BY FRANÇOIS FURSTENBERG

What happens when a university is run like a corporate boardroom?

I have a small but persistent fantasy about academic life, about an alternate review and promotion system for university faculty. Here’s what I imagine . . .

You were lucky to be hired as an assistant professor into a tenure-track job. Now six years later, you’re coming up for tenure. You’d like to keep your job. If things go well maybe you can get a raise too.

Well, I have good news for you! It turns out that you get to decide who sits on your tenure committee and who will evaluate your work. I’d suggest you pick some friends outside the profession—folks who know little about what your work entails but whom you’ve been cultivating for a few years.

Now I have even better news: Everything they will know about your job performance is what you tell them about it. Members of the committee won’t see your teaching evaluations or read your scholarship. Why would they? They’re not in your field anyway. How could they even judge?

More good news: you’ve been given a large staff to help shape their views about your performance—staff who will testify to how effective your teaching is, how significant your scholarship has been, and how all your colleagues admire you to the moon and back.

Needless to say, the committee will have to take your word for all this, since your colleagues and students are forbidden from communicating with them. You and your staff will provide them with all the information they have about you.

Not bad, huh?

I’d guess that if we faculty had a system like this one, we’d have a fairly easy time getting promoted. Giant raises would likely accompany every evaluation. The result would be a vast cadre of wildly overpaid faculty, numbers ever expanding, salaries ever growing, many of us with little knowledge of or connection to the institutions that employ us.

Well I’m glad to say that this is not the system that governs faculty evaluation and promotion. Our approach has its flaws, to be sure, but they aren’t this absurd.

I’m sorry to say, however, that this system does seem to structure the way one class of people in higher education are evaluated: university presidents.

I think, on occasion, about this system and the incentives it creates. I wonder what kind of oversight trustees can possibly exercise over university presidents and the bloated administrations they manage.

At private institutions like my own, presidents effectively select their board members. (In theory the board selects its own, but in practice the president and a huge cadre of development staff cultivate new members.) Board members, of course, get their seats because of their ability to give and raise money. They inevitably hail from the worlds of finance, law, business, or perhaps government. Few know much about universities or about their teaching and research missions.

One begins to perceive a significant asymmetry.

But that yawning asymmetry is made all the greater by the president’s tight control over information. Communication with members of the board is strictly constrained by the president and his or her staff. I’ve even been told that I, as an employee of the university, am barred from communicating directly with the board, and must channel any communication through the president’s office.

What oversight the board is capable of exercising is largely financial in nature. Trustees may not know much about universities in particular or higher education in general, but these are people who understand balance sheets. Is the ability to make matters of finance, real estate, and ranking intelligible to boards of trustees is one of the drivers of behind the inexorable growth of universities? How else, after all, is a board composed of people well-versed in financial matters but little versed in how to create scholarship capable of assessing success?

In any case, the structure explains a lot about my university. Twice, now, our president’s contract has been pre-emptively renewed before his previous term had expired. As Naveeda Khan and I explain in our recent essay in Academe, he has probably lost the confidence of a majority of faculty and students. There is no way of knowing. What is certain, however, is that with his tight control over the board of the trustees he has felt empowered to behave in all manner of ways that some might even call authoritarian.

I’m pretty sure my university is not unique. The problem is not individual; it’s structural. Our president isn’t an awful person. He’s just behaving as he’s been incentivized to do.

Until we find a way to reform the structure, we’re likely to endure more of the same. In the meantime, we’ll all continue to watch as this flawed but noble system of American higher education continues to be hollowed out by its corporate overlords.

François Furstenberg is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.