UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION: NURTURING VS MANAGING

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION: NURTURING VS MANAGING

I. Introduction

Harvard Emeritus Professor Henry Rosovsky wrote of university administrators, "They are facilitators -- servants of the faculty and students, ... . Their task is to implement educational policy set by the faculty ... and to make student learning more efficient." [UTL, p. 139] William Rainey Harper (Founding President of the University of Chicago) wrote, " To what definite thing can the college president point, and say -- this is my work? Does he not find his highest function in helping others do the things which he himself would like to do? ... It is his business to find ways and means by which others may be helped to do their work." [UTL, p. 111] Another University of Chicago President, Hanna Gray, described what she did as enabling, enabling people to meet their own highest standards in an environment at once supportive and demanding, and enabling institutions to reach, over the long term, toward their goals. [UTL, p. 114]
Many current college or university presidents, vice presidents, and deans apparently do not view their roles this way. They give very clear impressions that they view their role as leader, supervisor, policy-maker, public image maker, and visionary.
During my twenty-three years in university administration -- including ten as department chair and ten as arts and sciences dean -- I have worked with many administrators and observed many more. Some of these have been servants of the faculty and staff, or, nurturers. Others, and most of the more recent ones, have acted more like managers, business managers.
Managing has several meanings. One is handling or controlling, making and keeping submissive. A second is altering by manipulation. Yet, the manager has become a great American folk hero, often put forward as something to emulate. What I mean here is a combination of these -- controlling, altering, and manipulating toward some prescribed end.
On the other hand, nurturing is feeding, nourishing, supporting, furthering the development of -- causing to grow.
Basically, managers control and nurturers support. Nurturing is usually quietly done, much of the work invisible, and only over time are the effects realized.
Nurturing administration differs little from university teaching. As a teacher, I offer students the best opportunities I can to learn. I present them with information that I believe will be helpful to them. I aim toward getting them to believe that they can have original thoughts – that they need not simply learn what others have previously thought and done. I feed them with information, with motivation, and with encouragement. I see little difference with being a dean. As dean, I tried to build an environment in which faculty and students would be inspired to learn, providing them with resources to carry out their learning, and maintaining a system of motivation and encouragement. Part of the motivational system is the evaluation -- grades for students and performance evaluations of faculty. This is the least pleasant part of both activities.
Most of what I say applies more directly to academic administrators -- I know that some folks believe that to be an oxymoron. However, I believe that all administrators in a university should know the purpose of the university and respect that purpose by their actions. Namely, administration is to serve the academic units that deliver the instruction and produce the results of faculty learning --that is, research.
I will talk about what I see as changes and circumstances that have transformed the perceived role of university administrators from that of Presidents Harper and Gray to that we so often have today -- interrelated changes and circumstances in universities themselves, in their administrators, and in their faculties. (Students and society have changed too, but I’ll not address those changes here.) All these changes together are monumental and threaten to undermine the traditional and appropriate role of universities as seats of education, social and political criticism and innovations, and moral leadership.

II. Changes in Universities

The changes in universities are themselves monumental. All of the changes I will discuss are related to how universities are administered. Some of the changes have promoted the manager approach to administration while some of the changes have resulted from the manager approach.

