As an administrator, I welcome the growing chorus of voices calling for colleges and universities to be run more like businesses. For too long now, American higher education has lagged behind most other American industries with regard to innovative cost-cutting, market-expanding, and profit-enhancing strategies.
Perhaps the surest sign that academic institutions have been disconnected from the real world of profit and loss is that, in more than 350 years of operation, they have never coined a single AIM-T (Acronym for Implementing Management Techniques), nor produced a single self-help guide delineating the habits of highly effective people. Indeed, over the course of 20 years in academe, during which time I have visited dozens of colleges large and small, I have come to the conclusion that many academics actually disdain management acronyms and self-help guides -- the lingua franca of American business discourse.
Amazingly, such disdain is matched, or even exceeded, by academe’s aversion to the kind of systemic change that has made the American economy so productive. I know that American colleges and universities have adopted some of the most constructive developments of the business world. They have, for example, boosted the pay of some dynamic executive officers to over half a million dollars per annum. And, yes, they have still managed to insist on a flexible, “as-needed” work force for outsourceable tasks like maintaining the physical plant and teaching freshman composition.
But it is also true that nonproprietary American colleges and universities have been slow to register their names as commercial trademarks -- at least until spurred by seeing those names pop up on unrelated Internet sites. That has had a strongly negative impact on institutional mobility, preventing recourse to optimal wage environments in Arkansas or Singapore. It also speaks more generally to academe’s cluelessness about how the real world actually works.
Take, for example, the way most colleges and universities deal with their most valuable asset -- real estate. How are buildings currently named on American campuses? Occasionally a building will bear the name of a wealthy donor or noted alumnus; too often it will simply sport a generic name, such as “Physics” or “History.” Even colleges of business administration, which should know better, follow that outmoded practice. Contrast such academic behavior with that of Daniel M. Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins, who recently signed a 27-year, $205-million contract with Federal Express to rename the team’s stadium FedEx Field.
Again, in recent years higher education has taken a few steps in the right direction: witness the chair for the Taco Bell Distinguished Professor of Hotel and Restaurant Management at Washington State University, the General Mills Chair of Cereal Chemistry and Technology at the University of Minnesota, and the Federal Express Chair of Excellence in Management Information Systems at the University of Memphis. But those are baby steps, particularly when you realize that large state universities are letting hundreds of valuable buildings lie dormant and unnamed, even though a single 3Com Material Sciences Building or Burger King School of Animal Husbandry could garner millions in revenue -- and, thereby, enable universities to compete more effectively for the very best executive officers.
Tuition, too, is a problem. At the vast majority of American academic institutions, it is far too low. Public universities, especially, are prevented from pursuing market-value tuition rates by socialist-leaning state legislatures, whose regulatory ambitions seem to know no bounds. The absurd result? At a “low tuition/low aid” state university, a flagship institution like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, undergraduates who live off campus typically pay more per annum in rent than in tuition.
Given the fact that student apartments are usually cramped, dingy, and (unlike college degrees) incapable of enhancing lifetime earning potential -- and seeing how colleges and universities buttress local real-estate development by priming it with thousands of consumers in the all-important 18-to-25 age range -- surely a more reasonable benchmark would be to set tuition rates at six to eight times the local rate of a two-bedroom apartment. Needless to say, tuition at the most elite institutions should be allowed to go as high as the national market will bear.
If we were to force the dead hand of government to give way to the invisible hand of the free market, the deregulation of college tuition would ultimately benefit everyone, as we have already learned from key industries like airlines and savings-and-loan institutions.
It will be objected (rightly, I must admit) that, even now, students are not getting enough for their money. That is why tuition deregulation must be accompanied by curriculum re-regulation. On many campuses, entire departments do little or nothing to prepare students for employment, enhance the university’s portfolio, or develop new products for corporate underwriters.
