BY JOHN MCNAY

One of the truly frustrating things about working for reforms in higher education is to get our 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 COVID-19 crisis has shined a bright light on the routine and typical mismanagement of our private and public universities.

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. Published in 2011, it is 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.”¹

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.

In reading through several books that have been published recently about the perceived problems in higher education and the need for “reform,” I am struck by the fact that the authors never focus on the real problems facing higher education. These are, simply put, administrative bloat, runaway spending on construction, massive athletic department debts, and, too often, shrinking spending on instruction and its related problem, replacing tenure-track full-time positions with part-time faculty.

Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education (2016), written by William G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson, specifically identifies as “overblown” some of these real problems in our public colleges and universities. I think the main problem with this short book stems from the experience of both Bowen and McPherson. They both have long administrative careers in elite private universities and not public institutions – Bowen at Denison University in Ohio and Princeton University, McPherson at Macalester College-–and this has apparently generated their perspective. Both have had fine careers – Bowen rose to become president of Princeton and McPherson was president of Macalester.

The result of this is that they do not address the long-term decline in funding for public higher education as a problem that needs to be reversed and they suggest that administrative bloat and the student loan crisis are “overblown.” Instead, they posit that the solution is more tinkering with classroom education and teaching strategies. They suggest “innovative” approaches will be found through technology. Again, there is no attempt to address the real cost drivers.

And when they get to the concept of “free” or “debt-free” college, it is no surprise that they fail to recognize cost as a genuine problem.  They argue instead that some students “don’t borrow enough” and work too much? Again, there is a clear disconnect from the real world our students deal with and the perspective present in this study. Further, they distance themselves from the ample critics who point to administrative bloat as a real problem, with growth in administrative staff outpacing growth in faculty.  This is not just a faculty complaint. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative thinktank, has published research in their report in 2015: Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education. Goldwater points out that between 1993 and 2007 the number of full-time administrators per 100 students rose by 39 percent while the numbers of those engaged in teaching rose only 18 percent.²

Bowen and McPherson argue that the non-instructional staffing growth are not really executive staff. While that may be true, neither the growth in “non-administrative” staff or the flat number of people they consider administrators, matched the absolute decline in faculty between 2001 and 2007. That is a decline in faculty despite enrollment growth of 28 percent between 2000 and 2016, a point about which neither author expresses concern.³

Driving this must, at least in part, be a factor common in bureaucracies, outlined in Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All Administrative University and Why it Matters (2011). When a new academic executive assumes his or her position, there is a natural drive to have “reports” or staff to supervise and must report to you. It is often how academic bureaucrats define their status. Expanding without restraint, this has led to enormous numbers of staffers reporting to various deans, associate deans, assistant deans, and vice and assistant provosts. To try to cover up this problem by blaming it on the growing “professionalism,” as Bowen and McPherson claim, of the expanded staffing is, at best, an inadequate explanation.

And in what is evidence that they go really off the rails is their call for more assertive presidential leadership while they attack shared governance.  It is clear that one of the real problems at our colleges and universities is a lack of competent leadership in the upper administrative reaches of our institutions. In Ohio, two particular cases in point are Wright State University and the University of Akron, where repeated and self-inflicted blunders have hobbled both universities. And more examples abound.

Yet, Bowen and McPherson suggest that even stronger executive leadership is needed and even less participation from the faculty is also necessary.  “Presidents need to exert real leadership, and faculty need to contribute the knowledge and the enthusiasm for teaching that they possess.”⁴ The obvious problem here is that because there are so many examples across the country of the failures of presidents, administrators, and boards of trustees, it is absolutely essential that faculty are allowed a greater role in leading the institutions back to the basics and a focus on the academic mission.

Two other studies of higher education include Derek Bok’s The Struggle to Reform our Colleges (2017) and Jon McGee’s Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education (2015).⁵ Formerly president of Harvard University, Bok is another example of a president of an Ivy League institution who seems removed from the reality on the ground for the vast majority of public universities. McGee has served private universities as a financial analyst rather than on the academic side.

Bok maintains in his introduction that there are so many promising innovations in teaching and learning relying on new technologies and research that they must be pushed into the classroom. So, of course, exploration of these issues rather than addressing the real problems plaguing our public universities takes up much of the text. There is an interesting chapter on the quality of higher education that reviews the question of whether students are learning as much now in college as they have in the past. Bok concludes the studies are not conclusive but do provide at least some evidence that students are not learning as much as they once did.  Bok determines at the end of the chapter that the solution to this is to have more professors move to active learning strategies, like group work, in the classroom and away from passive learning strategies, like lectures.

