursued a strategy termed "growth by substitution." This new process was cast in a more entrepreneurial mold…

This report presents the findings of a visiting team charged with assessing Northeast Missouri State University's progress in 5 years toward goals from a new institutional mission and planning document. In particular the report endorses the 49 undergraduate programs and 9 graduate programs offered at NMSU each of which successfully attained the…

Adjustments that state policy-makers and institutions of higher education will need to make as they face cutbacks in public support and declining enrollments are described, based in part on a research project on retrenchment in higher education conducted by the Southern Regional Education Board. Given the long-term contractual obligations of…

Some of the responses of colleges and universities to declining enrollments and diminishing resources are reviewed. Institutions have tried to reduce the size of their operations, reallocate resources internally, and retrench a number of faculty and programs. Several approaches to reductions, reallocations, and retrenchments in specific cases,…