During My Nearly five decades in the academic world, the character of the university has changed, and not entirely for the better. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, America’s universities were heavily influenced, if not completely driven, by faculty ideas and concerns. Today, institutions of higher education are mainly controlled by administrators and staffers who make the rules and set more and more of the priorities of academic life. Of course, universities have always employed administrators. When I was a graduate student in the 1960s and a young professor in the 1970s, though, top administrators were generally drawn from the faculty, and even midlevel managerial tasks were directed by faculty members. These moonlighting academics typically occupied administrative slots on a part-time or temporary basis and planned in due course to return to full-time teaching and research. Because so much of the management of the university was in the hands of professors, presidents and provosts could do little without faculty support and could seldom afford to ignore the faculty’s views. Many faculty members proved to be excellent managers. Through their intelligence, energy and entrepreneurship, faculty administrators, essentially working in their spare time, helped to build a number of the world’s premier institutions of higher education. One important reason for their success was that faculty administrators never forgot that the purpose of the university was the promotion of education and research. Their own short-term managerial endeavors did not distract them from their long-term academic commitments. Alas, today’s full-time professional administrators tend to view management as an end in and of itself. Most have no faculty experience, and even those who spent time in a classroom or laboratory hope to make administration their life’s work and have no plan to return to the faculty. For many of these career managers, promoting teaching and research is less important than expanding their own administrative domains. Under their supervision, the means have become the end.
Multitask Agents and Incentives: The Case of Teaching and Research for University Professors*†