• Costs have increased enormously, and budgets are complex and diffuse
The spiraling costs of operation are driven by costs of technology, big science, expensive public entertainment and outreach, scholarships, escalating administrator salaries, star researcher salaries, library costs, fundraising costs, big and expensive physical plants, and the constant expansion of programs and offerings.
A single scientific instrument can cost millions. Buildings to house modern research cost $200 - $300 or more per square foot. Athletic programs, often wholly aimed at public entertainment, demand annual budgets of tens of millions. Outreach has expanded far beyond the agricultural and mechanical missions of Land Grants. We now have business incubators, executive training institutes, continuing education of all sorts, art centers, museums, radio stations, television stations, weather services, and on and on.
Although at a much lower level, universities are following corporations, professional sports and entertainers with enormous increases in administrative salaries. In the past ten years University of Arkansas deans’ salaries have approximately doubled and chancellors and vice chancellors salaries have nearly tripled. The chancellor is paid six to seven times what many new PHD faculty members are paid; value to the institution has given way to markets and external business practices in the determination of salaries.
With every escalation of one administrative salary comes a wave of other increases. Star faculty research salaries have also escalated with new hires at Arkansas last year being paid near $150,000 annually. The quest for external research grants and high profile publications is proving very expensive.
Library costs seem to inflate annually at 10-20%. The costs of books and journals and the number of books and journals available (and hence, needed) have been spiraling for years. Library space needs are increasing by about 10% per year. That means that at least every decade one has todouble the size of the library building! Technology – electronic publication, internet access – promised to help, but so far, costs for electronic access to publications are very nearly the costs for ownership of hard copies of the publications. We cannot afford to build a complete research library on every research university campus; there has to be another solution.
Escalating costs and the lure of private gifts have driven universities to invest millions in fundraising operations, in an upward spiral fueled by more need because of larger investments, creating monsters to be fed. Whether these operations prove good investments will depend on many things. Certainly, the Harvards and Princetons have thrived for a couple of centuries on private endowments. However, the effects of increased influence of private dollars in public institutions will be different from that in the Harvards and Princetons. Private gifts are usually given with conditions, creating greater leverage than usually attached to public funds. Public funds will provide the infrastructure and supplement the targeted private funds, in many cases compromising the public’s investments and interests.
Development, i.e. fundraising, is the area which should be scrutinized by faculty. Gift numbers are often inflated. Gifts in kind are often really worth a small fraction of their reported value, and the cost of a development operation can run into the millions, eating up much of the income from the process. The real value of gifts -- the value to the mission of the institution as it is supposed to be, not what the private gifts will make it -- is what should be measured against costs.
Furthermore, the enabling and excusing statement that "this was paid for by private funds" should always be viewed with suspicion. More often than not such "private funds" are not really different from state funds -- except that, in Arkansas, for instance, they can be used to purchase alcoholic beverages and pay gratuities.
These escalating budgets are building an infrastructure that is very expensive to maintain. Many times I have heard Frank Broyles (Men’s Athletic Director at Arkansas) argue that if we do not fund some major expansion, then we will not be competitive and the program income will decline, creating a deficit to be paid. So it goes, to maintain competitive programs we have to spend more money, and if we do not spend the money our income will be reduced, fueling a never upward spiral of costs. That applies to big science as well as it does to big time athletics or big libraries or administrative and faculty salaries.
You seek grants -- big grants. You match with your funds. You pay star salaries for faculty who can attract competitive grants. If you do not, like Coach Broyles argues, income will not be sufficient to pay the bills. If you can’t keep up with the spiral, the whole thing may tumble down. Sustainable growth should be our watchword, and every escalation of costs in a university should be questioned on the basis of its sustainability and its relevance to the historical and real mission of the university.
Finally, course and program offerings are ever expanding, and almost every expansion has costs. Rarely do we discontinue academic programs. Rather we offer more. Professor Richard Chait of Harvard has used the expression "unweeded curriculum" to describe part of this. [UTL, p. 142]Stanford President Donald Kennedy has said, "Sunset is an hour that rarely arrives on college campuses." [UTL, p. 143]

• Increased influence of professional schools
Many university curricula, including those in business, engineering, architecture, social work, agriculture, law, medicine, and some parts of education, focus on particular employment opportunities for the graduates. In recent years, these professional curricula have become more popular, and this popularity has increased corporate influence on academic programs, because the corporations hold the rewards.
With most employment over a career now requiring adaptation and continuing education, stronger general education is needed. Some professional curricula have recognized this and are either requiring more general education courses or changing their professional courses to more general themes, leading to more duplication between professional curricula courses and general education courses. Corporations are publically stating that general education is more important, but they continue to hire mostly graduates of professional schools.

• Boards of trustees and the public favor the business manager approach
The public sees only successful businesses, not those that fail, so American business is viewed very favorably.
Most university governing board members have prospered in the business mode: many are corporate businessmen. For example, nine out often members of the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees are business persons, mostly corporate executives. There are no educators on the Board. This seems analogous to having nine out of ten educators on the board of Tysons.
One of the major responsibilities of a university is to be a societal critic, to seek new and better ways for society to operate. This role often conflicts with attitudes of members of governing boards, and even university presidents or chancellors, who have prospered greatly under the very arrangements that universities question. [UTL, pp. 67-68] These successful executives are more comfortable with the traditional socially conservative positions of corporations and businesses.

• Mission climb
All higher education institutions seem to want to change. One-year technical institutes want to become two-year colleges; two-year colleges want to become four-year colleges; four-year colleges want graduate programs; graduate institutions want to be come national research universities, and on and on up this ladder. Often ,faculties are hired into positions with a set of expectations for performance. Then the universities change and expectations on faculty performances become quite different.
Administrators are more often rewarded for changing and expanding the institutions than they are for sustaining them or even improving the quality of existing programs. Faculty often align themselves with the push for mission climb because most doctoral faculty want to teach and do research and there’s not much chance of folks in teaching institutions moving to research institutions, so they try to change their institution.
Examples of mission climb abound in Arkansas higher education over the past few decades. Several four-year institutions have added graduate programs with some adding doctoral degrees. Most of the technical institutes were "up-graded" to community college status. The Arkansas constitution prohibits two-year colleges from becoming four-year colleges, so Westark was deemed a "unique" community college and authorized to award three-year baccalaureate degrees. Several of the community colleges have dropped the word community from their names, and baccalaureate and graduate degree programs are being offered on two-year campuses under the (sometimes nearly transparent)auspices of four-year institutions.
Moving up costs money, especially the support of research. Research is at the core of graduate programs, and it costs money, money for stars and money for reduced teaching loads. Almost all new faculty candidates want to do research, and this should be encouraged to whatever extent it can be afforded. When one quits learning then it’s difficult to see how one can be inspiring to others to learn. John Slaughter (President of Occidental College) has said, "Research is to teaching as sin is to confession. If you don’t participate in the former, you have very little to say in the latter." [UTL, p. 11] The key is to match the kind and cost of faculty research to the institution’s mission and means.

