Guiding the American University

Contemporary Challenges and Choices

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317496663
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

American higher education is under unprecedented pressure, beginning with the public funding and student debt crises and extending to inadequate performance in student retention and growing global competition. Respected educator and scholar Peter N. Stearns breaks down the underlying problems, exploring the most contentious issues for university leaders and administrators today. Guiding the American University covers the major facets of university operation—administration, faculty, and students—and discusses what should be changed and what should be preserved. Covering major topics for debate and real problems facing American higher education today—including the tenure system, online learning, administrative bloat, and campus culture—this book is a critical resource for aspiring and current higher education administrators. Research-based and stemming from a range of case studies, this book's insightful and fresh recommendations serve as an important contribution to the conversation on the future of American higher education.

1 Introduction Crisis and Opportunity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315713014-2

Universities in the United States are caught between a host of strengths, measurable and otherwise, and a growing range of attacks from within as well as outside the academy. We sorely need new opportunities to navigate among these tensions and, over time, to reduce the tensions themselves.

For the plus side: American higher education produces more top-ranked schools—regardless of the whims of any particular global ranking system—than any other nation, by a huge margin. As quick cases in point: American institutions comprise 62% of the top 100 on the 2014 Shanghai Jiao Tong list and 38% of the top 50 in the Q4 scale. Population size has something to do with this disproportion, but there is far more involved.

For the expanding minus column: American higher education faces an arguably unprecedented array of attacks and critiques, generating gleeful calls for systematic disruption or dire forecasts about going the way of the printed newspaper or, even worse, Border's bookstore. In a half century of academic experience, I have never seen anything like it.

The disparities clearly affect governing boards. Five years ago, the board at my university was vigorously focused on making us a “world-class” university. The term was a bit grandiose, but the goal clearly was to improve quality and visibility. Its successor group, beginning just four years back, dropped “world-class” entirely and developed a laser focus on real or imagined inefficiencies plus budget and tuition constraints. The same story could be told at many institutions over the past half-decade. Admittedly, changes in state politics and above all the ramifications of economic recession factor into the variability, but there's more to the inconsistency than this. It is hard to decide what universities should concentrate on in the mix of strengths and vulnerabilities. The result is a distracting impulse to zig and then zag.

This is a book about running American universities today and tomorrow amid these striking polarities. The book joins the discussion of basic priorities to an assessment of core issues in actual academic administration, urging more candid exchanges about the choices that must be made going forward.

Combining Management Realities with the New Terrain

We begin with the claim that the present level of incoherence in the higher education context is undesirable and—in most respects—unnecessary. It has several harmful consequences. It leads to unconstructive divides within the university and between external power sources and the academy. Priorities are obscured: lots of faculty don't have a clear sense of where their institution is going and what, other than the struggle to survive, should engage them. Ill-considered experiments are given too much credence, at least until they collapse: a case in point was the notion that free online courses (the fabled MOOCs) represented the wave of the future for universities—with little initial thought to the obvious point that the courses could not be generated or sustained without a substantial revenue source. What was interesting here was not the offering—it was fine for institutions that could afford to offer free wares as a form of advertising or as a means of learning more about online education—but the fact that an inherently flawed business plan—a plan without financial compensation—seemed so promising reflects serious academic disarray. Otherwise sensible academic leaders and observers spent more than a year grasping at straws. Finally, amid all the confusion, many universities arguably do not put their best feet forward, conceding too much ground to groups that have their own agendas—beginning with politicians who want at all costs to avoid a careful conversation about budget priorities. Higher education leadership can and should be doing better.¹

It's time—and I know this is a brash claim—for some renewed common sense. We'll proceed step by step.

First, let's accumulate all the significant current attacks on American higher education briefly but honestly. The purpose here, aside from trying to generate a constructive agenda, includes a recognition of the mutual incompatibility of many of the attacks, which is a problem in its own right. The main point is to suggest how we can select two or three primary deficiencies from among the crowd and argue that these should guide the next stages of change and remediation.

Second, and equally important, let's also identify existing strengths that can and should be preserved. As noted, American universities for all their woes are in some respects riding high, not only in international rankings but also in terms of many aspects of what in business might be called customer satisfaction.

And third, let's frame this conversation, and apply the results, to the way American colleges and universities actually operate. How, for example, should the tenure system be considered, or reconsidered, in light of the current context? What about the hallowed notion of shared governance between faculty and administration (with some external authority tossed in as well)? Do we need radical reconsideration of what student life operations are doing; if so, on what basis? We need to address not just general views of the university—the problems, the strong points—but their application to real issues, to the actual kinds of decisions administrators and faculties, and those who aspire to join them, make or should make.

