Over the past several weeks I finished reading two books
discussing the evolution or lack thereof in college and universities in the
United States. Both books were published in 2011, and although their central
theses are very different and their views contrast in many respects, there are
some points of meeting. The most obvious of these is the clarion call from both
authors that if universities go down the road they are headed, they will be in
serious trouble.
One of these books is
Abelard to Apple: The Fate of America’s Colleges and Universities, written by
Richard DeMillo. The author has lived and worked both in the academic world as
a professor and an administrator, and in industry as the chief technology
officer of a major corporation. The main thesis of the book is that the
majority of the two to three thousand institutions constituting America’s
traditional colleges and universities are in trouble as the education
“marketplace” has evolved. The “elites” may survive thanks to their large
endowments and brand name recognition that people are willing to pay for. New
upstart educational approaches, leveraging technology, he argues are nipping at
the heels of the “Universities in the Middle” – those that will go extinct if
they do not find their value proposition. Here’s the opening from “The Laws of
Innovation” – a chapter in the final section of his book.
“When it is written, the story of American colleges and
universities in the twenty-first century will note that they became strong at a
time when there were comparatively few choices in higher education. When faced
with competition, some institutions reinvented themselves, but most of them clung
to the belief that change, if it came at all, would be gradual. They seemed to
be helpless bystanders as their value was quickly eroded by newer – often more
agile – institutions. It is not a new story.”
“The pattern repeats throughout history: institutions that
become inwardly focused, self-satisfied, and assured of their central role in
society are easy prey for innovative experimenters who tap into the needs of
students, places, and times. Universities that want to escape this fate have to
understand the laws of innovation.”
“The forces shaping higher education – curriculum, a faculty
centered culture, reliance on simple fixes, unexamined assumptions, and the
inherent advantages of disruptors – are strong. There are incentives to solve
big problems, but higher education is a massive system, and the ability of an individual
institution to change is often masked by complexity. How many university
presidents would turn their attention from solving immediate, near-term
problems to charge into a battle where the stakes were high and the likelihood
of prevailing depended on so many different factors? … Universities in the
Middle that want to make it to the end of the twenty-first century should look
again at the historical arc. They should take the long view.”
The author makes his long-view case by tracing the history of
tertiary educations starting with the twelfth-century monk Peter Abelard. The
rise of institutes across Europe, the role of religious institutions in shaping
the early universities, the shifts in purpose wrought by the German approach,
the changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought about my a
confluence of politics, economics and technology – all these are weaved into a
narrative arc to show that the early twenty-first century is yet another
crossroads. It is a story of evolution – and like its biological counterpart,
those that adapt to the changing milieu changes may not just survive, but
thrive. There are also examples both in the U.S. and abroad where large
sweeping changes are being made – the author has interviewed a number of higher
education leaders.
DeMillo’s background is in computer science, and he sees the
exponential developments in technology and networking as a major disruptor that
will change the higher education landscape significantly. He argues that the
faculty-centered curriculum of the Middle needs to shift to a student-centered
curriculum. I suspect that Benjamin Ginsberg, a professor political science who
spent many years at both Cornell and John Hopkins would disagree. Ginsberg’s
book, also published in 2011,
The Fall of the Faculty is subtitled
“The Rise of
the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters”. Ginsberg’s
chronicles the rise of faculty governance (and the tenure process) through the
early twentieth century and its current demise. He argues that the rise of
university administrators and their “minions” (he calls them “deanlets”) have
disenfranchised what a liberal arts education should be to the detriment of
students, faculty, society – and everyone else except the administrators.
The book is peppered with invective, harsh words, and
examples of the worst kind of administrative behavior and arrogance. The
numbers he cites related to administrative bloat (and he calls out institutions
by name) are downright appalling especially when the concomitant increase in
students and faculty. Ginsberg recites arguments from the administration as to
why more staff and administrators need to be hired, and presents his
counter-arguments. The bloating of administration is seen to be almost
virus-like – interested in self-perpetuating in size and influence to the
detriment of the educational enterprise. Here are a couple of paragraphs and
sentences to give you the gist of his scathing comments from chapter two, “What
Admnistrators Do”.
“The number of administrators and staffers on university
campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is simply
not enough work to keep them all busy… To fill their time, administrators
engage in a number of make-work activities. They attend meetings, conferences,
they organize and attend administrative and staff retreats, and they
participate in the strategic planning processes that have become commonplace on
many campuses… Most administrators and staffers attend several meetings every
day… In any bureaucracy, a certain number of meetings to exchange information
and plan future ocourse of action is unavoidable [though] many meetings seem to
have little purpose [other than] reports from and plans for other meetings.”
“Whenever a school hires a new [senior administrator], his
or her first priority is usually the crafting of a new strategic plan… The
typical plan takes six months to two years to write… A variety of university
constituencies are usually involved in the planning process [but] most of the
work falls to senior administrators and their staffs as well as to outside
consultants… A flurry of news releases and articles in college publications
herald the new plan as a guide to an ever brighter future for the school…
Strategic planning serves administrators’ interests as a substitute for
action.”
“It would be incorrect to assert that strategic plans are
never what they purport to be… Such a plan typically presents concrete
objectives, a timetable for their realization, an outline of the tactics that
will be employed, a precise assignment of staff responsibilities, and a budget…
The documents promulgated by most colleges and universities, however, lack a
number of these fundamental elements of planning. They tend to be vague and
their means left undefined… These plans are, for the most part, simply expanded
vision statements… What was important here was not the plan but the process…
the new appointee asserted leadership, involved the campus community, and
created an impression of feverish activity and forward movement. The ultimate
plan, itself, was indistinguishable from dozens of other college plans and
could have been scribbled on the back of an envelope or copied from some other
school’s planning document.”
While Ginsberg acknowledges that faculty are partly
responsible for the rise of the all-administrative university (by not fighting
against it), by and large, he paints faculty as having the right approach and
that things would be much better off with fewer administrators and with faculty
members in charge of most things. DeMillo, on the other hand, argues that the
faculty-centered approach (which was not always true in history) is starting to
look outmoded. Ginsberg wants a return to this approach. DeMillo thinks it is
not possible.
Where both might agree is that universities today are
engaged in too much mission creep. Ginsberg would see this as fuel that helps
administrators continue to concentrate power and hire more of themselves and
more support staff to help these plans. He argues that many of these plans and
initiatives should be axed. DeMillo argues that one of the problems with the
Universities in the Middle, with fewer resources and serving different
populations of students, is institutional “envy” of the “elite”. This has led
to the proliferation of initiatives spread thin and demanding ever more
resources while passing the costs to students and their families. In his view
this is unsustainable and institutions need to carefully define their value
proposition, narrow their focus on what’s important, or risk going the way of the
dinosaurs.
I resonate with many of the arguments
brought up by both DeMillo and Ginsberg in their rather different books
(addressing different issues). That being said, I don’t agree with everything,
and I do question some of the assumptions. Did these two books get me to think more
carefully about the direction we are headed (for those of us who work in higher
education)? A resounding yes! If either of these books has piqued your
interest, I recommend reading them in full. I haven’t done justice to either of
the authors through short quotes and quick summaries.
