The Life Cycle of Academic Management Fads

eat tIe Institutions of higher education are always under pressure to become more efficient and effective. In response, many have attempted (either voluntarily or under mandate) to adopt new management systems and processes that were originally designed to meet the needs of (presumably) more efficient business or governmental organizations. One contemporary observer, referring to "the hum of corporate buzzwords" in the academy, has commented that "a person would be hard pressed these days to find a college that doesn't claim to be evaluating or reshaping itself through one of these approaches" (Nicklin, 1995, p. A33). This "hum" is not new; it has been a feature of the higher education landscape for at least the past forty years. Among the first of these processes was the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), initially developed by Rand for use by the Defense Department and adopted by many higher education institutions in the early 1960s. Among the most recent are Business Process Reengineering (BPR), and Benchmarking. In between, business management scholars have documented over two dozen management innovations that were proposed between 1950 and 1990 (Pascale, 1990), some of which were adopted by institutions of higher education. The development and advocacy of new management approaches in both nonacademic and academic management continues, and at an increasing