I think the biggest problem is that on the one hand, the broader society has become less willing to listen to universities and their presidents, and partly as a result, university presidents have ceased to see leadership in a broad sense as their mission. Instead, presidents are chosen to be managers, of endowments, of research enterprises, of hospital systems, of student life, of faculty. But we as a society ask more, and expect more, and care more about universities than that, and just managing a university like it's a medium sized company is not sufficient.
I love ya Ben, so please don’t take this the wrong way: this entire thing struck me as academic exceptionalism in platonic form. “Who could ever be CEO of Microsoft, think of all the different stakeholders you have to satisfy all of which are ready at a moment’s notice to stab you in the back!” Somehow the private sector has found its way towards solutions to this problem. And by the way: almost 0% of the time is the solution “let’s have co-CEOs!” for a very simple reason: diffuse responsibility is ALWAYS bad for leadership.
The job of a leader is in part to define the mission of the organization. What I see happening - and the presidents currently getting crushed/already having been crushed for anti-semitism are perhaps the best possible examples - is university boards refusing to invest in a leader that will actually do so, preferring lackeys instead. Well, that’s a problem for the boards to figure out.
I'd like to add the suggestion that the left ought to consider wholesale cutting all the various regulations they have covering higher education -- including all the anti-discrimination and other provisions -- or at least the ones tied to recipet of federal funds.
The federal government already has very limited control over the extreme bible colleges and there isn't much demand to attend such schools.
And yes there are issues of discrimination and unfairness that happen at schools but it's almost never because the school wants to harm women or racial minorities anymore. To the extent it happens it's a result in failures of the system to achieve its goals and it's not clear why one should expect that to happen less because an extra layer of organization is layered on top.
For the most part institutions of higher ed are aligned with the left and it's goals so of you free them from regulation I expect they'll use that freedom to achieve goals the left likes.
So I keep seeing the common sentiment here that the solution is just to cut all the excess administrators. To some extent that's true, but it's true in the same way that the solution to wasteful government spending is to be more efficient. It's not at all a trivial problem and it's only somewhat under university control.
First, even if this was entirely up to the university, studies of companies tend to show that it's relatively rare for large established and bloated companies to cut the fat to compete with nimble new entrants to the market. For the most part what tends to happen is that the new competitors simply displace the old guard -- it's just that this is often hidden because it can happen by aquisition (either direction) or even a division of a big company coming to dominate.
Point is that bureaucracy is alot like a codebase. It's really hard to simplify it without starting from the ground up. Problem is that most of the complications exist for a reason and even if people could have figured things out if no policy ever existed if you remove it they'll need direction.
Unfortunately, **it's harder to be a university president than a buisness president because you can't just aquire a more nimble competitor and replace your hierarchy with theirs.**
Second, much of this increase in administration isn't really something the university is able to control. They are caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand parents are ever more protective and demand that universities take an active role in protecting their children while there. This prevents them from just washing their hands of alot of this mess. At the same time federal regulation ensures that when they don't wash their hands they have to worry about legal liability.
Unfortunately, like a great deal of regulation, too often the people writing the regulation don't have a specific clear policy they want enforced or don't have the legal/political power to demand it so in effect what the regulations demand is that you have an office or program dealing with it or meet standards in higher education creating a ratchet effect.
IMO best thing you could do for universities is to drastically cut all the federal regulation.
On the larger issue of what universities should be doing, I think a huge part of the problem is that the administration has started believing the bullshit they sell about how they are doing something special to mold students. This prompts wasteful spending and counterproductive attempts to sculpt the incoming classes.
The truth is the real value provided by universities to their students is simply sorting students and bringing them together. Students who go to top schools like Caltech, UC Berkeley or other elite institutions really do benefit in ways they wouldn't at other research universities but that's not because of anything special about the teaching or the environment -- it's because they are immersed with other students of similar levels of ability and interest and that inspires you to reach further. Equally smart kids who went to UIUC rather than Caltech didn't learn or achieve as much not because the school didn't offer the opportunity but because people tend to rise or fall to the level of their peers.
