Yes, Higher Ed Is a Business — But It’s Also a Calling

In discussions about why higher education has fallen in public esteem and support, colleges are seen as too elitist, too liberal, too resistant to accountability, too expensive, and too focused on liberal learning rather than preparing students for careers. A less-cited theme is that a large majority of Americans view academic institutions as essentially businesses that are more concerned with their own financial well-being than with educating students or serving communities. It is not difficult to draw a bright line connecting the view of academic institutions as money-making enterprises with the readiness of Congress to eliminate longstanding tax benefits based on the idea of colleges and universities as charitable enterprises.

In his 1983 book, Academic Strategy, George Keller complained about the amateurism he found pervasive in college administrations, a situation he attributed to a deeply rooted disdain among educators for the ways of business. Keller was a dedicated academic who believed in the educational and social mission of colleges, but he also thought they could advance their purposes more effectively by adopting a professional approach to campus leadership.

Keller was right, of course. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the idea of strategic planning — the need for which was Keller’s central theme — was still an alien idea to most academic leaders. So, too, were marketing and advertising, financial-aid leveraging, negotiating with families about financial aid, sophisticated financial management, data analytics, and competing for positions in the rankings.

Harvard University provided a particularly striking example of the comfortable world of academic administration that Keller described. Nathan Pusey, who led Harvard into the early 1970s, functioned with a small personal staff and a single vice president, also thinly staffed. When his successor, Derek Bok, created four vice presidencies and recruited professionals from outside academe to key roles like finance, administration, and government relations, many in the university community lamented the passing of an era.

Higher education has come a long way in professionalizing administrative leadership since the days of Nathan Pusey. The kind of bureaucratization that Bok brought to Harvard is now commonplace. Much good has come from this. Colleges have gotten better at thinking systematically about how to flourish in the intensely competitive academic marketplace, and with this has come, in many cases, more thoughtful approaches to setting priorities, more rational and efficient uses of resources, more effective approaches to recruiting students and awarding financial aid, and more sophisticated administration of nonacademic functions. Taken as a whole, these changes have enabled institutions to do a better job of serving students and fulfilling their missions.

But consider the lack of support for higher education evident in the recent debate on tax reform in Washington and in surveys reporting drastic declines in public support. The unintended consequence of Keller’s management revolution may well have been a blurring of the distinction between colleges and businesses in public perceptions and, with that change, the loss of a precious asset: the widespread belief that academic work is a calling, that we aren’t in it for the money, that those who pursue careers in higher education do so at some expense to their material self-interest to serve society and advance a public purpose. As we mastered the language and mind-set of professional management in order to better advance our missions, we may have unwittingly encouraged the public to forget what we are — or ought to be — all about.

The issue is not about just public perceptions. Anecdotal evidence abounds that many people inside higher education itself think of colleges as businesses. An article in The Chronicle about the appointment of a management consultant as dean of a major business school quoted him as saying that “almost everything is a business” to explain why leaders from nontraditional backgrounds can be a good fit for higher education. A recent opinion piece by a college president about the sexual-assault crisis at Michigan State University included the observation that “in too many colleges today, the presidency has devolved from a position of moral and intellectual leadership to a common business executive more concerned with tending the bottom line than upholding great principles.”

Perhaps the most systematic discussion of the way in which a corporate mentality has become pervasive in academe was provided by Derek Bok himself. In his 2003 book, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, Bok identified an array of factors that cause presidents to think of their colleges as money-making enterprises — and to look at virtually every dimension of academic work through that prism. Among these forces, ironically, is the inter-institutional competition for excellence, which creates voracious appetites for cash even as it drives institutions to high levels of performance in education and scholarship.

Higher education faces a dilemma: We undoubtedly need the more sophisticated administrative leadership that George Keller called for so many years ago, including being smart about generating revenue. We also must be true to our roots in educating young people, seeking the truth, helping communities, and preserving the most important values of our culture. We need to find our way back to our academic center of gravity without losing the administrative capacities so crucial to the health of our institutions and the effective pursuit of our missions.

Three things will help secure the needed balance: First, those involved in preparing and selecting college presidents must remember the importance of moral and intellectual leadership as well as administrative sophistication in designing training programs and evaluating candidates.

Second, presidents must make sure their strategies are driven primarily by educational and social purposes, even as those presidents attend to the financial well-being of their institutions.

Third, those who represent academe to the public, including admissions and financial-aid officers, creators of websites and print materials, and the presidents, trustees, and association leaders who speak for us, must focus relentlessly and credibly on our commitment to the students we enroll and the communities in which we are embedded.

Our work is a calling. We must remember this ourselves and present our work this way to nonacademic audiences. We neglect this imperative at our peril.

Richard M. Freeland is president emeritus of Northeastern University and a higher-education consultant.