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Week 1: Introduction to the Course---The University
This course is about how universities work with a special emphasis on the management of research institutions. The management of universities is a technique, not an end in itself. Academics use a collection of tools and processes as they implement the values and achieve the objectives of their institutions. Universities, like all organizations, must have management. These are not random collections of people operating without system or organization. Institutional managers have many options. They can do things on the spur of the moment or manage through rigid inflexible hierarchies. They can respond to external pressures or internal politics. They can mange-by-objective or manage with zero-based-budgeting. They can do value-based-management. They can follow systems of Total-Quality-Management or Continuous-Quality-Improvement. They can implement participatory or autocratic, bottom-up or top-down management. Whatever the name, all universities do management. The more complicated the academic enterprise the more management it requires. While many observers of higher education complain about administration (another word for management) everyone wants the right classes offered on time, bills paid, federal and state regulations adhered to, student health and welfare watched, safety assured, and buildings and grounds maintained. All of this and much more is done by management or administration. Often the university needs people with special skills to manage safety, deal with plant and construction, recruit and retain students, and perform other specialized tasks. When these are done well, the university runs smoothly, but when they are performed poorly, the university, its students, faculty, and staff, are left to struggle with endless problems that divert time, effort, and money from the main business of effective teaching and research. There is a balance in university operations between too much and not enough administration, and part of the art of managing universities is to operate with minimal expense and maximal effect. Management is essential to the success of any organization, and many experts give advice. Real and virtual bookstores carry endless titles of how-to publications on management theory and practice. They offer different sequences of magic steps guaranteed to produce business success, and often coin a catchy phrase to capture the essential meaning of their management prescriptions. Frequently, these books reflect the achievements of particular business people who attribute their success to the special principles outlined in their book (and by inference to the brilliance and wisdom of the business people authoring the book). If read carefully, and everyone should read some of these, most management books focus on the obvious. They identify some simple principles and present them in effective ways. The core principles are:
Everything else elaborates on these themes. Much of what appears in management books is style rather than substance. Some talk about managing-by-walking around or managing-by-example. All of this is style that reflects primarily methods of communication. While style is surely interesting and useful, it does not replace the substance of management. Popular books on management usually charm the reader with a skillful breezy style, but often they make no allowance for the complexities of organizations and the widely varying characteristics and circumstances of different enterprises. Everything that a management guru recommends will work somewhere in some business under some circumstances. Many such books have interesting insights, but most offer buzz words that often fail to clarify the specific challenges of real organizations. Indeed, if a science of management existed, we would need only a few books to explain it. The proliferation of how-to-succeed-in-management books reassures us that management is a practical art, not an experimental science. Those who observe and study academic management in similar organizations over time discover that successful managers (deans, department chairs, program directors, vice presidents, provosts, and presidents/chancellors, for example) employ highly diverse styles and techniques and nonetheless achieve great success. Others with identical styles using similar techniques achieve much less. Style and technique are not the core issues of management. They have their purposes and uses, but they do not replace the substance of management, nor do they replace the essential component of fortunate circumstances or plain, simple good luck. We too have our core principles that define successful academic management:
Money Matters because every academic institution requires money to survive and prosper. It is possible to have a lot of money, but still perform badly, but it is not possible to be a financially poor institution and compete in the marketplace against much better funded colleges and universities. Money determines the range and depth of activities, it determines how much an institution can spend on generating quality in addition to doing the basic work of teaching. As is true for every other enterprise, public or private, for-profit or non-profit, money allows the institution to fulfill its mission. In research universities, money is particularly important because research is essentially a money losing proposition. Even when we have a large grant to do some project, the grant almost never covers the full cost of doing the project. The university will need to subsidize some portion of the true costs. The more money we can generate that is not required for some other purpose, the more research grants we can acquire and subsidize, and the more competitive our institution will be. Similarly, in almost all colleges, basic instruction costs more than tuition and fees (minus institutional aid) generate. State appropriations, endowment income, federal and state financial aid, and other funds subsidize undergraduate and some graduate education as well as provide the extra funding required for high quality student experiences, both academic and extra curricular. If the university has extra money beyond what it needs to provide core instruction and student services, it can spend the money on smaller classes, honors programs, special teaching materials, equipment or facilities, student activities, and many other amenities that make student life attractive, including intercollegiate sports. Money matters, and the more money a college or university has, above what it costs to operate the core teaching mission, the more competitive it will be in the marketplace. Performance Counts because the competition among colleges and universities is driven by the work of the best students, faculty, and staff. High performing institutions whose students and faculty work at the top level in their fields are also the most prestigious and the most successful in continuing to attract the best students and faculty. Performance counts as well because when every element of the institution operates at top levels of effectiveness the