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Minding the Academy’s Business
When our graduate students think universities should be run like for-profit businesses, we know we’re losing the PR battle.
By David J. Siegel
As a teacher of educational leadership, I have observed that an alarming number of my doctoral students tend to view colleges and universities as little more than failed businesses. They might be forgiven for adopting this perspective; after all, they have witnessed a rising tide of corporate executives appointed to top academic posts, suggesting that boards of trustees see higher education’s principal challenges as commercial rather than academic. The matter-of-factness with which many people in academe now make the case for the university as a business—as if it were completely natural to discuss academic institutions in terms formerly reserved for multinational corporations—points to a distressing subtext: that nothing much is worth protecting against the steady expansion of business methods, and we should simply yield to them because they are superior in some objective, rational sense.
For me, a recent incident brought into sharp relief the extent to which this argument is seeping into our collective consciousness and lexicon. Toward the end of a class focusing on organizational change and adaptation in higher education, I told my students to assume that they had been charged with redesigning a college or university to better address contemporary challenges. They had carte blanche to abolish or add any organizational structures, features, or routines that would help the cause. I asked them to paint a picture of their “new and improved” institution, anticipate sources of resistance to their vision, and identify techniques they might employ for winning people over to their vision.
Corporate Model What I heard as we went around the room disheartened me as much for its uniformity as it did for its stridency. My students didn’t appear to think very highly of the academic enterprise or respect our traditions. Tenure and shared governance, for example, came in for scathing criticism. They saw tenure as a license to slack off, and they disliked shared governance because it slows down change. They wanted to wed us more tightly to industry—big business would be the ultimate judge of the value and uses of higher education. In this new world order, the liberal arts would be a thing of the past, because (the students alleged) the liberal arts are simply out of touch with industry’s needs. The highest virtue of the academy would be its responsiveness to “stakeholder preferences,” not fealty to purpose or mission or abstract ideals. In short, these students viewed us as flawed, deficient, increasingly irrelevant, and in desperate need of corporate management models to set everything aright.
This exercise confirmed my growing suspicion that students borrow their notions of leadership largely from nonacademic contexts (typically industry) and that these contexts form the prism through which they view leadership in higher education. They demonstrate little patience for the idea that leadership grows organically out of the context in which it is practiced; indeed, they seem to see context as an impediment—something to be domesticated, overcome, or brought into conformity with external tastes. (They look upon the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of academic life as annoying aberrations, not as amusements.) In this formulation, academic culture is merely a roadblock to the accomplishment of business objectives.
This strikes me as a curious position for graduate students studying higher education. These are college and university administrators in training. Many of them already hold leadership positions at four year institutions and community colleges but need a terminal degree to advance through the ranks. They are bright, earnest, opinionated, full of practical ideas, and eager to make a difference in the world. Knowing nothing else about them as individuals, one might expect them to gravitate to programs in educational leadership because of a love for the academy or a desire to promote the transcendent possibilities of higher education; in fact, one might expect their greatest liability to be an overly sentimental or idealized view of their task. More often, however, they come from the other extreme—a desire to reform a place they perceive as archaic or unfriendly to “customers” whose demands must be met.
None of the foregoing inspires great confidence in a future leadership cadre that will dig in its heels on higher education’s behalf. If anything, it suggests a posture of subservience or too-easy capitulation to outside interests and forces. How do we embolden future leaders to promote the strength and rightness of the academic model of organization, even at the risk of being branded recalcitrant, retrograde, or worse? I sometimes think we should institute a requirement that aspiring leaders (those groomed in educational leadership programs and elsewhere) swear some sort of oath—something akin to an oath of office (I solemnly swear to preserve and protect the city of intellect), an oath of allegiance, or a pledge to testify on behalf of academic values in dealings with stakeholders. If the idea of an oath overreaches a bit, we might at least expect a spirit of commitment to an academic ethos in the age of business.
Toward an Academic Ethos
Such a commitment might be built on the following four imperatives.
Counteracting Market Hegemony
The degree to which commercial markets and firms now dictate and shape nearly every aspect of our lives is astonishing. In fact, one argument in favor of an “ivory tower” mentality is that society needs some powerful alternative to the extremity of market hegemony. It’s almost impossible, for example, to imagine an academic going into a company as chief executive officer and trying to refashion it in the image of the university. But how often have we seen a corporate titan coming into a university to rescue us from ourselves and make us operate more like a profit-driven enterprise? Market hegemony operates in other ways, too. It conditions many critics to ignore the possibility that academe is already optimally organized to accomplish its objectives and that those are not the same as industry’s. Critics presume that universities are run incompetently, that higher education is stricken with an inability to grasp the essential superiority of business methods. How many corporations have lasted as long as most U.S. colleges and universities? It’s not that we are unable to impose a business model on our core values and operations. We are fully aware of alternatives, have considered them, and have found them—or parts of them—wanting for our purposes. Call it informed dissent.