And yes, it's true that teaching may not be particularly correlated with research ability but once you accept teaching skill isn't important -- only the extent to which you inspire excitement and draw elite students -- putting together the best researchers with the best students makes alot of sense.
I'd go further and suggest that big public universities should divide up housing by college so all the STEM kids live together and so on.
I think it's worth considering that the primary job responsibility for the university president is to be the person who gets publicly sacked if things go wrong. As such, I think it's worth distinguishing questions about how power should really be wielded at the university and how the presidency should be structured.
Basically, I support a model where the university has a president who is the analog of a head of state whose primary job is gladhanding, being high status and soliciting donations and handling PR. The real power should be exercised by a PM style role choosen by the academic senate (call them provost if you want but they shouldn't be limited to a narrow conception of academics) in conjunction with regents or whatever you call the board.
One change over time is that it's become easier to apply to large numbers of universities. Applications moved online, they became increasingly standardized, etc., so it is now relatively easy for students to apply to, say, all the top 30 universities in US News, in addition to more reasonable "fit" and "safety" schools.
Also, competition for the top schools depends on keeping up with the other applicants to those schools. If the total student population is declining, but a larger fraction of them are applying to Harvard, and those other applicants to Harvard are going to ever-increasing lengths to have impressive-looking CVs for age 17, that's what you need to keep up with if you want to have a chance.
It's entirely possible for this to coexist with declining enrollment at Directional State Universities and little-known private colleges.
I understand that the Take Bakery produces experimental pastries, but could you get a copy editor to take a looksie at these articles before sending them out?
There are many obvious typos and missing words, at least in the version I received via email. thanks
“Look, it doesn't take a genius to know that any organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?”
Ben Sasses's WSJ editorial in May, brazenly titled The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida, reveals a truth that seemingly has been obvious for a long time: the way to handle entitled special interest groups is to tell them they can go to hell. I mean, if anything should be clear about the rise of Trump, it is that the bulk of the most vocal people really have no power (in large part because they generally speak for a much smaller group of people than they claim). Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that university presidents' jobs would be much easier if they didn't care so much about social status in their liberal peer group.
I'd say that until we see hard evidence* that universities simply can't find good quality candidates to be president and have to settle for truly unqualified persons, this is not a problem and we're simply hearing about vibes and people who like to moan and complain.
I mean, are shorter tenures a bad thing? Maybe previously these university presidents hung around too long.
To be fair - a lot of large public universities siphon off campus life to a student affairs VP (an under recognized source of administrative bloat). One of the elements though that has increasingly consumed higher education time is the mission creep associated with solving student success issues. A lot of academic institutions have been pressured to try and resolve many of the societal issues that contribute to student achievement gaps - cynically I think some of this is a diversion by some faculty away from resolving some of the issues with curriculum and teaching quality. This includes increasing focus on how higher ed institutions can resolve homelessness, mental health issues, child care, racial inequity specifically for their students. The result is a lot of high ed institutions trying to juggle the operations of multiple very discrete operational and employment sectors. For example, I worked at a large community college that wanted to expand its programs for homeless students and students with mental health issues - we had to have a separate manager with experience with HIPA who could ensure all the data systems associated with the mental health office met security standards in addition to the extensive staff who knew the legal standards for FERPA (the educational equivalent to HIPA). In addition, we operated a preschool that had an entirely separate regulatory structure and accreditation program that was set by the state department of education - a group that no other entity at the college interfaced with or had experience with.
In addition to expecting less from college presidents, colleges would be wise to really consider mission creep and find better ways to partner with other entities for help in resolving some of these secondary issues or step away from resolving them entirely.
I think the biggest problem is that on the one hand, the broader society has become less willing to listen to universities and their presidents, and partly as a result, university presidents have ceased to see leadership in a broad sense as their mission. Instead, presidents are chosen to be managers, of endowments, of research enterprises, of hospital systems, of student life, of faculty. But we as a society ask more, and expect more, and care more about universities than that, and just managing a university like it's a medium sized company is not sufficient.