institution will achieve much more with the money available than if the performance of its people is sub-par. This means the physical plant people and the admission officers, the development and fundraising professionals, and the student services staff must all perform at the top levels characteristic of others in their fields. Faculty must teach, research, publish, and seek grants at levels of performance that at least match their competition. Performance is contagious. When the university is focused on measurable competitive performance, everyone tends to participate. If the faculty perform at top levels, so too will the students. If the buildings and grounds are maintained at top levels, admissions and retention officers will find it easier to compete for the best students. The marketplace provides the reference point for measuring performance. When we identify a high quality university, it is the performance of its people that defines the quality. Time is the Enemy because every minute our people do not apply for a grant, recruit a student, repair a classroom, or do some other critical job, our competitor institutions are applying for the grant, recruiting the student, or repairing their classroom. Universities live in a competitive marketplace, and time is the enemy because university organization and culture tolerate complacency and delay. Universities are among the world's most enduring and stable institutions with long lives. They are rarely at risk of elimination or total failure unless they are private, poor, and very small. University people can have a false sense of stability believing that this longevity is a guarantee of future performance. It is not. Every university wants to have what better universities have. The only way to get what some other institution has is to compete for it. We want better students, but everyone wants better students and the number of better students is limited. If we fail to recruit a good student today some other institution will have recruited that student and our moment to win is lost. If we do not apply for a grant today, someone else will get the grant, and the moment to win is lost. If we do not visit our alumni and friends and ask for a gift today, the moment to gain support for our ambitions is lost. Time is the Enemy. To compete effectively we need to understand something about our university world, how it developed and how it functions. Research universities are a small part of the higher education industry and their importance has changed within this industry significantly over the years. Many have written thoughtfully (and some not so thoughtfully) about the purpose and values of a university and a university education. Although the history of higher education is a complex subject, our interest here is somewhat less grand. We focus on the American university and within that context, on the current incarnation of a particular type of university, the American research university. Nonetheless, the evolution of the American university since its earliest days, in both public and private forms, set patterns that even today, many generations later, govern how we think about these institution. In America, even more than in other parts of the world, the college or university has always had a utilitarian pragmatic value at its core. While the purpose of education for the sake of enlightenment and wisdom is surely embedded in the structure and content of colleges and universities, in America from the beginning, universities trained men and later women for specific functional and productive roles in society. Whether as ministers or farmers, engineers or doctors, teachers or scientists, American colleges and universities justified their existence primarily on their ability to deliver value to individuals and meet society's needs for competent professionals. Whether expert in preaching or mining or business, the graduates of these institutions were expected to take leadership roles and add value to society. From the beginning, colleges and universities had an elitist cast, serving to replicate the existing elite and fulfill elite roles. With the emergence of large public university enterprises and especially the emergence of the public land-grant institutions in the second half of the 19th century, the American higher education industry became even more utilitarian and more focused on ordinary people. The land-grant institution grafted an emphasis on practical knowledge for agriculture and engineering onto the standard college curriculum designed to produce leaders well versed in the cultural, intellectual, and political traditions of America and Western Europe. This notion found resonance with the dramatically expanding American economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With the post-WWII boom in enrollment, American higher education became the essential industry for the creation of a prosperous middle class and the sustained replication of the leaders of business, industry, government, and the arts. In the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the American higher education industry became increasingly complex, with sub-categories of institutions pursuing substantially different missions, with distinct curricula, faculty, and students. This complexity resulted in a substantial confusion among observers of higher education as they attempted to sort out what a college education might mean and how anyone could determine which among many higher education providers offered the best value. We will explore many of these themes throughout this conversation about research universities, for of course the research university is a special case. Yet even when we look across the higher education domain that includes community colleges, private for-profit colleges, state and regional comprehensive institutions, private liberal arts colleges, sectarian colleges, state sponsored and private research universities, and online virtual institutions, we find that all share some parts of the same set of educational values. Their missions overlap as does the rhetoric for describing their value. While no one would confuse a small community college in New England with a major private research university in California, the overlap in declared values and purpose is remarkable. This leads to some considerable confusion as we attempt to analyze performance and evaluate the roles of these colleges and universities. Among the conflicting notions that our society holds about colleges and universities these two highlight the significant challenges of managing universities.:
The conversation about these two notions constitutes a fundamental value conflict that has and will continue to engage managers of American higher education. If academics want to know the business and know the customers, they must come to some understanding of these conflicting traditions in American higher education and reconcile them for themselves and their institutions. In class and on-line, we engage these issues, even though we may not resolve them. The following can serve as starting points for the discussion.
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