How Business Metrics Broke the University

In a recent interview with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo pivoted from his usual focus on the ideological biases of higher education — the prevalence of “critical race theory and gender ideology and liberatory pedagogy” — to remark on the broader restructuring of universities that has taken place in recent years. “Our universities are no longer liberal arts universities,” Rufo noted. “They are these mega complexes that have scientific arms, research arms and financial arms.” In contrast to this, he highlighted the “community of scholars and learners that have a shared commitment to a culture of civil debate” at New College of Florida, where he is a trustee.

Indeed, the conversion of universities into corporate juggernauts is closely connected to their drift into ideological extremism. Over the past two decades, metrics-driven leadership has transformed how universities operate. In the process, power has migrated from decentralized departments to an administrative apparatus that prioritizes enrollment growth, branding, efficiency metrics, and public impact over intellectual rigor.

These changes might sound politically neutral. Some might well appeal to conservatives. Shouldn’t colleges be run more like businesses? If “tenured radicals” are the source of left-wing ideological dominance on campus, why not subject them to higher standards of accountability? But in actuality, metrics culture played a key role in consolidating the progressive monoculture on campuses, dissolving and merging traditional departments, giving increased power to student voices, and contributing to the politicization of scholarship and teaching.

In eras past, when power was more decentralized, distinguished faculty voices of varied political persuasions might compete with the president from power bases inside the institution. Voices from moderate-right centers of power are still heard in elite places like the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the James Madison Program at Princeton. But the loudest faculty voices heard on campus today are speaking from left-leaning interdisciplinary power bases (or affinity groups and multicultural centers) inside and outside the university. The moderate voices that once found a home in traditional departments have gone silent.

Addressing the hyperpoliticization of academe must therefore start with a recognition that metrics-based centralized planning nurtured this tendency in the first place. While other factors played a role, the centralized university became an incubator for ideological extremism above all, because its structural design makes students into customers and incentivizes faculty to seek visibility through controversy rather than through traditional scholarly achievement.

The most visible leader of the centralization movement was Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, who first articulated his model for a “New American University” when he took the helm in 2002. His “reinvention” and “transformation” involved breaking down disciplinary “silos” to put students before faculty and “impact” before everything else. Convinced that he had found the winning recipe, Crow and William B. Dabars published Designing the New American University in 2015 as both a testimony and blueprint. The “New American University,” the book proposed, should be “broadly inclusive, representative of the region’s socioeconomic diversity ... and, through its breadth of functionality, maximiz[e] societal impact.” The university, Crow and Dabars wrote, would

What this meant in practice was weakening departmental autonomy, dissolving disciplinary governance, and giving centralized administration the power to determine hiring, research priorities, and academic structures. Notwithstanding “the artisanal component to teaching and research in academic platforms committed to discovery … [t]he academy might even learn from the Cheesecake Factory,” Crow and Dabars suggested, which reengineered cuisine for “affordable delivery to millions.”

As Crow explained in a retrospective survey of his achievements at ASU: “We have been transformed from a faculty-centric institution to a student-centric institution — that is, the purpose of the institution is to serve the student and to enhance outcomes in the community, not just to provide a place for the faculty to be great academics, or scientists, or creators.” Under the banner of “access for all” and “societal impact,” power was stripped from academic departments, disciplines were collapsed into massive interdisciplinary schools, and faculty were sidelined.

Crow’s model gained nationwide influence alongside a broader push for metrics in higher education. At the turn of the 21st century, the U.S. News & World Report college-rankings methodology began including ever more granular data: student-to-faculty ratios, enrollment yield rates, graduation rates, job placement rates, and detailed financial metrics. Accreditation bodies also began imposing new requirements for documenting student learning outcomes, institutional effectiveness, and program assessment. Along similar lines, state legislatures began tying funding to retention rates, time-to-degree statistics, and job placement rates.

Rapid enrollment growth accelerated centralization, especially at large public universities. As institutions enrolled tens of thousands of students in hundreds of programs across multiple campuses and online, leaders argued that the only way to ensure quality was through central oversight, with automated assessment systems and standardized practices. New administrative structures were born: “Institutional Effectiveness” offices launched to gather and report data, along with “Student Success” initiatives to track and improve retention metrics. New jobs like “Assessment Coordinator” were filled by staff without Ph.D.s, to ensure every course had measurable “learning outcomes.”

Data became the driving force behind academic decisions. Faculty were required to redesign courses around standardized rubrics. Departments faced pressure to adjust grading practices to maintain desired retention rates. Programs were evaluated primarily on their ability to meet numerical targets, and the administration prioritized research that had measurable real-world “impact.” Most universities now have professional student advisers, which means faculty members have less contact with students and have less intellectual influence over the student body as a whole. In 2014, Crow and 10 other leaders of large public institutions established the University Innovation Alliance to share strategies for improving student outcomes, especially for low-income and first-generation students. A noble goal — but one that led to more metrics and more predictive analytics. The ASU model was now an influential “approach.”

So how exactly does this approach produce polarization? Because when the student is the customer, when job placement and graduation rates determine rankings, when the curriculum matters more than the person teaching it, the quality of teaching goes down. When that happens, polarization and radicalization go up.

Just as Designing the New American University was going into print, the country saw violent events on the streets that would rock campuses for the next five years. The killings by police of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice sparked waves of protests and the launch of the Black Lives Matter movement. University presidents including Harvard’s Drew Faust, Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber, and the State University of New York at New Paltz’s Donald P. Christian issued statements. Over the next few years, the killings of Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and others prompted statements by the presidents of the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins, and many more. By 2020, with the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, presidential statements were both expected and debated.

