Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line and Governing Academia

Reviewed by David Leslie

Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education

Governing Academia: Who Is in Charge at the Modern University?

One of the essential questions dogging the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is whether collective action—by a state, an enterprise, or an institution (like a university)—is more effective (or more efficient) when regulated from the top or when responding freely to market forces. The old Soviet model failed because the command economy served hugely stupid assumptions (not to say pathological illusions). Yet there is something disturbing and repellent about an amoral marketplace in which winners (like Enron) take all from losers (like the flimflammed people of California). How can we be both as smart as we assume the invisible hand to be and as moral or as good (or at least as "progressive") as governments ought to be?

Two new books on higher education look at this dilemma from divergent perspectives. One—Governing Academia: Who Is in Charge at the Modern University?—grapples with how institutions are governed. The other—Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education—looks at how institutions have transformed themselves with explicit responses to market forces. One comes away from reading these books together with the clear impression that we have reached—passed, even—a tipping point in the way higher education is evolving. Once considered a sacred trust, holding and cultivating the wisdom of the ages for succeeding generations, higher education has perhaps now become complicit in the market mania of our age.

As the state has progressively withdrawn its financial and moral support (nay, as it has leveled outright assaults on institutional integrity), the power of markets has driven more of our lives. So, have colleges and universities begun to turn the critical choices that they formerly made in exercising their public trust over to paying customers? Are they more like resorts with smorgasbords, serving clients instead of acting in their best interests? "Governing" or "deciding" or "choosing" is perhaps no longer for lay trustees or even so much for the professional and intellectual trusteeship of the faculty if an institution is to attract the resources it needs to survive and thrive in an increasingly market-driven world.

Ronald Ehrenberg's 2000 book, Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, was a tour de force in the economics of higher education. In Governing Academia, he has edited a collection of essays by a varied group of authors—including administrators and scholars-that aims to describe "how higher education is governed." But the authors write more about the kind of economic algorithms and perspectives they use to understand decisions than about the street-level politics in which the players in governance engage. Some of the essays are extraordinary, though, and the book's impact will be felt through powerful insights from subsections of these essays. The book does not, in the end, however, form a coherent whole, nor even an especially consistent narrative. (But, then, "governance" is not an especially coherent subject.) Its style varies from the clear and compelling to the off-putting use of "propositions," formulae, and abstractions.

The paper by Gabriel Kaplan, a University of Colorado public affairs professor, comes closest to "describing how higher education is governed." It reports the results of a massive governance survey sponsored by the AAUP in 2001 and compares those results to findings from an AAUP survey conducted circa 1970. It thus provides both a contemporary "state-of-things" report and a sense of the thirty-year trends.

The more recent survey focused on how the norm of shared authority is implemented. Not surprisingly, it found that things have changed since the earlier survey. But contrary to much current commentary on the subject, Kaplan found that faculty influence has grown significantly on a wide array of decisions, such as those having to do with faculty appointments and tenure, some administrative appointments, and the setting of average teaching loads.

The book's opening chapter by James Freedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa, is an especially candid look at his own experience as president of two major institutions of higher education and his relationships with his boards. His thoughtful reflections and suggestions for practice are, by themselves, worth the price of the book.

The chapter by Susan Lohmann, a UCLA political scientist, is a lucid examination of the historical roots of the culture of university decision making. She focuses especially on "deep specialization" as academe's core value, which makes decisions at the department level "impenetrable" to outsiders. (I simplify her argument this way: historians don't understand theoretical physicists; economists don't understand literary scholars; and presidents don't understand anyone. Yet they have to come together to decide important issues affecting them all.)

She sees decisions as the playing field between forces that would "ossify" the university by resisting essential change, and forces that would reform the university, overlooking its eternal strengths. And she seems basically content with the chaotic interplay among these contending forces. She believes the conflict serves as a constructive way to balance perennial values against the need to adapt.

Legal scholar Michael Olivas's chapter on "nonlegal legal influences" on higher education places the modern corporate university squarely in the land of Lilliput—a vital and thriving institution tied down by myriad small constraints—lawsuits, accrediting standards, consortium contracts, athletics conference rules, and more. He puts to rest the idea that universities enjoy autonomy—and establishes that universities have waived some of their freedoms in navigating through an increasingly complex and interdependent external world. He suggests that the university may not have had much choice, echoing educator Clark Kerr's insights about how much a part of the real world the university has become.

Olivas's argument reminds us that university governance operates with-in boundaries of limited discretion, boundaries that have closed in more tightly as external entanglements have expanded. More corporate than community, the modern university depends increasingly on its regulators and attorneys rather than on the creative juices of its faculty and students.

