Responding to Existential Crises: An Examination of Organizational Adaptation Over Four Decades

• In Event: Equitable Education Systems and Organizational Climate: Stakeholder Perspectives

Abstract

The year 2020 was viewed by colleges and universities as a perfect storm. Faced with enrollment uncertainties auguring financial distress, some scholars and pundits projected significant closures of less-selective, nonprofit private HEIs. Yet these dire prognostications never came to be. This scholarly paper synthesizes four decades of literature to understand how HEIs have weathered historic crises and lays out a history of organizational adaptation. Secondly, it offers a typology of environmental crises since 1980, utilizing domains of the organizational environment from organizational theory (Hatch, 2013) to contextualize 2020 crises relative to those of decades past. We close with a reflection on the opportunity that environmentally-induced existential crises present HEIs to critically examine, reinterpret, and revitalize their mission, purpose, and practice.

Authors

• Elizabeth Dunens, University of Pennsylvania

• Matthew Hartley, University of Pennsylvania