The Evolution of Universities

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.