Managerial Pathologies

When they are not meeting, retreating, fund-raising, and planning, administrators claim to be managing the fiscal and other operational business of the university. And to bolster their claims of specialized managerial competence, an increasing number of university administrators have gone so far as to add MBA degrees to their dossiers. Some have actually attended business school, while others, as you may recall from chapter 1, simply added MBA degrees to their dossiers. In point of fact, whether or not they hold MBAs, many deanlets’ managerial savvy consists mainly of having the capacity to spout last year’s management buzz words during meetings, retreats, and planning exercises. I often ask for clarifications when I hear a deanlet using such acronyms as SWOT, ECM, TQM, or MBO, the term “benchmarking,” or the ubiquitous “best practices.” Of course, ambitious administrators hope that by demonstrating their familiarity with the latest managerial fads and buzz words they will persuade recruiters and search committees from other universities that they are just the sort of “visionary” academic leaders those schools need. Since the corporate headhunters that control the recruitment of senior administrators generally know next to nothing about academic life and little about the universities they nominally represent, this strategy is often successful. And, why not? In the all administrative university it is entirely appropriate that mastery of managerial psychobabble should pass for academic vision. There are many reasons why the affairs of the university should not be controlled by members of the administrative stratum. Some of these reasons are academic, that is, related to the substance of the university’s core teaching and research missions. We shall turn to these in the next chapter. The other reasons to be concerned about the growing power of administrators and managers within the university are essentially managerial. The university’s organizational and institutional interests are not well served by the expanded role of its management cadre. Indeed, the growing power of management and the decline of the faculty’s role in governance has exposed the university to such classic bureaucratic pathologies as shirking, squandering, and stealing.