The Need for Balance: Change and Cherish

This is a book about balance. Good universities have long had to worry about balance—between teaching and research, for example, where new issues link to older models and concerns—and about professional and liberal training goals, another tension that, despite current hyperbole, should feed into our basic approach. More recently, universities have worried about global versus regional interests, but the big balancing act now is between preservation and innovation, both essential but both by themselves inadequate in dealing with what universities need to do in the near future.

Balance wars against both disrupters and traditionalists, though hopefully it can also bring some of them together. The disruption movement is fascinating, and again quite new in my experience—save perhaps for some of the extreme, and short-lived, anti-intellectualism of the 1960s protest. Lots of bright, well-meaning people sincerely believe that almost every aspect of the American university must be rethought and transformed. Some of them are fully sincere. Some, probably, operate, whether consciously or not, under generational banners: let's find any way possible to penetrate a power structure dominated by baby boomers (with a few preboomer hangers-on). Some are out to make a buck. It's really interesting to realize how many academic audiences—particularly administrative audiences—pay big money to hear themselves attacked at leadership or planning conferences. It's rather like the liberal segment of the French aristocracy in 1789.

Traditionalism is currently far less fashionable and has fewer spokespeople, but surely it exists. Michael Crow and William Dabars’ recent study, urging a new model for American universities, notes regretfully that “few institutions of modern society so rigidly adhere to tradition as academe,” with only religion and the courts as rivals. And surely, as the disrupters claim, though with exaggeration, many universities do change slowly. Many faculty are quite eager to continue doing, for the next two decades, what they did the previous two.²

The balanced approach urges, however, that both extremes are off base. We need change, in some cases serious change. This book will focus directly not only on several policy areas but on some deep-seated aspects of academic culture that need to be altered. I personally think that innovation is the best way to describe the shifts that are required because it is a less combative term than disruption. Whatever the vocabulary, we do have some sacred cows that must be desacralized. At the same time we need to be able, against the current fashion, to point out what should not be fully altered—what existing strengths go into quality education—while also recognizing several adjustments that have already begun to emerge and that should be more respectfully recognized. Even a glance at the differences in the courses and undergraduate majors offered in a quality public university today, compared to its counterpart half a century ago, at least should raise questions about some of the more systematic accusations about unaltered traditionalism.

It is indeed true, as the critics say, that universities cannot continue on their present path and that academic life must become more complicated than it was a few decades ago. But—against this claim alone—it is also true that significant change has already been occurring AND that a range of basic practices must be very carefully and explicitly enhanced.

Balance isn't sexy. It does capture, however, how most constructive change occurs: few frontal attacks ever succeed entirely. Balance—real change but also real preservation—more accurately conveys what is possible in reviewing the interests of the key players in higher education and how they can work together toward future success. As we explore the core features of the contemporary university, the plea for balanced priorities is no evasion. It's the only way to combine existing achievement with the kinds of adjustments that simply have to be faced.

One of the problems with the current atmosphere around higher education is that a plea for balance risks seeming purely defensive, hopelessly retrograde. In some versions, advocacy of disruption makes any objection look feeble and evasive. Add to this some other obvious points that disrupters also make. For example, this book is written by someone who has been in academic administration and therefore has a stake in elements of the existing system. It is written by someone well past youth; a key disrupter argument is that change must come from those who are young, who have more than a decade or so left in the system and who therefore can espouse fundamental change with more conviction. Obviously, I think those arguments are wrong, but that might merely confirm my irrelevance. I also think they are wrong because they downplay some real changes that are already underway, by faculty and administrative leaders and because they bypass the elements of preservation that are also essential. Not everything is broken. Not every new idea is worth investment.

The goal is evolution, admittedly accelerated evolution, rather than revolution. Evolution is inherently more achievable and normally has fewer unpredictable or undesirable side effects than its more disruptive cousin. In this case, evolution has a chance to appeal to those many faculty and students (more on the student claim later) who find lots of merit in existing academic practices. More people can be drawn into discussions of change if, first, they have a clear sense of priorities among current problems and, second, they can see connections to established systems. For—and again this will be more fully defended in Chapter 2—it is not for the most part fundamental goals that are in question but how best to reach these goals. This is not a plea for a stand-pat approach, however modest the rhetoric of balance may seem. Movement is essential but not frenzy. Evolutionary change will get us to where we should be.

