BY JOHN T. MCNAY
The growing obsession on the part of college and university administrations with secrecy, which I address in my recent Academe article, “Ohio AAUP Chapters Contend with Secretive Searches,” is indicative of a larger issue. The continual adoption of corporate models is undermining the academic mission at our institutions. Even corporations, when they allow themselves to get involved in too many things that are peripheral to the core business, ratchet their businesses back to focus on their core business.
Here is the important thing: This refocus on the academic mission is the kind of innovation that our institutions should begin to explore. What passes for “innovation” is too often just an acceleration of running down the same rabbit hole that is destroying higher education.
One of the truly frustrating things about working for reforms in higher education is to get college and university administrators to put education first and not allow the resources of the institutions to get hijacked for other purposes. The inability to focus on the real problems is widespread and yet the solutions are right there before everyone’s eyes. They only require the courage to address them.
The pressure to treat our public colleges and universities as though they were corporations designed to produce profits does a great deal to undermine the academic mission and take attention away from the institutions’ reason for existing. Top academic administrators are thoroughly sucked into this vortex for several reasons, including that their training is designed to make them fit the corporate model.
Take one of the most popular handbooks for administrators, Business Practices in Higher Education: A Guide for Today’s Administrators by Mark A. Kretovics. The book’s introduction makes it clear where the author stands:
It is my contention that higher education is an industry and that individual institutions have operated like a business. Our core business practice just happens to be that of educating students.
I think this commodification of education is in great part what has gone wrong. It distorts what is actually a pretty simple function, teaching and research. It also tends to remove the focus from educating students to all of the other peripheral functions of the university and promotes the idea that all of these activities—construction, education, non-academic staffing, teaching, athletics, restructuring, real estate development, research, and climbing walls—are all of roughly the same value. Higher education is a public good, not a widget.
Guest blogger John T. McNay is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati at Blue Ash and is past president of the UC AAUP chapter and current president of the Ohio AAUP conference.
This is in my experience one of the central issues in higher education today. That is, the effects of “corporatization” on various of the functions of the modern university (and it also affects public secondary education to some extent). I think it is helpful to break these effects into units of influence. In some cases, the corporate managerial model can be helpful. Here I’m thinking of building real estate operations (I used to work for a energy resource management company whose clients were universities; Yale the most prominent, but smaller ones as well including Middlebury). Building costs and efficiency were always an issue, and still are (including utilization rates, or occupancy levels which are very low throughout the day, to maintenance, repair and overhaul, security and HVAC, most very far from “green”). But it is in the cultural, academic and labor areas where the corporate model seems, for the college and university, to have its deleterious influences. Take labor. The university hosts a very typical tiered wage structure with administration now assuming they are “executives” like their assumed commercial counterparts, while those “below” them (they have embraced corporate hierarchy) are working in much less remuneration schemes, including graduate labor (at UChicago the GSU is threatening to strike). Much of this culture that mimics the commercial corporation, comes from the various Board structures of Trustees, Directors or Chancellors, or even Fellows almost all of whom are either selected or self-select from the business sector, usually very large often dominant corporations or from very wealthy families. This effects the expectations and grooming and conditioning of college administrators who are seen, or like to be seen as, a peer group to the Trustees. This builds solidarity and mutuality in business and research projects, including political ones. They include “Big Pharma” and many others from banking, real estate, energy, software (Microsoft’s CEO is a Chicago Trustee for example) and of course government, especially the new security state run by the agencies and bureaus. I discuss some of these issues in last week’s Financial Times, concerning University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer, “Overhaul Likely to Mean Business as Usual at the University of Chicago:” https://www.ft.com/content/2676282a-70f1-11e9-bf5c-6eeb837566c5. Thank you and Regards.