I refer, of course, to the arts and humanities. According to one conservative estimate from a former higher-education leader, 50 percent of the research currently being conducted there is nonsense. Departments of history, for instance, often focus obsessively on the past, while our children need to be prepared for the future. And it’s not even worth talking about literature departments.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t preserve the cultural treasures of civilization, like Shakespeare’s work. Shakespeare was not only a fine writer of what The San Diego Union-Tribune has eloquently called “deathless prose”; he remains important to the American public -- and the American economy -- in ways that many other writers do not. His products combine extraordinary cross-demographic appeal with long shelf life. Why, we haven’t even begun to assess the extent of Shakespeare’s appeal; imagine if McDonald’s had had the foresight to offer Happy Meals with action figures from Shakespeare in Love.
Indeed, the best course might be to consolidate departments of history, anthropology, linguistics, art history, music, philosophy, and the modern languages into one department of Shakespeare. Universities would save millions, pruning their rolls of unnecessary and redundant teachers, and restoring some of the public’s lost confidence in their value.
But when it comes to the long-overdue task of initiating mass firings of faculty members, we run into the biggest problem of all: tenure. The institution of tenure is profoundly antibusiness and, consequently, profoundly wrong. As James F. Carlin, businessman and former chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, perceptively wrote in these pages on November 5, “lifetime job guarantees border on being immoral.”
Moral law, in other words, clearly mandates termination-at-will forms of employment, not merely because all healthy growth requires regular pruning, but also because American society ought not to support anyone who has become unproductive. Nor, as Mr. Carlin noted, will dismantling tenure jeopardize academic freedom, for “state and federal statutes, commissions against discrimination, and the vigilant news media protect anyone -- in or out of academe -- who wants to expound unorthodox beliefs.” Surely faculty members are aware that the American mass media will stand firm in defense of controversial scholars, as they have done so often in recent memory.
More to the point, tenure prevents university presidents and trustees from engaging in what may be the hallmark of American business today: the use of efficiency experts and external consultants to fire middle-aged account executives, nurses, editors, and secretaries, after having made them run a humiliating gantlet of pointless self-assessment trials. That ritual is vividly (and, I confess, entertainingly) depicted in contemporary films like American Beauty and Office Space.
Like business, academe is rife with anxiety, territorialism, and ill will. But what academe lacks is a mature culture of abjection and groveling. Fiftysomething faculty members with 30 or more years of service to their colleges simply do not live in terror that they may be terminated without reason. That constitutes a major reason why most Americans do not understand the institution of tenure.
Dissatisfaction with tenure is all the more rampant now that new technology has the potential to make faculty members as obsolete as telephone operators. With the judicious use of the Internet and your ordinary household touch-tone phone, in fact, most college courses could be conducted for $4.95 a minute: “Press 1 and the pound key for a lecture on the Italian Renaissance, press 2 for a lecture on the French Revolution. For seminar credit, just log on with a password and a credit-card number.” If not for tenure, such systems would already be in place -- and colleges and universities would be richer places of learning for it.
Finally, academic institutions have stubbornly refused to engage in the single-most-important activity of American business in the 1980’s and 90’s: namely, mergers and acquisitions. Think of how a powerful conglomerate like Harvard/M.I.T./Tufts/Boston University/Boston College could revolutionize education delivery in the greater Boston area. And why shouldn’t a lean, sleek enterprise like Adelphi University attempt a hostile takeover of the entire bloated, mismanaged State University of New York system? Not only would that force SUNY to cut personnel costs and close outlying plants in Geneseo, Plattsburgh, and New Paltz, it would drive up the value of both SUNY and Adelphi, to the benefit of stockholders.
Of course, for mergers and acquisitions to work, academic institutions would have to issue stock. It has long been a truism of academe that a free society requires a free marketplace of ideas. It’s about time the products of that marketplace were made available to the ordinary investor. Indeed, this is perhaps the most critical item of all: If American colleges and universities truly want to reconnect with the American public, they will have to go public. It worked for Martha Stewart. It can work for Sarah Lawrence.
Michael Berube is a professor of English and director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: A64