• Enormous influence of private/corporate donors
Escalating costs have increased reliance on private and corporate gifts to universities. This has led to decreased political influence as public funds are taken for granted and the focus is on the marginal in come from private sources.
Consider what happened after the 1999 Arkansas General Assembly approved the higher education budget. Even though this was the best year in memory for some of the institutions, especially for the first year of the biennium, some university officials complained publically and derided the Legislature privately. At the same time, these complaining officials dare not offend any potential private donor to their institutions and strongly cater to big donors. Basically, such actions indicate that State funding is being assumed while advancement focuses on pleasing private and corporate donors who will provide far less, and at their pleasure.
External gifts and grants drive many university decisions, but faculty rarely feel the influence of private gifts on their work. Gifts more often than not underwrite new programs and do not apply to the core responsibilities of most faculty. But pleasing faculty has moved down the list of administrative priorities. Chancellors, presidents, and deans are increasingly dependent for survival on key corporate and philanthropical support; they consequently need less support from faculty, students, or alumni --- or apparently the legislatures.

• Competition among institutions -- for students, state support, and public favor.
Arkansas public higher education institutions spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually recruiting students, competing with each other. Also, they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying executives to lobby for more money and less regulation and to spin whatever happens at the institutions so they will look good. The state pays people to deceive it about its own agencies, either by hyping positives or playing down negatives, and further, state funds are used to support all sides in a competition for the same students. The rising costs of state-funded scholarships has been fueled by this competition, and the standards for awarding such scholarships have been uneven and erratic.

• Organizations are increasingly bureaucratic and disaggregated
The major reasons for increased bureaucracy and disaggregation are the vastly expanded central administrations and stronger external influences. With attention to external constituencies such as corporations, foundations, private donors, alumni, and federal agencies increasing, both administrative structures and budgets are increasingly fragmented and complex. The central administration’s care for the faculty, students, and instruction is now only a small fraction of its activity and interest.
Not many years ago, university presidents did their own correspondence. Harold Shapario relates in an essay that Harvard President Charles Eliot hired his first secretary, one Jerome Greene, in 1901, thirty years after assuming office. At that time, Harvard had approximately 150 faculty members and 2,000 students. [UTL, p. 81] Presidents of institution of such size today will have several assistants and secretaries.
The organizational expansions have taken place mostly at the college and university levels. Departmental offices have not expanded accordingly. Look at a typical departmental office twenty years ago and the way it was staffed. Now look today. Then do the same thing with the office of student services, development office, admissions office, external grants office, or university relations office. You’ll probably find the departmental offices just about the same but the latter ones greatly expanded. And you’ll find offices with large staffs in the central administration that were not there twenty years ago.
My own university has functioned like a loose confederation of a dozen independent units --the eight degree-granting colleges, continuing education, libraries, the central administration, and athletics -- whose spheres of activity occasionally or periodically overlap. The overlaps are often cooperations but are just as often conflicts and interferences. Most of the positive developments occur within the separate units with little help or even awareness from the other units. My own college had some of the same characteristics with a college dean’s office, twenty academic departments, and more than a dozen interdisciplinary programs and institutes. Keeping meaningful unity and purpose required constant vigilance from the dean’s office.

• Rise of strategic communication: spinning the messages
Expansion and changes in emphases in public information offices is undermining the integrity and purpose of universities. Down through the years, these offices have had various names -- public relations offices, university relations offices, and even esoteric (but scary when you think what it means) names like office of strategic communication. The University of Arkansas lists about twenty people in university relations and governmental and community relations. Compare this growth and size to that of the philosophy faculty and staff. Twenty people is more than philosophy, more than geology, more than geography, more than drama, more than political science, more than journalism, and on down the list.
The expansions of these offices is not the worst news, however. The worst is that these offices often act like political operations, controlling and spinning information about the institution and its administrators -- letting the public know what they want them to know.
The spinning can really get out of hand and reflect paranoia and contempt for the public’s right to know. Just this fall, the University of Arkansas withheld the fall enrollment numbers from the public for more than a week. After media pressure had mounted, University Relations spun the release of the numbers so that an increase of eighty or so international students made the headline -- a new surge toward internationalization -- when internationalization has been in the forefront of University goals for at least two decades. This "internationalization" headline was apparently pushed to partially conceal a significant drop in freshmen enrollment. How silly and contemptuous can we get.
Media articles about my own university often amaze me. The information therein is very often incorrect. Part of that comes from honest miscommunications on the part of the reporters and the institutional spokespersons and part from various biases of media outlets, but part of it is from spinning. Universities should hold the truth so dear that they tell the complete unadorned truth. But that is not what they do -- they are no more reliable than institutions which do not have the mission of finding and dispersing truth.

