This 5-Word Phrase Has Become a Mantra for Slashing College Budgets

Mark Thiessen, AP Images

In 1992 the University of Alaska at Fairbanks assembled a group to chart a strategic plan as the new century approached. Members heard the same advice over and over again. “People reminded us often that we should not try to ‘be all things to all people.’ We recognize that as good advice,” they wrote in the plan.

Nearly 30 years later, the campus heard the exact same message — but under far more dire circumstances.

“We can’t continue to be all things for all people,” said Gov. Mike Dunleavy last week, discussing a planned 41-percent cut in state funding for the University of Alaska system. He said he believed its leaders could “turn the university into a smaller, leaner, but still very positive, productive university in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Dunleavy’s expression — “all things for all people” — underlines the perception that universities are bloated, in need of budgetary trims.

He’s a politician. But college leaders, too, have deployed the message. Last year Chancellor Bernie L. Patterson of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point used it as he proposed eliminating programs, including in French, German, geography, and geoscience.

The phrase “all things to all people” comes from the Bible. The Apostle Paul, in describing his quest to spread the Gospel of Christ, says, “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”

Try to summarize the spirit of American higher education in its heyday, and “all things to all people” isn’t that far off — at least for the most prominent research universities. They conduct research. They teach students. They stage sports. They treat patients. They are repositories of knowledge.

But diminished state funding means budgets are tight. That and increased skepticism about colleges’ value to society leave their leaders under pressure to justify that value — and to devote spending to lucrative or distinctive areas. Hence, “all things to all people” is an ethos on the outs.

“We can’t be all things to all people” sounds like “perfect political rhetoric” to Kevin R. McClure, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who pointed out on Twitter that similar language had been used at Stevens Point and in Alaska.

McClure studies public regional universities, and he paid close attention to the proposed restructuring at Stevens Point, which was when he first noticed the phrase. He doesn’t think many colleges have too much fat, though he acknowledges that institutions have limits and humanities programs are often on the chopping block.

“All things to all people,” however, doesn’t present a solution.

“It’s easier to say we can’t be all things to all people than to identify a vision and articulate what the purpose of higher education is going to be,” he said. “It manages to say something and nothing at the same time.”

A Constant Refrain

For decades, university leaders have used “all things to all people” as an easy contrast, signaling practicality and a desire for their campus to stand out.

On a Thursday morning in March 2000, at the University of Houston, a group of state senators, business heavyweights, and other Texas leaders listened to a top administrator from Florida’s State University System talk about making each campus’s mission distinct.

Florida, she told Texas’ Special Commission on 21st-Century Colleges and Universities, had realized that it could not fund “a system of universities that are all things to all people,” according to minutes of the meeting.

In a 2005 address the president of the University of Missouri System said it could not be all things to all people, and must have the courage to articulate “what we can and cannot do,” according to an account published in a faculty newsletter on the Kansas City campus.

The president, the late Elson S. Floyd, would eventually come back to the message. In 2009, in a new job as president of Washington State University, he was announcing 370 job cuts in the wake of a crippling recession. He used a familiar turn of phrase.

“We have tried to be strategic in preserving academic and research quality,” he said. “Especially in these difficult budget times, we cannot be all things to all people. We believe these cuts will, to the greatest extent possible, position us to emerge from this economic crisis as a stronger university.”

T. Ryan Durkan, the board chair of Washington State at the time of Floyd’s death, in 2015, said the president’s philosophy would be “night and day” from the cuts proposed by Alaska’s Dunleavy, even though they had used the same language. Floyd advocated for state investment in higher education. But he did want each campus to consider its local identity as it developed programs, from engineering in Everett, which is near Boeing facilities, to sciences in the Tri Cities area, home to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, she said.

The cuts after the recession were difficult. “Hard decisions had to be made,” she said. “And sometimes the analysis was, Is this program being served somewhere else in the state?”

In many states, funding has not fully rebounded, and campuses have become more reliant on tuition revenue a decade after the recession. In those 10 years the phrase has been applied to at least a dozen institutions, from the University of Hawaii to North Carolina State University, according to a Chronicle review of financial plans, speeches, and budget assessments.

A Retreat

Universities might say they’re not all things to all people. Their mission statements tell a different story, said Andrew J. Policano, an author of Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities. Many research universities, he said, are indistinguishable from one another and say they serve everyone and do everything. That’s a problem in an era with fewer public resources for higher education.

Policano, an emeritus professor of economics and public policy at the University of California at Irvine, told The Chronicle that he believes specialization would improve overall quality in higher education because expensive disciplines that attract fewer students would not need subsidies from tuition dollars or limited state support.

But offering fewer programs would mark a retreat from the idea of the comprehensive university, which had expanded from niche professional schools, said McClure, the higher-education professor at Wilmington.

“Unfortunately, I do think that’s the trend,” said Cathy Sandeen, chancellor of the University of Alaska at Anchorage. “My goal here is to make sure that we preserve these opportunities for our students to experience philosophy, to experience history, to experience English literature, while they’re also focusing on work-force programs.”

She said that a 41-percent cut could set Alaska on a path to turning its universities into vocational schools, depending on how it is carried out.

Sandeen spoke briefly with The Chronicle on Wednesday amid a wall-to-wall advocacy push to persuade lawmakers to override Dunleavy’s veto, a process that could begin on July 8 and, to succeed, would require a three-quarters majority in the Legislature as a whole.

Some people are already preparing for the worst. One staff member, expecting to have to move out of state, put the family home on the market, Sandeen said. Prompted by the veto, Moody’s Investors Service on Tuesday placed the University of Alaska on review for a possible credit-rating downgrade.

Shortly after the recession hit, in 2010 and 2011, Sandeen visited public and private universities as a fellow at the American Council on Education. Her takeaway was that specialization in many cases took place naturally, connected to work-force need. That’s been the case in Alaska, she said, with Southeast’s education school, Anchorage’s focus on health and engineering, and Fairbanks’s heft in research.

The “all things to all people” message from the governor, then, felt like a justification without data behind it.

“On one hand, I hear that refrain a lot — there’s overlap and we need to specialize more,” she said.

On the other hand? She thinks Alaska’s already pulled it off.

Lindsay Ellis is a staff reporter. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.