Differentiation
Let’s think of ourselves as citizens of a vast ecosystem in which having a variety of forms is important. We have a responsibility to fill our environmental niche. The diversity of American colleges and universities has been an important hallmark of U.S. higher education since their inception, but all of us are gradually converging toward one model, guided by commercial norms and practices. This development is good for neither education nor the public interest. Homogeneity of forms is not a healthy aspiration. Besides, differentiation is good strategy. Just ask any CEO.
Living By Our Logic
Our counterparts in industry often charge us with inefficiency. That’s a fair criticism in some cases, but the standard of efficiency being applied fails to make any allowance for the different purposes served by academic and business routines. Small class sizes, light teaching loads, and continued support of programs with low enrollment may seem horribly inefficient from a business perspective, but these practices reflect (and finally must be judged according to) academic priorities and understandings. Many of the allegations of inefficiency simply don’t acknowledge that firms are guided by a different logic of production, exchange, and efficiency than universities. This failure points to a larger problem of imprecision in much of the current discourse on the academic corporate cultural divide. It is always tricky to characterize whole categories of organizations as this way or that (for example, corporations as nimble, universities as plodding). There is much more variety to be found. My students, for example, did not indicate whether the corporate culture and practices they advocated were patterned after Google, General Electric, or Goldman Sachs. Talk of corporate culture—like discussion of academic culture—rarely approaches the kind of specificity that is truly instructive for comparative purposes.
(Re)Defining Boundaries
Perhaps it is just getting harder to make meaningful distinctions between our camps. Organizations of all varieties are expanding their roles and activities; our conception of the corporation, for example, is undergoing profound change as public expectations mount for companies to attend to humanitarian, social, and environmental—not just economic—concerns. An argument is even to be made that different quarters of the business world are becoming more “academized” at the same time universities are becoming “corporatized.” This is especially true, not surprisingly, in knowledge-intensive industries like high-tech and biotech. Visitors to Google’s Silicon Valley “campus,” for example, will observe a work environment that looks as if it has lifted pages right out of the academic playbook. It was designed to encourage creativity and comfort. There are Foosball and pool tables, overstuffed couches, and refrigerators stocked with fresh juice. Periodic “tech talks” are delivered on topics ranging from the arts and humanities to medicine and current affairs. The corridors contain white boards filled to capacity with diagrams, formulas, and snippets of ideas, and clutches of people sit in nooks and crannies pecking away on laptops or conversing. In addition to enjoying an atmosphere and physical trappings that clearly evoke an academic lifestyle, Google engineers are encouraged to set aside one day each week to pursue personal research interests, wherever those may lead.
The winds of change blowing through all social institutions have erased or redrawn many of the boundaries between us. This new configuration offers important possibilities that we should celebrate. And yet it is easy to become too enchanted by allusions to our increasingly interlinked and borderless world; we may be led to believe that organizational structures and cultures must be standardized if we want to collaborate effectively across sectors. Our growing connections, however, do not demand that we should all look and behave exactly like one another. On the contrary, when one organization seeks to work more closely with another, it is typically because it wants the specialized competencies the other offers.
Courage and Confidence
What should be the tack of aspiring academic leaders in this evolving scheme? Certainly, they do not need to bow down to academic idols or pursue a policy of strict isolation (not that they could), but they should at least appreciate and respect the special contributions of colleges and universities as institutions. The manners and methods of corporate entities are well-suited to their particular tasks, and universities may even benefit from using some of the same approaches in certain instances. But we need to avoid wholesale declarations that universities should be run as businesses.
A reflexive embrace of non-native models and modes makes little sense, however tempting or convenient they may seem. Given the unprecedented erosion of boundaries—organizational as well as cultural—and the growing popularity of partnerships and joint ventures, we need strong academic leadership more than ever lest we bleach our uniqueness right out of the mix. We need a proud and muscular sense of ourselves, not withering self-loathing. We need leaders (at every level of our institutions) who can and will keep us on solid ground when the floodtide is pulling us inexorably toward something else. The job requires mettle and idealism of the sort represented by James Joyce’s young protagonist in Araby, who is determined not to be seduced by the wiles of the marketplace; he imagines that he bears his “chalice safely through a throng of foes.” Such is the challenge for higher education, and the chief foe in question may be our own lack of confidence.
Perhaps in future classes, I will try a new thought experiment. I will ask my students to assume that American colleges and universities, with their proud heritage extending back nearly four hundred years, have succumbed to myriad pressures to operate strictly as businesses. What does this version of the academy look like? What has been lost in the bargain? What has been the extent of the transformation—just a little around the edges or an entire makeover of our core? What gets taught, researched, and talked about in these institutions newly built for speed and profit, only those subjects with commercial prospects and relevance? Where did James Joyce go? Was he a victim of low market demand? At the end of the day, has society been helped or hurt by the ivory tower’s disappearance from the landscape?
These are among the questions I would like my students to consider when they suggest that we should conform to a business model. Buying and selling the argument without a reasoned and careful analysis of its fitness in the academic setting simply isn’t helpful. We need to know where, how, and under what circumstances such practices might help us improve the conduct of our academic work. But business methods aren’t the blanket solution to our problems, any more than an academic model is the cure-all for poor corporate performance.
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David Siegel is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at East Carolina University. His e-mail address is siegeld@ecu.edu.
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