• Increased federal regulations
One of the major reasons for increased administrative duties in universities is the vast increases in regulations, state and federal. One account I read recently said there are approximately 7500 federal regulations directly applicable to universities. [UTL, p. 32] Many of these regulations apply to personnel actions. Almost any personnel action falls under one of the civil rights laws, ADA, or sexual harassment/hostile workplace scrutiny. Lest I be misunderstood, I do not quarrel with the intent of any of these broad regulations, but their application can really frustrate those who have to make personnel decisions as individuals and not under the umbrella of a committee.

• Accountability schemes replacing trust
When trust is strong, accountability processes can be weak. [UTL, p. 23] When trust is weak, accountability processes tend to be complex and extensive. Lack of trust creates tension and suspicion, and reduces real productivity. And, make no mistake about it, at the end of the day, even with detailed reporting schemes in place, we in higher education rely on trust for a quality end product. The relationships between teacher and student and between researcher and knowledge are inextricably tied to the inner motivations and integrity of the participants.
Reliance on accountability reporting is a major failing of managers in higher education. Nurturing rather than managing recognizes the fundamental and intrinsic need to trust faculty and students to produce good learning outcomes. Managers may survive, and even prosper for a time, by relying on reporting of available data but they are deceived if they believe they are learning the real story of how the institutions are functioning.

III. Changes in Administrators

Much of the following is critical of many present-day university administrators. Nonetheless, most university administrators I have known were well-intended and able. However, because of the way institutions are managed, many of the administrators’ best characteristics and some of their worst were never apparent to faculty and students, or the public.
For example, one chancellor I worked with was intensely interested in faculty and students and basically altruistically motivated, but many of his budgeting decisions were driven by what he saw as needs of a spreading charge -- to recruit more students in the face of rising admission standards, to respond to growing calls for accountability on the part of the university, and to raise private money. Whatever he believed about faculty salaries often took a back seat. I don’t think the faculty ever understood that, and I don’t remember it even getting much public discussion before the faculty proposed and passed five resolutions, basically faulting this chancellor for neglecting faculty salaries in favor of administrator salaries. The debate on these resolutions was badly informed, on both sides, in large part because information managers had controlled information, and that took a toll in this case. I believe full disclosure would have served the chancellor well, but full disclosure is too reckless for the strategic communicators. An expanded version of that information management machine remains in place at the university, but I am not at all sure full disclosure would serve the current administration well.

• From servants to managers
Very few university administrators give clear impressions that they are servants or facilitators as Professor Rosovsky says they should be. Rather, they convey the image of a manager or a supervisor, a leader. They make decisions based on data that are not measuring the outcome of the core mission of the university, that is, learning. Basically, they use secondary data because they are available and easier to use than more meaningful data. In short, managing is simpler than nurturing, or serving. Albert Einstein said, "Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Managing rather than nurturing, for a university academic administrator, is usually making things simpler than they are.
Management terms and data are usually more familiar to the public and to members of governing boards than are the terms describing the processes of learning. Consequently, administrators who use such terms are seen as effective.
Nurturing, supporting, facilitating, or serving are often invisible, certainly in the short-term views of both governing boards and university administrators. The effects of teaching play out over generations, not five-year terms as president or vice-president or dean. Martin Trow wrote that education is a process pretending to be an outcome. [UTL, p. 52] Those who have seriously attempted to assess educational outcomes understand what Trow means.

• From faculty members to CEOs
Not many years ago, university presidents and deans taught classes -- real classes, regularly. Nowadays, most line academic administrators do not teach, and, unbelievably, some have never taught.
Prior to becoming a department chair (which I was for a decade),I had taught for thirteen years as a professorial faculty member and for four years as a graduate assistant. As department chair I taught at least one course each semester. When I was dean, I taught occasionally, but found it was basically unfair to the students -- I was much too inaccessible to them because of the bureaucracy around me and the demands on my time and attention. As dean, however, I required that department chairs and program directors teach. Teaching in a university keeps one aware of the core issues and how administrative decisions affect those issues.
University Presidents were once very much members of faculties. Harvard President Charles Eliot (1869-1909 as President) was a member of every faculty and presided over the faculty meetings -- forty-five in one year. In Eliot’s time, university presidents were also intimately involved in the essence of university operations, such as purchasing supplies and approving curriculum changes. [UTL, p. 83]
University administration close to faculties differs greatly from those far removed from faculties. Department chairs/heads are very close to departmental faculties and deans are close to college faculties(or should be). However, vice chancellors and chancellors are removed from faculty influence. The extreme is noted in many university systems whose offices and duties are separated geographically and intellectually from both students and faculties. Administrative decisions subject to faculty review, public debate, and rejection are usually more carefully considered than those sheltered from faculty view.
• From long-term views to short-term views
The tenures of university administrators are now usually much shorter than Charles Eliot’s forty years as Harvard’s president. The shorter tenures stem partly from the demands of the positions, but largely from university administrators climbing the ladder to loftier positions and the competition to land these high-paying and prestigious posts. Many administrators begin positioning themselves for their next appointment immediately on gaining a new one. Terms in positions are often four or five years or less. Further, appointments of new presidents or chancellors are often followed by multiple changes in vice presidents and deans so that the new chief executive can have his or her own team to implement a new agenda. The effect of this is to destabilize the university and to have it change in fits and starts. And the weaker the institution and it’s commitment to a core historical mission, the more dramatic are these destabilizations.
The employment market for university administrators has become a national industry with numerous so-specialized executive search firms. My experience with searches handled by search firms has made me very uneasy --uneasy about thoroughness, fairness, and even legality with respect to public freedom of information laws and affirmative action compliance. Screening and search committees can be managed by search firms to the point that the decision on whom to hire is no longer with the committee. Thus faculty prerogatives are co-opted by others.
Some very wise person (unknown to me) said, "No one should tamper with a university who does not know and love it well." [UTL, p. 14] Even though most people who know and love a university would agree with this, transient administrators are often hired and given rather free hands to tamper. Rarely does such tampering result in long-term positive changes in the institutions.