The Nature of University Management

The evolutionary approach is enhanced by the nature of academic organization—which, I admit, some disrupters see as a key problem. Academic administration is, and should be, an exercise in persuasion and discussion. It is not a diktat. One of the tensions between the academic world and some of its governing boards is a real difference in management style. There are, and again there should be, relatively few opportunities for academic administrators to tell faculty and staff: do this. Not a few administrators, even some with academic experience, get into trouble because of an exaggerated sense of hierarchy. Of course, there is a power structure in the university, but it operates amid consultation, wide contributions and abundant persuasion.

This point, too, can be confused. It does not mean that administrative leaders do not have goals and priorities or a sense of where the university should be heading. If they do not, the institution can be in serious trouble. But the goals themselves should be formed, and recurrently tested, by presentations to and discussions with other internal constituencies. They should be open to modification on that basis, and they should certainly be receptive to valid initiatives proposed by other sectors. Good administration is an exercise in interactivity. This entails a lot of meetings, I admit, but it can also generate real and intelligent engagement as to where the institution should be heading.

The interactive style does not mean that fairly rapid change is impossible, another target of disrupters and external critics. We must also talk about important cases where major new decisions were made and implemented reasonably quickly and about how entrepreneurial flexibility is a vital academic attribute. Persuasion and interaction do not prevent significant redirections, but they help assure that the redirections will be appreciated and amplified by those involved.

Despairing advocates of academic change sometimes refer to the difficulty of turning a battleship on a dime. I claim that the image is misleading on two counts. First, we don't really want a full turn—whether the “we” here is faculty and administrations, or students and their families, or American society more generally. Second, the academic enterprise can set some new patterns pretty quickly, and there's real evidence of this in recent university experience.

But the ship will run better, and will adjust course more smoothly, if participants have more opportunity to discuss the priorities of current challenges and their intersection with established strengths. It will run better as well if this discussion refers to the real issues with which academic decision makers deal, from installing new academic programs or ending old ones to deciding the best size for various categories of faculty to assessing actual student progress. The goal is the kind of realistic presentation—the explicit discussion of how things work amid the cluster of current problems—that will inform some existing administrators and also the many people in training programs for higher education (many of whom already have relevant staff positions). I hope the result will also interest those faculty—like participants in faculty senates—whose contributions will be improved if they have access to fuller knowledge of what contemporary academic administration is all about. I don't despair of even serving some of the outside observers, from accreditation officials to members of governing boards, who again will function more effectively if they have a more grounded sense of current operations and current debates.

The focus is on academic systems and decisions themselves, but the discussion must also reference some wider factors in the higher education context. American universities operate in a really odd organizational structure in which federal decisions influence basic activities strongly, and may impinge even more in the future, but in which there is no real federal authority and relatively few opportunities for systematic policy discussion about higher education overall. This haphazard system may have real advantages—most academics believe, whether correctly or not, that more federal involvement would be detrimental—but it has real drawbacks, for the feds’ intrusions are not leavened by any overall responsibility. (Correspondingly, one of our future challenges in international higher education competition may involve our patchwork policy structure; or perhaps this will be a saving grace, as against the more rational but arguably more bureaucratic systems elsewhere.) Or take the unquestionably legitimate plea that our universities improve their performance on student retention and graduation rates—a key subject of the following chapter. I fully agree, but to discuss this obligation without some attention to P–12 operations would be folly. Part of our challenge—not most of it, as I will argue in closing this chapter—involves factors that impinge on us but operate beyond our full control.³

Blending Data and Experience

As it approaches current problems and future prospects, the book combines general information about higher education and university administration in the United States and (to a degree) their comparative context, with various case studies. It also builds directly on what I think I have learned from my own experience, or what I wish I had learned (I've also benefited from some postadministration months, which have admittedly allowed more time for reflection). The following chapters discuss educational goals and innovations where several recent studies have at least partially pointed the way, but they combine this with (I hope) a concrete sense of what universities, administrations and personnel are all about. It's the mix of basic responses with practical operations that is distinctive and, I believe, distinctively useful: where we should be heading combines practical considerations of how we might get there.

This is, of course, where the experience part comes in, so I'll provide a very brief word about that a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction Crisis and Opportunity
• 2 Universities on Trial
• 3 Essential Strengths From Defense to Offense?
• 4 Shared Governance
• 5 Academic Administration “Dark Side” or Positive Force; or Both?
• 6 The Faculty
• 7 Students and Their Services
• 8 Beyond The Campus Regional and Global Roles
• 9 Adding it up “The University of the 21st Century”
• Index