The Ongoing Transfer of power from professors to administrators has important implications for the curricula and research agendas of America’s colleges and universities. On the surface, faculty members and administrators seem to share a general understanding of the university and its place in American society. If asked to characterize the “mission” of the university, members of both groups will usually agree with the broad idea that the university is an institution that produces and disseminates knowledge through its teaching, research, public outreach, and other programs. This surface similarity of professorial and administrative perspectives, however, is deceptive. To members of the faculty, the university exists mainly to promote their own research and teaching endeavors. While professors may be quite fond of their schools, for most, scholarship is the purpose of academic life, and the university primarily serves as a useful instrument to promote that purpose. Many professors are driven by love of teaching and the process of discovery. Others crave the adulation of students or the scholarly fame that can result from important discoveries and publications. But whatever their underlying motivations, most professors view scholarship and teaching as ends and the university as an institutional means or instrument through which to achieve those ends. For administrators, on the other hand, it is the faculty’s research and teaching enterprise that is the means and not the end. Some administrators, to be sure, mainly those who plan to return to scholarship and teaching, may put academic matters first. Most administrators, though, tend to manifest a perspective similar to that affected by business managers or owners. They view the university as the equivalent of a firm manufacturing goods and providing services whose main products happen to be various forms of knowledge rather than automobiles, computers, or widgets. This perspective was famously articulated by the late president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, when he characterized higher education as the “knowledge industry,” and suggested that universities should focus on producing forms of knowledge likely to be useful in the marketplace.
Transforming Technical Services