The problem that Bok has to face when arguing that the solution is a change in teaching strategies is that if learning was good once with predominant lectures but declined while lectures were still predominant then what changed? It wasn’t teaching styles that caused the decline (if there was a decline). It was something to do with the students. And what has been the biggest overall change for students? The skyrocketing cost of higher education (caused by defunding at the state level and mismanagement at the administrative level) has pushed students to work too much and borrow too much. The days when a student could just be a student have largely disappeared. Bok goes out of his way to argue that working more is not an explanation. Yet, for those of us who teach at public universities, it is clearly the big reason that students can’t focus as much time on their studies as they once could.

Bok continues with some interesting chapters about the difference in perceptions between universities and employers on what students learn, the impact of for-profits on higher ed, and the ineffectiveness of performance funding on the state level. But he provides no chapter on flourishing administrative bloat, grandiose construction projects, or runaway athletic deficits.

Both Bok as well as Bowen and McPherson, however, do spend time on a bad idea about how to address putting more faculty in the classroom. They both propose creating large full-time teaching corps of faculty out of the massive numbers of part-time teachers. Cutting way back on the immoral exploitation of part-time faculty is a good idea but the authors argue that this group of teaching professors should not be granted tenure. They reflect the too common notions held at our research universities that devalue teaching as part of the academic mission. Being less important, tenure is not a necessary protection for teachers.

The authors are clearly wrong on this point. Tenure is the armor of academic freedom. It is the ability to be protected for being arbitrarily fired because you said or wrote something unpopular. These days, it is far more likely that tenure will be important to protect a teacher who said something provocative in the classroom in order to spur critical thinking and debate than for someone producing a heavily-researched piece on the Hanseatic League or gene-splicing. Tenure is essential for faculty, both teaching and researching.

McGee’s book, in some ways, is a symptom of the problem. By seeing higher education as just another commodity in the marketplace, he addresses it with the same corporatized and distorted lens that has been the source of many of our problems over the last 20 years or so. His best chapters are about the “disruptions” that have faced the country’s institutions of higher ed–demographic (shrinking college age population), economic (economic downturns and defunding from state legislatures), and cultural (increasing focus on job training rather than a broad-based education). Sadly, for a book that might have focused on the economics of higher education, McGee missed a golden opportunity to focus on the triumvirate of financial problems-–administration bloat, grandiose construction projects, and runaway athletic spending. And yet not a word about those issues.

In conclusion, these studies, by top administrative leaders in higher education, are further evidence that our administrative class, for whatever reason, just doesn’t get it. And, it is important to recognize, this is just a sampling of the many misguided books being produced about higher education that will never encourage the reforms so desperately needed.

It is undoubtedly true that our colleges and universities should have funding restored to them. At present, the state of Ohio contributes less than 20 percent of the operating budgets of the state institutions. Twenty years ago, that number was closer to 70 percent but more than 70 percent is now what students are paying for their education.

State funding is not the only problem. It is crucial that in the COVID-19 crisis that institutions focus more of their revenue on the academic mission – and not peripheral activities. Too often, we hear the university referred to as the “enterprise” by top administrators. That is a sign that, amid all the pressure from the chamber of commerce, athletic boosters, and those with a “edifice” complex, they have lost track that our central job is teaching, learning, and research.

The nation deserves better.

 

Endnotes:

[1] Mark A. Kretovics, Business Practices in Higher Education: A Guide for Today’s Administrators (New York: Routledge, 2011) x.

[2] Sen the Goldwater report at: https://goldwaterinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/cms_page_media/2015/3/24/Administrative%20Bloat.pdf

[3] William G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson, Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change in American Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) 108-09.

[4] Ibid., 70.

[5] Derek Bok, The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Jon McGee, Breakpoint: The Changing Marketplace for Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

 

John McNay is a Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash. He is the President of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, a position that he has held since shortly after the fight to repeal Ohio’s Senate Bill 5, an attack on the collective bargaining rights of all public employees but an effort to eliminate those rights completely for college and university faculty. He is the author of  Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Struggle to Defend the Middle Class (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).