Looking Back,Moving Forward

The Administrative/Bureaucratic Alternative: Growing Support

An increasingly powerful response from these critics, given new momentum by the current protracted financial crisis, has been to advocate forceful action to breach the walls of our closed university world. A bureaucratic or “administrative” approach to the academic enterprise promises to improve efficiency and responsiveness by dismantling the traditional, wasteful form of organization. Universities are increasingly turning to “strong” leaders who are willing to challenge the sacred cows of tradition. This is attractive to students and parents, governments, media, and businesses as a way of breaking into the walled preserve and exerting greater control over academic practices that often seem to them solipsistic and self-serving. The recent dismissal of the University of Virginia chancellor is a dramatic incidence of this kind of forceful outside intervention.

This administrative model focuses on efficiency, consistency, and control. Its logic leads to a clear differentiation between functions—for example, teachers versus researchers, with the former held accountable for meeting clear learning goals focused on the needs and desires of students, as conveyed by an open market. The evaluation of research productivity is crudely addressed as a quantitative production function. We can already see these trends in the most bureaucratized of schools—the ones subjected to high levels of standardization, where teachers start “teaching to the test” and try to meet targets that take them away from close interaction with their students. Similarly, the tendency to give grants based on societal relevance focuses academics on an array of short-term deliverables (presentations, publications), displacing long-term, exploratory, and more uncertain research endeavors.

At the secondary education level, educational initiatives in the United States such as “No Child Left Behind” and the “Race to the Top” have imposed precisely this kind of administrative standardization and accountability. At the higher education level, the Federal Department of Education’s Spellings Commission in 2006 proposed a public database of performance measures to enable consumers (i.e., families) to make more informed choices through market mechanisms, thus increasing accountability. Mass media such U.S. News and World Report, Times Higher Education, and Financial Times release annual rankings on education programs and universities that are increasingly used by university administrators to set rewards and allocate resources. Standardization also comes via implementation of Fordist faculty appraisals in the form of management by objectives (crudely equating quality and value of output with number of courses taught and quantity of publications). In addition, the corps of pure teaching faculty on an adjunct, part-time, nontenurable basis have ballooned in recent decades because of their lower salaries, higher teaching loads, and flexible work conditions.

All these developments reflect the essential combination of markets and bureaucratic control that characterizes most of modern society and that has already taken over most of the domains formerly managed through guild-like mechanisms of self-management. There is little question that the widespread pursuit of an administrative model would be disastrous for the academy, however, because it would lead to a focus on conformity and consistency at the expense of innovation and responsiveness. Yet, universities are not likely to successfully resist this movement by continuing to assert traditional claims of privileged expertise. Is there some way to deal with these troubling trends?

An Alternative: Develop Collaborative Systems

If we don’t want bureaucracy of this kind, but can’t sustain traditional autonomy, what might be the alternative? The key problem is for academics to open the doors and lower the walls, to invite in their constituencies and stakeholders for a discussion of purposes and practices. That requires a quite revolutionary change in mindset: a more collaborative one than the old mentality that characterizes us today. We have learned a good deal about collaboration in the last few decades. In many domains, there has been a major turn away from bureaucracy, toward more decentralization and teamwork. Although bureaucratic control is beating at the gates and crossing the moats of professions, same bureaucratic model is increasingly being criticized and modified elsewhere.

One surprising locus of learning has been some of our most highly successful large corporations. Many of these institutions now seek to reduce layers of control, to encourage decentralized collaboration and promote accountability toward mission, with people continuously working together directly through task forces rather than waiting for administrative rule making. Their guiding principle is not autonomy but interdependence: Specialists don’t protect their preserves but work together in coordinated processes. This approach has made it possible to rapidly mobilize diverse and dispersed knowledge to focus on complex problems and to respond quickly to changes in customer expectations.

The success of collaboration in these companies depends on some key innovations. First, they have spent great energy clarifying their common purpose and developing a set of shared values, with open and continuous discussion of strategy at all levels. Another innovation has been the rise of flexible cross-functional teams: In many companies today, middle managers and technical employees work much of their time not under the direction of their formal bosses but on temporary boundary-spanning projects requiring the ability to tolerate ambiguity and manage multiple conflicting commitments. Third, many companies are reaching outside their walls to interact in an ongoing way with customers, including them in actual product design and development decisions.

