Why and How Our Institutional Home Matters: Strategic Program Planning in a Specific Setting  

My presentation will address the conference question of how institutional setting affects program focus and development. The answer, at least as we understand it so far, turns out to be fairly complex. In our case, for example, the recent changes to our Technical Writing degree have been directly responsive to rapid changes in the field of technical communication, in evolving technologies, and in the importance of information systems and web-related writing and design for technical communicators, At the same time, it is clearly the case that an equally strong influence has been the internal pressures we feel as we find ourselves competing with other departments at CMU for students who had once been a kind of private preserve, And this pressure involves more than competition for students. An equally important value at stake is our perceived status and role within our department and our university.

Schnakenberg, Karen R. CPTSC Proceedings (2000). Academic>Education>Rhetoric