Research and Teaching at the All-Administrative University

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.

There Is No Such Thing as Academic Freedom (For Professors): The Rise and Fall of the Tenure System

Many Academics Who are troubled by the growing power of administrators on their campuses believe that their jobs are protected by tenure and their campus activities by academic freedom. Hence, they believe that they, personally, have little to fear from the advent of the all-administrative university. Yet, these unworried professors might do well to fret just a bit. Tenure does not provide absolute protection, and at any rate only about 30 percent of the current professorate is tenured or even on the tenure track. The remaining 70 percent are hired on a contingent basis and can be dismissed at any time. The question of academic freedom is more complex and more dispiriting. In recent years, the federal courts have decided that deanlets, not professors, are entitled to academic freedom. This proposition may be surprising to academics, who, usually without giving the matter much thought, believe they possess a special freedom derived from the German concept of Lehrfreiheit, which they think protects their freedom to teach, to express opinions, and to engage in scholarly inquiry without interference from university administrators or government officials. It certainly seems reasonable to think that professors should possess Lehrfreiheit. Academics play an important part in the production, dissemination, and evaluation of ideas, and a free and dynamic society depends on a steady flow of new ideas in the sciences, politics, and the arts. The late Chief Justice Earl Warren once opined that American society would “stagnate and die” if scholars were not free to inquire, study, and evaluate. Accordingly, he said, academic freedom “is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned.” Despite Chief Justice Warren’s endorsement, professors’ ideas and utterances do not have any special constitutional status. Like other Americans, professors have free speech rights under the First Amendment. In a number of cases decided during the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court made it clear that the First Amendment offered professors considerable protection from the efforts of federal, state, and local governments to intrude on their freedom of speech and association.

What Administrators Do

The Number of administrators and staffers on university campuses has increased so rapidly in recent years that often there is simply not enough work to keep all of them busy. I have spent time in university administrative suites and in the corridors of public agencies. In both settings I am always struck by the fact that so many well-paid individuals have so little to do. To fill their time, administrators engage in a number of make-work activities. They attend meetings and conferences, they organize and attend administrative and staff retreats, and they participate in the strategic planning processes that have become commonplace on many campuses. While these activities are time consuming, their actual contribution to the core research and teaching missions of the university is questionable. Little would be lost if all pending administrative retreats and conferences, as well as four of every five staff meetings (these could be selected at random), were canceled tomorrow. And, as to the ubiquitous campus planning exercises, as we shall see below, the planning process functions mainly to enhance the power of senior managers. The actual plans produced after the investment of thousands of hours of staff time are usually filed away and quickly forgotten. There is, to be sure, one realm in which administrators as-a-class have proven extraordinarily adept. This is the general domain of fund-raising. College and university administrators have built a massive fund-raising apparatus that, every year, collects hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts and bequests mainly, though not exclusively, from alumni whose sense of nostalgia or obligation make them easy marks for fund-raisers’ finely-honed tactics. Even during the depths of the recession in 2009, schools were able to raise money. On the one hand, the donors who give selflessly to their schools deserve to be commended for their beneficence. At the same time, it should still be noted that, as is so often the case in the not-for-profit world, university administrators appropriate much of this money to support—what else?— more administration.

What Is to Be Done

Professors, Taken As a group, are far from perfect. They can be petty, foolish, venal, lazy, and quarrelsome. Nevertheless, at its best, the university is a remarkable institution. It is a place where ideas are taken seriously; where notions that are taken as givens elsewhere are problematized; where what has seemed to be reality can be bent and reshaped by the power of the mind. The university is also a vitally important social institution. Chief Justice Warren, quoted in chapter 2, said American society would “stagnate and die” without free scholarly inquiry. In truth, society would not die, but it would become more stagnant without the philosophical and scientific concepts that are conceived and debated on university campuses. In the sciences, university laboratories continue to be a source of ideas that promise not only to improve established technologies but, more important, to spark the development of new technologies. This is why the Bayh-Dole Act and its encouragement of patent thickets and an anticommons in the scientific realm is potentially so destructive. In the humanities, the university is one of the few institutions to encourage and incubate new visions and modes of thought. Where else are smart people paid primarily to think and rewarded for thinking things that haven’t been thought before? The university, moreover, is a bastion of relatively free expression and, hence, one of the few places where new ideas can be discussed and sharpened. The old left, new left, neocons, and neoliberals of recent years all had their roots in academia. Political impulses that changed American life, including the “new politics movement,” the peace movement, civil rights movement, feminist movement, gay rights movement, environmental movement, the conservative legal movement, and a host of others were nurtured, if not launched, on university campuses. And why not? The university is a natural center of ideological ferment and dissent. The recipe is a simple one. simple one. Take large numbers of young people, add a few iconoclastic faculty members, liberally sprinkle with new ideas, place into a Bohemian culture, and half bake.

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.

The Realpolitik of Race and Gender

It is Certainly no secret that professors tend to have liberal political orientations. Most academics, especially but not exclusively those in the humanities and social sciences, strongly support racial and gender equality, social justice, protection of the environment, constraints on the use of force in international affairs, and other elements of America’s liberal Democratic agenda. Faculty generally explain the academy’s ideological imbalance, especially marked at elite universities, as a natural consequence of the fact that liberals are smarter than conservatives. In recent years, unfortunately, on many campuses the political commitments of the faculty have been hijacked and perverted by administrators. Issues that to many professors represent moral imperatives have been transformed into powerful instruments of administrative aggrandizement. Ironically, administrators have brought about this transformation by forging what amount to tactical alliances with representatives of minority groups as well as activist groups on their campuses. Indeed, since it was not so long ago that campus administrators responded to the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists by calling the police, it is fascinating to observe the apparent sympathy shown for these same groups by university administrators today. At my university, for example, the administration strongly supported liberal activists’ protests in response to what some termed a fraternity’s racial insensitivity. The fraternity had called its 2006 All Hallow’s Eve party, “Halloween in the Hood,” invited guests to wear their “bling,” and decorated its chapter house with a plastic skeleton in pirate garb dangling from a rope noose. The precise meaning of this display was far from clear. A noose might have a racist connotation, but skeletons and pirates would seem, at first blush, to be devoid of racial antecedents. Campus and community activists, however, chose to interpret the unfortunate skeleton as a symbolic affirmation of the idea of lynching black people. This understanding was vigorously contested by the fraternity, which boasted a multiethnic membership. The university administration, nevertheless, supported the activists’ interpretation and agreed with them that investigations, punishments, and policy changes would be required to prevent such events from occurring in the future.

The Growth of Administration

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.