Collaborative Universities?

Can universities learn from these positive organizational innovations? The good news is that such an approach is likely to be more favorable to knowledge production and exchange than the administrative model, and would engage faculty more extensively. The bad news is that it, too, is quite different from the traditional orientation of professional autonomy and self-governance and would require major changes. In internal decision making, a collaborative approach would require faculty to come together across disciplinary lines to address the growing challenges. They would need to spend much more time sitting on cross-departmental committees, considering the linkages and flows between disciplines as experienced by students and other stakeholders, and creating combined offerings that address emerging interests and social needs. So far, efforts to create such cross-departmental collaboration have run into major obstacles. Faculty, typically focused within their disciplines, have been at best unenthusiastic and at worst overtly resistant. Differences among academic cultures and standards have made genuine communication difficult; the competition between departments for resources remains the major sticking point.

Collaboration has thrived somewhat more on the research side. Flexible multidisciplinary research teams flourish, and in many fields, research has become a multiparty endeavor. Where the sole-authored work was the gold standard even a few decades ago, it is now typical for social science articles to have two or three authors and for “hard” sciences to have many more. Yet, the resulting strains for traditional models of peer governance and review and bureaucratic demands for standardization remain unresolved: It is more difficult to assign direct accountability in tenuring and promotion decisions, resulting in pressure for more open and explicit standards of judgment. Policies for tenure and promotion generally penalize multiauthor publications.

The most difficult task of all, one that seems a huge stretch from the faculty point of view, is the need to engage outside stakeholders in discussions of the purposes of the university. Scholars rarely discuss the value of their work: They simply assume and deeply believe that what they do is important. Pressure for justification is, in fact, a threat because it means that outsiders who “don’t understand” may start to meddle in the internal workings of the academy. For these reasons, strategic planning exercises have rarely worked well in universities. From the faculty perspective, they are threatening and a distraction from the core work of advancing knowledge—and teaching about advances in knowledge—in their disciplines. Planning has generally been driven by top administrators focused on goals—such as improving the university, college, or department ranking—that are foreign to faculty in their lives as scholars.

However, collaboration requires that stakeholders be drawn into discussions about priorities to strengthen their commitment and willingness to provide resources. To accomplish this end, the professoriate needs to open up disciplinary mysteries and develop explicit justifications of their value. A secretive society is passé in the age of the Internet. On one end, U.S.-based disciplines like medieval French literature would have to justify their importance despite the lack of demand. They will need to answer hard but justifiable questions such as the following: By what criteria and on what basis do they deserve societal support? What important contributions do they make to society and to students? In addition, on the other end, business programs would also be questioned, even though they are current popular: On what basis do they really add value in terms of student careers, or life satisfaction, or societal health? Do they contribute to a view of businesses that builds social responsibility? Such discussions would need to justify the academy’s contribution to a range of values, including preservation of intellectual traditions, diversity of civil society, and economic prosperity. Stakeholders would need to be convinced that these values are worth investing in.

Conclusion

Universities need a fundamental reorganization because we are losing the ability to respond to, and to win the confidence of, those who provide their resources. Yet, the most popular current reform, that of increased administrative control and bureaucratization, is likely to make things worse for everyone. That is an untenable and unsustainable outcome.

The challenge is to become more responsive to stakeholders without simply submitting to short-term market demands. It may take a real crisis to overcome the centuries of professional acculturation that stand in the way. It is quite possible that academic resistance to change, in the form of insistence on autonomous expertise, will be so strong that it will break before it will bend—that the society at large, finding little desire for engagement among faculty, will simply withdraw its support. Those of us in research universities know well the tendencies of departments to protect their own resources and traditions rather than opening up to messy, unpleasant, lengthy, frustrating discussions with those who do not understand us.

Collaborative organizations have shown positive and practical results—an ability to mobilize diverse knowledge, to respond to complex environmental changes, and to engage multiple stakeholders. It would take tremendous change for universities to develop these capabilities—but it’s the only workable alternative.