• From moral leaders to amoral businesspersons
One of the major responsibilities of university leaders -- whether presidents or deans -- should be to provide moral leadership. The way this is done has changed over the decades. The 19th century university president would teach a capstone course in moral philosophy or deliver daily sermons or counsel (even pray with) individual students and faculty. In today’s more liberated and less restricted society, it is no longer these leaders responsibility to teach "right thinking." Rather, it is "to act as an example of personal integrity -- accepting both the rights and responsibilities of academic life -- and to protect and project the academic vision of the modern university and the intellectual culture contained therein."[UTL, p. 93]
Personal integrity is the key to moral leadership in a modern university. Personal integrity requires an "open commitment to a set of academic and social values, forthrightness, discernment, steadfastness in pursuit of a vision, fierceness in the defense of cultural conditions(such as thoughtful debate and reasoned inquiry) required for scholarship and education, compassion, and a capacity to compromise when that is what is required to move a community forward." [UTL, p. 93] And, of course, to be honest -- never deceive and even avoid the possible perception of deceit.
Unfortunately, many current university administrators are not good models of personal integrity, and many universities are not good models of institutional integrity. With emphasis on measurable out comes rather than effective educational processes, the need to be moral leaders is less apparent.
Let me return for a moment to Harvard President Charles Eliot. Though a non-cleric, Eliot was nonetheless a strong moral leader. When two students were caught stealing library books and, when caught, lied about their names, Eliot immediately suspended them. As it happened both were to have rowed in the upcoming Harvard-Yale crew regatta. Even President Teddy Roosevelt (a Harvard alumnus) urged Eliot to let the students row. Eliot’s terse reply was that students who impugned their own characters and that of Harvard would certainly not represent the school. [UTL, p. 79] (Compare with our current view of such situations!!!)
Eliot also had views of fund-raising different from those of today. He believed that the president (of Harvard) should not engage in solicitation of gifts for the university. Rather, financial support could be attracted by institutional integrity and providing information to the educated public. [UTL, p. 85] How naive!

• From focussed historical missions to mixed messages and mission shifts
In recent years, many university administrators have viewed developing mission statements or lists of goals as a major facet of leadership. I call this "mission-of-the-week" or "mission-of-the-moment." This week our top priority is teaching, next week it will be research. Then it will be diversity. Some days we will want to increase enrollment, then restrict it -- opportunity for all versus selective admissions. One week we push science and technology, then arts and humanities. On some days and in some forums, our goal is to become a national research university, then it’s to serve the state in outreach. None of these goals is inherently bad, but how they interact deserves serious attention, and the casualness with which they are bandied about both detracts from their importance and confuses faculty, students, and the public. Over the past two years, several different lists of goals and missions have been presented at my university, some with as little thought or consensus as conversations among a few administrators. We should at this point repeat the axiom: "No one should tamper with a university who does not know and love it well."
Mission-of-the-week is a response to two perceived needs of many administrators; one is to appear to be a leader and the other is to find goals or missions that can be achieved, at least in part, in a time frame which fits the selfish ambitions of the administrator.
Those administrators who know and love an institution will respect the historical and well known mission. Further, effective university administrators must not only assert a vision but must also have the energy to pursue this vision and inspire others to do likewise. Anyone can assert glorious visions -- not many can inspire others to work toward realization of those visions.

• From intimates of core university to allegiance to external constituencies
Because of the attention to external constituencies and their remoteness from faculty and students, many administrators are ignorant of the core university, its mission and its function. Their rhetoric still indicates connections, but their actions belie their words. Consequently, they are unable to appropriately evaluate outcomes, develop quality, and provide real academic leadership. Instead they substitute inflated rhetoric about missions and goals and rely on management techniques to maintain control.

