What Many Colleges Need: a Driving Vision

U. of Halle-Wittenberg

After Mark William Roche gained tenure, he says, he pored over Henry Rosovsky’s 1990 book, The University: An Owner’s Manual (W.W. Norton), and exclaimed, “This is how a university works!”

He referred to the book often during his stints as an academic administrator — as a department chair at Ohio State University and the University of Notre Dame, and from 1997 to 2008 as dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters.

Out this week is his own academic operator’s manual, Realizing the Distinctive University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture (University of Notre Dame Press). His message to college administrators: Work with your faculties and other constituencies to conceive and pursue a driving vision that distinguishes your institution from peers and competitors, and steer your course with distinction.

On the phone from Indiana, Mr. Roche allows that that’s easier for an institution like Notre Dame, where more than 80 percent of students are Catholic. But distinctive institutions don’t have to be religious, single sex, or historically black, he says; and they don’t have to have wed “intellectual vigor and nonconformity” like, say, Reed College, or have a signature honors program like the one at Swarthmore College. Rather, they can emulate some of the many strengths of American higher education, and they can reap benefits from its shortcomings, such as its indifferent record in serving underrepresented racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups: “You can say, OK, where is there an objective gap, something important that needs to be addressed?”

Thanks to government neglect, a trivializing student culture, and faculty narrowness, Mr. Roche says, “we have a lot of very mediocre universities.” But his book is far from the jeremiad that has become common during recent decades; it is an optimistic paean to American higher education’s accomplishments and opportunities. Echoing the arguments he made in such books as Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), he says that offering intellectual challenge amid a fostered sense of community, rather than mere jobs preparation, reaps such rewards as lifelong alumni loyalty.

Of course, he allows, inspiring faculty members to work together on an agreed vision may require more than appeals to academic idealism: Not all will share, or care about, a vision. Then, the able administrator may resort to such incentives as granting extra faculty lines to departments whose hiring practices advance the mission. (Economics departments thrill to such measures, he reports.)

In such efforts, administrators who have been faculty members often have insights that management specialists may not, Mr. Roche says. He himself is a professor of German language and literature and philosophy. He says, “I like the idea of faculty members going into administration, trying to make a difference, and then rotating back.”