A Discrete Event Model of Viability Building in a Public University Organization

In the context of today’s interconnected world, public higher education is confronted with a shift of its role from public good to public service, which is accompanied by new challenges in building and maintaining the viability of public universities. There is a vast literature on this topic, but there is not yet reported a systematic approach in modeling the basic steps of decision making and problem solving to be completed by a public university to remain viable. Starting from the concepts of service system, and consonance and resonance as key viability conditions, this paper proposes a discrete event model of the viability building and maintaining process in a generic public university organization. The model evolution is driven by events conditioned by internal, external, or mixed causes. Some of the uncontrollable events occurring in the process may drive the discrete evolution to disturbance rejection states, where specific recovery strategies are applied. If recovery is successful, disturbances may become sources of innovation. The discrete event model can be used as a theoretical and conceptual tool for building and testing instances of the viability building and maintaining processes in public universities, and also for refining academic evaluation criteria by the authorities.