IIIA. Why Universities are not Businesses

• Business outcomes are easy - profits. University out comes are complex and difficult to determine and evaluate.
The difficulty of evaluating learning outcomes was addressed briefly above in contrasting managers with nurturers. As I said there, the full effect of teaching in a university plays out over decades and full lives of the students. Therefore, measuring the quality of a university’s work is impossible in the time frame normally used in management evaluation. As Martin Trow noted, education is a process pretending to bean outcome.
Collegiate faculty are expected to be self-motivated. The quality of teaching and research ensues from faculty norms and values, their own competitive situations, their internal motivations and standards; therefore, faculty are not easily managed on the edges.
Teaching, mentoring, and outreach are difficult to evaluate. Even faculty are reluctant to judge their colleagues’ performance in these areas; only the research products receive close scrutiny. We are often very free with our criticism and severe judgement on research product-- but much less confident to do the same in other areas of faculty performance. Yet, the evaluation of research, usually done according to discipline standards, often has little to do with its value to the core mission of the university, and as disciplines become more fragmented and disciplinary lines more blurred, the discipline standards are less applicable.
The managers as university administrators tend to measure success by data that are available -- like number of students, annual private gifts, annual grants and contracts, SSCH production, number of degrees, ACT/SAT and GPAs of entering students, and so on. These are surely symptoms of the health of an institution, but they are really on the margin when real outcomes are considered.
The quality of an academic community is almost wholly determined by attractiveness of institution to best faculty candidates and care and rigor of appointments and recommendations for promotion and tenure. My goal as department chair and dean was to select folks who have a passion to do what you want done and get out of their way; demonstrate trust and confidence, depend on individual responsibility, because at the end of the day you must.

• Businesses can and do fail, by hundreds. Universities can not be allowed to fail.
I can recall once when a university administrator said that he wanted to run the university like a business, some wag had the gall to ask which business, and suggested Eastern Airlines and Chrysler. At that time both companies were deep in the throes of bankruptcy. For every successful business and wealthy owner, there are dozens of failures. Universities cannot be allowed to fail in this way. Alumni and students depend on universities’ continuing existence and reputation.
Ultimately, if you do not measure success in economic terms, then you cannot use economic priorities to determine your course.

• Businesses are -- at best -- amoral. Universities must be moral leaders.
American corporations and other businesses have in general been benevolent only when either forced by regulation or by unions. Businesses are intrinsically amoral and are often immoral in the singular quest for profits.
Universities should be moral leaders, one of their major historical roles. In particular, university leaders - faculty or administrators - should be moral leaders.
When universities act like businesses, for example in spinning and controlling information, they are not moral leaders; in fact, they become immoral. When faculty behave irresponsibly or unprofessionally, they are not moral leaders.

• Businesses sell things -- soap powder, lawn mowers, or automobiles. Universities "hand the immortal stuff of learning on." [UTL, p. 77, quoting Woodrow Wilson]
How often have I heard a student complaint contain the phrase, "I am a paying customer." Paying is not at all the issue. One does not easily purchase the kind of intimate commitment necessary for teacher and student to learn together. One earns that commitment with a commitment of one’s own to meet the age-old standards of knowledge and behavior.
The paying-for-products analogy with educational, professional or spiritual services is far from perfect. Some students pay a lot; others pay little or nothing. The State of Arkansas pays for approximately 2/3 of the costs at my institution. Although rich people can purchase superior medical care and legal advice, the codes of conduct for attorneys and physicians say that the doctor or lawyer will do everything in his/her power to serve their clients equally regardless of their ability to pay. No seller of soap or clothes has this same moral obligation. And, then consider priests and their communicants -- commercial considerations are largely absent. The tie between teacher and student should resemble these -- doctor/patient, attorney/client, and priest/parishioner -- and not storekeeper/customer. [UTL, pp. 151-152]Every student should be served with equal fervor, regardless of how much they pay. In the words of Woodrow Wilson, "The teacher’s own spirit must, with intimate understanding and touch, mold and fashion the spirit of the pupil; there is no other way to hand the immortal stuff of learning on."

• Businesses are not societal critics. Universities must(should) be.
"It is the fundamental responsibility of the university to question society’s current structures and to construct, entertain, and test alternative visions -- new ways to understand the natural world, to organize society’s institutions, and to rethink its fundamental values." [UTL, p.68, quoting Harold Shapiro]
Even when a business is inclined to criticize society and push for change, the views are severely compromised by the avowed commitment to profits.

Interlude

IIIB. Distance Education -- A Business Alternative but not an Educational Alternative

(Professor York asked me to comment on the potential of distance learning and its effect on higher education in Arkansas.)