Other chapters on collective bargaining, governance of for-profit institutions, "Tiebout competition" (a method for allocating resources competitively and efficiently), statewide coordination of higher education, and "herding cats" add texture and depth to the book, but seem both too focused and too oblique to the central topic—how universities are governed—to move its narrative toward the sort of clear conclusions readers might anticipate.

Indeed, at times the chapters show points of friction, if not contradiction. James Freedman's clear and insightful retrospective on his two presidencies under very different boards, for example, argues against putting faculty or students on boards of trustees ("It is a mistake," he writes.). University of Virginia education professors Brian Pusser and Sarah Turner, on the other hand, note that nonprofit boards often have faculty and student appointees, without apparent harm. Ehrenberg's own brief concluding chapter implicitly acknowledges these divergences. He confirms that "there may not be any single optimal design" for university governance. And it is indeed difficult to find one's way to any central conclusion from the good, but divergent, analyses in this volume.

David Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is more than a breath of fresh air: it is a healthy slap upside the head to academics who think they are immune to the grubbing and grabbing of raw market forces. Elegant, amusing, irreverent, refreshingly written, and beautifully edited, this book shakes the scales off a purist's eyes.

Kirp presents a series of cases recounting (in sometimes entertainingly gossipy detail) the ins and outs of campus resurrections. He takes the University of Chicago as his opening case, an impressive way to confront doubters. Chicago, almost always included in the pantheon of academic "greats," was headed for financial meltdown in the early 1990s until a savvy (but unpopular) president insisted on big changes.

The other cases range from turnarounds at small liberal arts colleges (Beaver and Dickinson) to "responsibility-center management" run wild at the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan, to the quasi-privatization of the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. Other cases include the controversial endowment of the University of Florida law school by an exile from the legal profession and the marketing of electronic courses by Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the British Open University. "Renting" universities for corporate-sponsored research represents another experiment. As expected, the for-profits like DeVry and Jones International universities and the University of Phoenix show up as the competition.

In short, a lot of change is under way: competitive, market-driven, soul-selling, and profiteering changes to institutions desperate to survive and advance themselves in a world where guarantees are gone and big bets are being laid down. The message of this book is that the train has left the station on a very fast trip, but the condition of the tracks and the destination remain uncertain.

Some casual readers will probably tag Kirp as a promoter of the market approach to university governance, management, or stewardship. But in fact he balances descriptions of the impressive successes of some experiments with a warning that the assertion "leave it to the market" is itself a political statement, "a default of institutional leadership and an abandonment of the idea of a university's mission." His concluding chapter raises all the right questions about the balance between providing for the private gain of individuals and corporations by charging market rates for the products of professors' work and protecting the common good by arranging subsidies for the things that enrich society but that do not pay for themselves (like "sociology, comparative literature, and pure mathematics").

I come away from these two books with a feeling that Ehrenberg's authors (with a few exceptions) struggle too hard to find a rational way to govern the university and that the institutions described by Kirp may have bought short-term success in a bargain with the devil. Earlier studies about university governance have concluded with a consistency that is persuasive that universities are neither rational nor "manageable." So perhaps we are looking for help in all the wrong metaphors—as in the point of departure (mainly economics) of the Ehrenberg book. Bargains with the devil are more worrisome to me. They succeed often enough by the popular and most immediately gratifying measures—money, prestige, and so forth—to be addictive. They reinforce images of managerial omnicompetence at the expense of more responsible views of leadership.

Driven as we are to master the rules of a competitive economy, we should heed former University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins (as quoted by Kirp): "When an institution determines to do something in order to get money, it must lose its soul." Perhaps this is the difference to which attention must be paid: colleges and universities are more than mere enterprises, they are "institutions." They are carriers of important values that represent a common good, and that must be sustained by charitable beneficence. It is the stewardship of these values, rather than accounting for the bottom line, that should worry us and that should animate our leaders. Faculty, of course, have to articulate and personify these values of free inquiry and authentic, purposeful scholarship that serve society. If we know what universities ought to be at their core, and if we and those who represent us to the public know it—and if we deliver honest value—then perhaps we don't have to play inventive games at the margin or create corporate decision rules that rationalize everything.

But in the world we inhabit, I am afraid faith in the traditional order of things is naïve and misplaced. Both these books include insights and lessons about how forces beyond academics' control are changing colleges and universities. They suggest that the future of the academy will probably be influenced more heavily by the marketplace than by the established values and traditions—including customary governance arrangements—that have shaped higher education in the past century.

David Leslie is Chancellor Professor of Education at the College of William and Mary.

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