Colleges and universities are organized into schools
and departments, with organized research units distributed among them. The
schools are under a provost, the departments are under a dean, and departments
are under chairs. Faculty may be treated as workers in a bureaucracy, much as
movie stars were treated in the old studio system. Some superstars have greater autonomy. Some
researchers are so productive and rich (in terms of external support), they run
their own empires. And in some universities, the deans are afraid of the
faculty since the faculty under them is so strong and potentially mobile.
Under this system, each major unit may well have
budgetary responsibility. Using standard accounting principles, their revenue
in terms of tuition, grants, gifts, endowment returns is balanced by their
costs for staff and faculty, facilities, and revenue generation (development,
marketing, grant administration). Some fraction of their revenue stays with the
central administration. In effect the provost and president are running a
conglomerate that is reminiscent of Hal Geneen’s ITT of the 1960s and1970s,
where investments are made in units that are most likely to be productive.
There is competition among the units for programs (should computer science be
in engineering and with mathematics?), for undergraduate students and their
tuition, for donors, and for grant overhead. And the provost and president
manage that competition. They may propose and support cross-unit projects
(“interdisciplinary”) and they may well be open to initiatives that are
university-wide. Presumably, students see the university as a single
university, taking advantage of the strengths throughout the institution. But
at the same time, they will feel the pull of departmental requirements and even
school fellowships, that demand that they provide revenue for the department of
their major.
From 1941 to 1960 Dwight Eisenhower pushed for unity of command in the armed services,
first of the Allies in the Second World War, and then of NATO, and then of the
armed services of the United States. My description of the university was the
situation of the armed services, barely able to work together during wartime,
and during comparative peacetime they believe their units were the vital force
for security, others there to support them. External interested constituencies
(Congress, for example) much preferred the competitive and conglomerate to the
unified. Over those twenty years
Eisenhower pushed against the national and service chiefs, and those interests,
to create a more coherent fighting force. He only partially succeeded, and the
Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 went further. It is likely that there will be
further Congressional action in the direction of unified command in the next
few years.
Imagine if there were such unified command in a
university, and competition was focused on external
competitors at other institutions. The interests of students could be addressed
with less concern about unit budgets, and faculty might well more readily
experiment with new fields of research and teaching. Some students and faculty
would be comfortable and productive in more conventional paths, perhaps most.
But what one is hoping for is more cooperation among deans, where their
budgetary concerns and their turf concerns are muted, and where their main
concern is increasing the strength and quality and adaptive capacity of the
institution. Now, you will still have to have strong financial controls. The
provost’s job becomes one of insuring both responsiveness and solvency, not so
much by generating revenue or controlling deans and faculties, but by
addressing problematic mis-matches and deciding which ones are better for the
academic mission of the institution. What you want to do is to make the
institution into a competitive one, competing in the larger society rather than
among its units. Otherwise, you will be defeated by the Axis of Educational
Tyranny and the Lowest Cost Producers.
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