Let me first say that I have not had much direct experience with distance education, but, in the tradition of experienced university administrators, that will not keep me from having strong opinions about its effectiveness and its future.
I believe that interactive communication by electronic and photonic media will greatly supplement – but not supplant -- face-to-face teaching when face-to-face teaching is available. Persons should be educated in an environment closely approximating the environment in which they will work and play. As long as we work or socialize face-to-face, then that is how we should learn.
So far, distance delivery of instruction has been expensive in money, time, and energy. Eventually, the costs should decrease, and the facilities improve. On the other hand, residential campuses are expensive, so we had better be able to show their worth if we expect them to persist. We have never had to justify the worth of these campuses, so we have not thought much about the benefits of residential socialization, of how students and faculty learn from one another, or of how students learn responsibility in the campus setting.
If delivery of instruction is to individual homes as it is likely to be, then basically a student would be isolated. I visualize this as learning in a closet, and learning in a closet doesn’t appeal to me. I suspect the results will be very different from what we now know.
Distance learning should help where students are place-bound; that seems to be the major advantage and says that the internet should be the delivery mechanism, not interactive communication lines between conference facilities which will still require gathering of students and teachers together.
To whatever extent distance learning works independently of face-to-face learning, namely if it replaces face-to-face teaching and is profitable, then I suggest it will be dominated by large institutional delivery systems. Most Arkansas institutions will not be able to compete. Consequently, if higher education is delivered by internet exclusively, then we may not have any higher education institutions in Arkansas.
Woodrow Wilson, noted Princeton University President and teacher with a stellar reputation, said it very well in the context of another era: "No system of teaching which depends upon methods and not persons, or which imagines the possibility of any substitution of the written word for the living person, can work any but mechanical effects. The teacher’s own spirit must, with intimate and understanding touch, mold and fashion the spirit of the pupil; there is no other way to hand the immortal stuff of learning on." [UTL, p. 77]
"Harold Shapiro, President of Princeton University has commented, in thinking ahead to the Princeton of the future, that the residential community of students and scholars will persist at Princeton. Its special collegiality cannot be replaced by virtual communities of Princetonians meeting on the Internet. We need the stimulus of face-to-face communication and shoulder-to-shoulder cooperation on our own campuses, not just the temporary, often anonymous, and usually disengaged communities of cyberspace. It is in the rough and tumble day-to-day living and daily, direct conversation that faculty members and students can best carry out the work that research universities were invented to do."[UTL, p. 13]
Universities were invented because medieval monks believed that scholarship could flourish better in community than in the isolation of monastic cells. [UTL, p. 12] The modern day version of a monastic cell is being alone with a computer screen. Implementation of distance learning -- learning in a closet -- would bring us full circle a millennium later.

IV. Changes in Faculties

While universities and their administrators have changed, so have faculty.
Basically faculty influence in colleges and universities has weakened to almost zero, not because of policy but because of practice. Faculty powers have simply been co-opted by others or let lie fallow.

• Faculty governances have weakened
During my tenure at the University of Arkansas, now twenty years, the faculty has been virtually invisible in guiding the University. (At a recent forum, a faculty leader who has been here thirty years listed only three significant faculty actions in his memory.) The faculty did develop and vote to implement some admission standards, but when push came to shove on admission standards, the Board of Trustees exerted itself and made it clear that it would have the final say. The issue was the admission of athletes. I heard two members of that Board then state in no uncertain terms that no faculty or faculty committee was going to have control over the admission of athletes. That was one of the most depressing discussions I have experienced in more than 30 years at universities.
The key to substantial influence is the budget. And good information about budgets is very difficult to obtain -- partly because they are so large, so complex, and disaggregated among private and public funds of various types.
Earlier I referred to the one bold action taken by the faculty during these twenty years, five resolutions directed at the way the chancellor was allocating money. Basically, the resolutions said that too much money was going to administration and too little to faculty salaries and that this had to be reversed. As I said earlier, the debate over these resolutions was uninformed and the outcome was unfair to the chancellor, but the mistakes have to be shared by an uninformed faculty and a less-than-open central administration.
Now, a few years later, the campus has a chancellor who is spending wildly on administrative salaries and the resolutions are gathering dust. This same chancellor scoffed at the invitation to an introductory meeting with the local AAUP Chapter.
Only on a few occasions have I heard faculty seriously engaged in public discussions and debate about curricular issues. Even in that sacred responsibility as trustee of the curriculum, the faculty as a whole has been inactive. Faculty have become employees rather than owners.
The loss of faculty power stems from disinterest rather than inherent impotency. Disinterest among the faculty and lack of knowledge by the faculty has led to impotency. The nature of administrative issues are alien to core faculty interests and as administrations become more management oriented and more externally directed, the alienation increases. Faculty are busy with other pursuits, ones they consider more important. Faculty do resent -- as they should -- the relative high rewards administrators receive for their work -- in salary, community status, staff support, and other perks.
Faculty are ignorant of institutional organization and operations-- and that usually suits the managing administration. This is the flipside of administrators being ignorant of core university functions and purpose. As the administration – and there is such an entity -- moves away from the faculty and student activities, faculty know less about how the administration operates, and that administration determines the organization and administrative policies. This mutual ignorance allows administrations to be free of faculty influence and faculty to ignore the university operations until they interfere with their own activities.
• Faculty have become extremely fragmented [UTL, p. 173-196]
The fragmentation is by type of institution, by rank, by discipline, and by duties. Even within disciplines, faculty are further fragmented by research specializations that have become increasingly narrow and esoteric. Clark Kerr, former president of UC Berkeley has said that a research university is "a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking."
Basically, each academic discipline, especially in the arts and sciences, is a separate profession which trains its own members and judges them with its own standards. Deans of colleges of arts and sciences become very aware of these different standards and depend on them for rigorous evaluation of faculty research. However, the disciplines themselves are becoming more fragmented with more faculty members having no clear academic home department. Interdisciplinary research and teaching are growing, and, with that growth, disciplinary standards for evaluation apply less well and the burden falls more heavily on institutional means.
Because of these fragmentations, faculty interests, cultures, and loyalties vary extensively, even within a single institution and within a single academic department. Faculty loyalties are partitioned among their research groups, their disciplines, departments, colleges, and institution. Often the loyalty to the institution is at the bottom of the list. This makes addressing faculty issues above the department level more difficult. For example, the lack of coherence in undergraduate curricula and weak core curricula follow directly from these circumstances.
Some institutions have eliminated academic departments in the interest of promoting better communication and cooperation among faculty members. In my experience, much of the current strength in standards for evaluation and behavior lie in the departments, and erasing those units will further aggravate existing problems.
This fragmentation raises the question, is there an academic profession? Professions are normally defined by internal values, occupational practices, structures, working conditions and public perceptions. It’s difficult to see that there is one academic profession -- there may be several.