I love ya Ben, so please don’t take this the wrong way: this entire thing struck me as academic exceptionalism in platonic form. “Who could ever be CEO of Microsoft, think of all the different stakeholders you have to satisfy all of which are ready at a moment’s notice to stab you in the back!” Somehow the private sector has found its way towards solutions to this problem. And by the way: almost 0% of the time is the solution “let’s have co-CEOs!” for a very simple reason: diffuse responsibility is ALWAYS bad for leadership.
The job of a leader is in part to define the mission of the organization. What I see happening - and the presidents currently getting crushed/already having been crushed for anti-semitism are perhaps the best possible examples - is university boards refusing to invest in a leader that will actually do so, preferring lackeys instead. Well, that’s a problem for the boards to figure out.
Any update on the University of Austin?
I'd like to add the suggestion that the left ought to consider wholesale cutting all the various regulations they have covering higher education -- including all the anti-discrimination and other provisions -- or at least the ones tied to recipet of federal funds.
The federal government already has very limited control over the extreme bible colleges and there isn't much demand to attend such schools.
And yes there are issues of discrimination and unfairness that happen at schools but it's almost never because the school wants to harm women or racial minorities anymore. To the extent it happens it's a result in failures of the system to achieve its goals and it's not clear why one should expect that to happen less because an extra layer of organization is layered on top.
For the most part institutions of higher ed are aligned with the left and it's goals so of you free them from regulation I expect they'll use that freedom to achieve goals the left likes.
So I keep seeing the common sentiment here that the solution is just to cut all the excess administrators. To some extent that's true, but it's true in the same way that the solution to wasteful government spending is to be more efficient. It's not at all a trivial problem and it's only somewhat under university control.
First, even if this was entirely up to the university, studies of companies tend to show that it's relatively rare for large established and bloated companies to cut the fat to compete with nimble new entrants to the market. For the most part what tends to happen is that the new competitors simply displace the old guard -- it's just that this is often hidden because it can happen by aquisition (either direction) or even a division of a big company coming to dominate.
Point is that bureaucracy is alot like a codebase. It's really hard to simplify it without starting from the ground up. Problem is that most of the complications exist for a reason and even if people could have figured things out if no policy ever existed if you remove it they'll need direction.
Unfortunately, **it's harder to be a university president than a buisness president because you can't just aquire a more nimble competitor and replace your hierarchy with theirs.**
Second, much of this increase in administration isn't really something the university is able to control. They are caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand parents are ever more protective and demand that universities take an active role in protecting their children while there. This prevents them from just washing their hands of alot of this mess. At the same time federal regulation ensures that when they don't wash their hands they have to worry about legal liability.
Unfortunately, like a great deal of regulation, too often the people writing the regulation don't have a specific clear policy they want enforced or don't have the legal/political power to demand it so in effect what the regulations demand is that you have an office or program dealing with it or meet standards in higher education creating a ratchet effect.
IMO best thing you could do for universities is to drastically cut all the federal regulation.
"but really you’re just dealing with a whole bunch of ridiculously entitled interest groups."
This really succinctly describes higher ed's disfunction.
On the larger issue of what universities should be doing, I think a huge part of the problem is that the administration has started believing the bullshit they sell about how they are doing something special to mold students. This prompts wasteful spending and counterproductive attempts to sculpt the incoming classes.
The truth is the real value provided by universities to their students is simply sorting students and bringing them together. Students who go to top schools like Caltech, UC Berkeley or other elite institutions really do benefit in ways they wouldn't at other research universities but that's not because of anything special about the teaching or the environment -- it's because they are immersed with other students of similar levels of ability and interest and that inspires you to reach further. Equally smart kids who went to UIUC rather than Caltech didn't learn or achieve as much not because the school didn't offer the opportunity but because people tend to rise or fall to the level of their peers.
And yes, it's true that teaching may not be particularly correlated with research ability but once you accept teaching skill isn't important -- only the extent to which you inspire excitement and draw elite students -- putting together the best researchers with the best students makes alot of sense.