What seems not to have been noticed at the time was that centralization broadly and the “New American University” students-first approach particularly, had invited protest and radical activism to take center stage — in part because of the agenda of inclusion and open access, and also because the institutional design flattened the landscape, demolishing traditional disciplinary spaces and platforms for alternative voice on campus, including voices of moderation, context, and caution. As college and university structures re-embraced the pre-1960s in loco parentis role, promising parents and students safety as well as affirmation and education, the voice of the president was seen as binding the university together in moral outrage against the violence.

This unified institutional outrage was the backdrop to the now infamous confrontation over Halloween costumes at Yale, in November 2015, between Nicholas Christakis, a faculty member and Silliman College master, and students who accused him of failing to provide a “safe space” for students. A year and a half later, Bret Weinstein, an Evergreen State College biology professor, voiced objection to a “Day of Absence,” which called for white people to stay off campus for a day, thus provoking a massive student protest and the occupation of a campus building. While both Christakis, who remains at Yale, and Weinstein, who resigned from his position, had pockets of support, the leadership of both campuses overwhelmingly sided with students and the broader goal of diversity.

Those with reservations about student protest and a student-first monoculture stayed quiet, particularly after the national protest movements of 2020. With senior faculty stripped of authority, ideologically driven faculty and graduate students gained influence everywhere. Professors who stoked controversy, engaged in media battles, or led student movements thrived. Traditionally, senior faculty wielded significant influence over a department’s intellectual direction, with regular face-to-face interaction and direct oversight of teaching. Senior faculty mentored junior colleagues, shaped curriculum development, and maintained academic standards through collective governance. This system wasn’t perfect, but it organically created constraints on ideological extremes through peer review, professional standards, and the accumulated wisdom of experienced scholars.

These personal, organic forms of oversight were deemed under the new model to be ossified and inefficient. Small departments were eliminated or merged into new units that employed dozens of adjunct instructors teaching hundreds of sections across multiple locations. Regular departmental discussions, collaborative curriculum development, shared teaching experiences — all of which had a politically moderating function — disappeared. An intellectual vacuum was created. By 2022, the great faculty disengagement was in full swing, as senior faculty in traditional disciplines, feeling undervalued, began pulling away emotionally from their institution. Radicalism has continued to fill the vacuum.

When the decision to mount a suite of courses is driven by metrics, the rigor of each class matters less than its ability to attract students. Radical voices that spark controversy suddenly have an advantage. Assessment coordinators can point to high enrollment numbers and enthusiastic student feedback as evidence of success. Quality and rigor do not matter. Many senior faculty members have simply withdrawn from governance altogether, tired of fighting a bureaucratic system that values check-box compliance over academic judgment.

The rise of metrics-driven administration coincided with the rise of social media, making it easier for politically driven faculty to build followings outside of department structures. The most radical voices bypassed traditional academic hierarchies entirely, deploying online attention to demonstrate their “impact” directly. A star system was born. Adjunct instructors, lacking job security, also came to see that provocation and siding with students could serve as a kind of employment insurance, ensuring popular classes. The traditional forces that once encouraged moderation and scholarly rigor have been replaced by incentives that reward polemics and ideological fervor.

The push for scale further nudges the climate toward politicization. Administrative metrics favor large or online courses that can process hundreds of students simultaneously. Everyone knows that a 300-person lecture is more “efficient” than twenty 15-person seminars, regardless of pedagogical quality. In smaller seminars, extreme positions face questioning and discussion from peers and professors. There’s little opportunity for dialogue or intellectual give-and-take in a lecture or online format. A charismatic lecturer can present edgy viewpoints to hundreds of students at once, with no meaningful opportunity for debate. The metrics will show high enrollment and efficient resource utilization. Nobody asks about content until there are headlines.

Even at universities that have not embraced the Crow approach, the broader push toward metrics means that traditional academic departments play a smaller and smaller role in campus life, and the job of department chair has evolved to face inward and upward, toward central administration, not outward and downward, toward their academic community and younger faculty. Tenured faculty spend more time responding to top-down reporting requirements, adjusting practices to comply with new syllabus standards and course-delivery expectations. Centralized planning encourages the reliance on instructors on short-term contracts. The path of least resistance — and greatest job security — lies in siding with students and embracing ideological currents.

It was not obvious at the outset that centralization and bureaucratization would drive politicization, but perhaps it should have been. With departmental homes broken and disciplinary ties severed, why wouldn’t faculty seek emotional connection in politics and causes? Why wouldn’t they spend their extra time on social media rather than in the lab or the library?

To counter this trend, senior faculty need to be given a greater say in curriculum development, hiring decisions, and academic standards. The structures that once encouraged scholarly rigor and intellectual diversity must be restored, and simplistic metrics to evaluate “effectiveness” must be abandoned.

Universities must recognize that their experiment with centralized planning has had unintended consequences that have damaged the institution’s status and pose serious political risks. They must support their own faculty voices and devolve power to departments, not in deference to quaint traditions but as an essential mechanism for maintaining academic standards and intellectual diversity. Only by addressing the vacuum that has enabled polarization can universities claim their proper role as centers of reasoned debate and scholarly inquiry.

This essay originally appeared, in a slightly different form, in Compact.