• There are no standards for behavior for faculty [UTL, p.120-156]
There are no widely accepted codes of professional conduct – or professorial conduct -- for most of us, certainly not like those for physicians or attorneys. And we resist such codes. The times my arts and sciences faculty at Arkansas resisted most were those times when they were being asked to adopt policies or guidelines on their own behavior. Many argued that such regulation was unnecessary since faculty would do the right thing and shouldn’t be told how to behave.
We have a profession -- if there is one -- that almost anyone can join. No special training is needed, just some knowledge of one of our many, many disciplines.

• Decline in mentoring -- de-emphasis on education of teachers[UTL, p. 121]
Partly because of the ever-spreading missions of universities, the education of teachers has become less important in these missions. Further, the low pay and declining status of elementary and secondary teachers has made teacher education programs less attractive. To a certain extent, the education of collegiate and university faculty members has also been de-emphasized. Largely, education of collegiate faculty has been vested in the disciplinary research enterprise. Basically, if one receives a research-based doctoral degree, then one is qualified for a university faculty position. Mentoring of prospective teachers by their teachers is minimal, and the curricula for pre-college teachers are often weak in subject matter while the curricula for college teachers is totally subject matter, culminating with a major capstone project in research.

• Irresponsible and unprofessional actions by faculty members
Academia has more than its share of people who do not feel the need to pursue the truth because they already have it -- they simply need to impose their beliefs on others.
Faculty often misunderstand their roles and responsibilities, and have little understanding of the ideas and values which set our profession apart, such as academic freedom. We certainly have more freedom than many professions; I often wonder if it serve us well. Many times we confuse our rights with mistakes. Often in cases of student and faculty conflict I have heard faculty members defend their position by asserting their right to set standards of behavior in the classroom. More often than not the conflict is not based on a faculty member’s right to set the standards but the way in which they were implemented .Shoddy implementation is not protected by academic freedom.
V. What can be done?

• Reclaim the curriculum -- give it some coherence and focus --educate for a lifetime of learning instead of a lifetime in a particular occupation.

• Reclaim trusteeship of standards - standards for admission, for exit, and for behavior.

• Rekindle the campus community and exploit its advantages. Revitalize the internal forces which focus efforts and responsibility where it belongs, on learning.

• Reinforce and enforce institutional priorities -- resist the mission-of-the-week and shortsighted transient administrator with an agenda for his/her own advancement -- tell those transients what the mission of the institution is rather than let him or her tell you. Insist that no one tamper with the university who does not know and love it well.

• Anticipate societal needs and position the university to address those -- concentrate on the great issues: economic prosperity and fairness, environment, health, and justice rather than on budgets and increasing resources. Revitalize the role of the university as societal critic; let us look for a better society, a higher quality of life for all.

• Reassert moral leadership as a major part of the mission oft he university. Re-establish the university as a place of integrity, including honesty, openness, and fairness.

• Establish some codes of conduct and behavior for faculty. Without this we have little defense against the reactions to irresponsible and unprofessional actions by one of us. And we will all be tarred with the same brush.

• Re-invigorate the education of teachers and professors. Renewal of our own profession should be a high priority. Erase some of the lines that divide us and emphasize the issues and missions that unite us: passing the immortal stuff of learning on.

• Stop building dinosaurs -- stadiums and arenas? big science research labs? teleconference centers? computing centers? general access computing labs? libraries? Question all large budgetary commitments.
Universities have embraced computers and their power in computation, visualization and communication in various ways. In almost every way, however, costs have increased. We continue to build computing centers although we say that computing will be distributed and networked. We continue to build libraries although we say that electronic publication will become the norm. We continue to build arenas and stadiums although we say entertainment will be delivered to every home inexpensively. We continue to build large and expensive science laboratories although we say that the internet will make some big science into small and inexpensive science. We build teleconference centers although we say that electronic communication will be from desk to desk or home to home. We continue to build rooms full of computers even though we say that every student and every faculty member will have their own personal computer. We continue to build residential campuses and classrooms although we say that our courses and curricula will be effectively delivered to every desk and every home. We seem not to be able to anticipate or decide, so we build for all eventualities. We need to be smarter.

• Insist on sustainable growth, and growth within the institutional mission.

• Be vigilant -- watch for charlatans and scoundrels, because they are out there, some seeking to be faculty, and some seeking to be university presidents, chancellors, or deans.