I'd go further and suggest that big public universities should divide up housing by college so all the STEM kids live together and so on.
I think it's worth considering that the primary job responsibility for the university president is to be the person who gets publicly sacked if things go wrong. As such, I think it's worth distinguishing questions about how power should really be wielded at the university and how the presidency should be structured.
Basically, I support a model where the university has a president who is the analog of a head of state whose primary job is gladhanding, being high status and soliciting donations and handling PR. The real power should be exercised by a PM style role choosen by the academic senate (call them provost if you want but they shouldn't be limited to a narrow conception of academics) in conjunction with regents or whatever you call the board.
Is attendance really declining? All I see are complaints about how competitive applications are.
One change over time is that it's become easier to apply to large numbers of universities. Applications moved online, they became increasingly standardized, etc., so it is now relatively easy for students to apply to, say, all the top 30 universities in US News, in addition to more reasonable "fit" and "safety" schools.
Also, competition for the top schools depends on keeping up with the other applicants to those schools. If the total student population is declining, but a larger fraction of them are applying to Harvard, and those other applicants to Harvard are going to ever-increasing lengths to have impressive-looking CVs for age 17, that's what you need to keep up with if you want to have a chance.
It's entirely possible for this to coexist with declining enrollment at Directional State Universities and little-known private colleges.
I understand that the Take Bakery produces experimental pastries, but could you get a copy editor to take a looksie at these articles before sending them out?
There are many obvious typos and missing words, at least in the version I received via email. thanks
Nice article, tho.
“Look, it doesn't take a genius to know that any organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?”
-Oscar Martinez, Dunder Mifflin Scranton
Ben Sasses's WSJ editorial in May, brazenly titled The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida, reveals a truth that seemingly has been obvious for a long time: the way to handle entitled special interest groups is to tell them they can go to hell. I mean, if anything should be clear about the rise of Trump, it is that the bulk of the most vocal people really have no power (in large part because they generally speak for a much smaller group of people than they claim). Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that university presidents' jobs would be much easier if they didn't care so much about social status in their liberal peer group.
I'd say that until we see hard evidence* that universities simply can't find good quality candidates to be president and have to settle for truly unqualified persons, this is not a problem and we're simply hearing about vibes and people who like to moan and complain.
I mean, are shorter tenures a bad thing? Maybe previously these university presidents hung around too long.
* Not in any of the linked articles.
I think these challenges are not really THAT unique. Being CEO of a major company has a highly similar set of overlapping and competing priorities.
I wonder if a better solution isn't reform of the University governance structure, particularly the Boards.
this won't be on the quiz:
https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/a-note-to-university-administrators
Interesting! Stanley Fish is one of those people that I often hate but sometimes love, and this seems like one of those love moments.
To be fair - a lot of large public universities siphon off campus life to a student affairs VP (an under recognized source of administrative bloat). One of the elements though that has increasingly consumed higher education time is the mission creep associated with solving student success issues. A lot of academic institutions have been pressured to try and resolve many of the societal issues that contribute to student achievement gaps - cynically I think some of this is a diversion by some faculty away from resolving some of the issues with curriculum and teaching quality. This includes increasing focus on how higher ed institutions can resolve homelessness, mental health issues, child care, racial inequity specifically for their students. The result is a lot of high ed institutions trying to juggle the operations of multiple very discrete operational and employment sectors. For example, I worked at a large community college that wanted to expand its programs for homeless students and students with mental health issues - we had to have a separate manager with experience with HIPA who could ensure all the data systems associated with the mental health office met security standards in addition to the extensive staff who knew the legal standards for FERPA (the educational equivalent to HIPA). In addition, we operated a preschool that had an entirely separate regulatory structure and accreditation program that was set by the state department of education - a group that no other entity at the college interfaced with or had experience with.
In addition to expecting less from college presidents, colleges would be wise to really consider mission creep and find better ways to partner with other entities for help in resolving some of these secondary issues or step away from resolving them entirely.