Organizational change and public university

This text analyzes what has and what has not happened in Mexican higher education during the last 10 years, particularly what has happened in the public universities ( the illustrative case of the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla). For that purpose, we propose a different way of analyzing organizational change, by focusing on the changes in the perspective of a changing environment and the response of the organization to said environment. That analytical focus offers guidelines not only to describe the changes but also to be able to make comparisons with other institutions and countries, or to be able to judge the quality or the direction of the change, as well as to be able to know whether a change was an innovation or a step backward. Thus, we see vaguely that in the face of the changes in the world, and in Mexico, the public national universities have been reluctant to change; and when change has occurred, it has done so inopportunely and incongruently with the changes in other regions.