What's It All About? : Part 1

They are all about the students. Universities, that is.

On days when complaints outnumbered oxygen molecules, an administrative associate dean I worked with loved to draw the following reverse organizational pyramid.

Students, the most important population, is at the top

followed by the faculty (tenured & non-tenured);

researchers and postdoctoral fellows;

members of the staff;

administrators; &

the dean.

In fact, he said he used this party trick primarily on the dean---a way to remind him about what truly mattered when internal politics led to boiling over bouts of anger and frustration. If the end goal was not going to support the top level of the pyramid, then he needed to rethink things.

A lot of scholars of academia (a celebration of meta-knowledge to the extreme: academics who study the academy) dislike that diagram and the kind of thinking it suggests. They say it frames the students-as-consumers model, promotes illicit (or at least, unwise) industry-academic partnerships, or worse, celebrates the for-profit model for higher education. (Oh horrors!)

An academic spire as seen through a corporate window.

I am going to focus a bit on the industry-academic partnerships and the notion of the student-first mentality (in a roundabout way, of course). The for-profit model for education (which even fair Harvard benefits from) will be saved for another day.

In the early 2000's, Harvard's former president Derek Bok wrote a slim book called Universities in the Marketplace decrying the increasing commercialization of celebrated institutions like those in the Ivy League.

Bok---a truly lovely and humble person whom I had the pleasure of interviewing several years ago---decried the cozying up to corporations and the virtual professionalization of college sports as the bellwethers of doom. Put simply, he wrote:

Was everything in the university for sale if the price was right?

Bok's warnings were sincere and prescient. (Think of the recent Ohio State football scandal or the ever tenuous relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical companies---yes, right here at good old Harvard.)

"Old Kenyon," 1998, colored pencil, Andrew Woodward.

That said, his book struck me as nostalgic, a desire to return to the days when universities were more like the Magic Mountain than markers of cultural currency (something I wrote about in my prior blog posting).

After all, letting the outside world in transformed universities for the better. More women. More diversity. More financial aid. More connections across the globe. And well, made institutions of higher learning more relevant.  

(As an aside, the ongoing tension of how much of the outside world to let slide into the ivy gates is an old chestnut of a story. One never seems surprised to learn that famed Harvard President Charles William Eliot tried to unload the institution's engineering programs (including giving the entire thing, lock, stock, and barrel, to MIT) no less than six times because he felt that professional education of the practical kind had no place in a bastion of liberal, rarefied thinking. Meaning, places like Harvard were not meant to dirty themselves with the vagaries of the real world.) He lost that battle thanks to a thoughtful donor (Gordon McKay) and the wisdom of the Massachusetts courts.)

At engineering schools like SEAS---even one based in a long tradition of applied science---the need to engage with the outside world has long been paramount.

Case in point, the Mark I, the first large-scale electromechanical computer was developed by IBM and Harvard---and a lot of financial support from Uncle Sam. That innovation took place more than 50 years ago. In fact, I just learned from our dean that Harvard received the first federal research grant in the U.S. to support radar work in Cruft Hall.

The Harvard-IBM Mark I in action.

By contrast, in the 1970s when An Wang was a student at Harvard he created magnetic core memory. This form of memory helped to build modern computation. As for what happened next, Wikipedia truly delivers a stinger:

Wang and Woo were working at Harvard University's Computation Laboratory at the time but, unlike MIT, Harvard was not interested in promoting inventions created in their labs. Instead Wang was able to patent the system on his own.

Imagine the worth of Harvard's endowment today if the University would have bothered with things like intellectual property. Then again, it is not so much the potential profits as it is the cavalier attitude that is truly damning.

The sturm-und-drang of industry-academic relationships is worth several blog postings---well, probably a full book. So, instead, I will simply say that collaboration with industry, as well as a focus on the kinds of things that companies do (profit, products, marketing) has long been a source of contention in the ivory tower.

Many believe that it is a slippery slope that could lead to the end of the modern academy as we know it. iPads and Google are already upending (or at least, annoying) the marbled gatekeepers of knowledge.

Others (like me!) believe institution-to-institution handshaking is an exciting, fluid, ever-evolving enterprise that offers a lot of fantastic potential (and can be free of pitfalls with the right planning.) After all, new forms of energy and computing are likely to be driven by strategic university-corporate-government partnerships. (For a stunning, fictional look at this, read Solar by Ian McEwan.)

Nevertheless, leaving that fun debate aside, let's focus on the latest enemy of the good ship academe. Administrators!

Back to School pokes fun at academic administrators.

Benjamin Ginsberg, a faculty member of Johns Hopkins, just published: The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.

Any faculty member reflecting on the title will no doubt cheer!

Any university administrator or staff member will no doubt ask, "How can I get a job at this mythical and wonderful institution Professor Ginsberg is describing!" (If true of his home base, Johns Hopkins may very well be awash with job applicants in the next few weeks.)

While I haven't read the book (yet), the brief overview from Inside Higher Ed provides a good deal of food for thought:

The larger result, he argues, is that universities have shifted their resources and attention away from teaching and research in order to feed a cadre of administrators who, he says, do little to advance the central mission of universities and serve chiefly to inflate their own sense of importance by increasing the number of people who report to them.

After reading the above many staff may reverse their prior assessment of the book's title and cheer alongside the faculty. The rise of oblique titles like Executive Associate Vice Dean for Institutional Strategy, Knowledge Wrangling, and Party Planning rarely helps matters.

Many an eyebrow was raised, in fact, when members of the Harvard community read (on the University's homepage, mind you) that there was a summit for the institution's 1,000+ IT staff. 

Yes, that's 1,000.

Good god, with that kind of base, we must not just be living in the realm of cloud computing but be manufacturing storms that are altering the global IT climate. If so, why doesn't my email work again? And what is up with those quadruple log-ins for the wonky financial systems?

If Ginsberg wants an "I told you so!" moment this way well be his watershed. Not so fast.

First, like it or not, universities do exist in the real world. The genie Bok was hoping to put back into the bottle has long since dissipated into a billion nanoparticles. The world is far more complex these days. Harvard is a large scale enterprise that employs tens of thousands of people, houses, feeds, and cares for tens of thousands more, and educates even greater numbers.

That means 1,000 IT folks could be about right to keep the institution running smoothly. And to give proper credit to our IT folks, they support more than just email, storage, and networking, but web development, open access scholarship, research computing, and on and on.

Second, while administrative bulk no doubt happens, growth often has a reason---often unseen by faculty. With the arrival of ARPA-E, for example, the regulations on reporting on federal funding suddenly became far more complicated. If faculty wanted the money, universities had to hire more administrators and staff to manage the paperwork.

Some administrators may wish to build empires, but I suspect most just want to get the work done---and get it done well.

Stanley Fish, hero to administrators everywhere!

Third, as cranky academic Stanley Fish once argued in a piece called "First, Kill All the Administrators", most faculty do not want to do the majority of the administrative tasks.

They simply do not have the time. After all, they are here to teach and do research (which I think, Ginsberg says is the very priority that is being undermined.)

Moreover, administrating is difficult and specialized work. At least that what those in the administrating business, like me, tend to argue.

Relish in the following eloquent paragraphs by Fish:

So, once again, what do you need administrators for anyway? You need administrators to develop and put in place and, yes, administer the policies and procedures that enable those who scorn them to do the work they consider so much more valuable than the work of administration.

Most faculty members believe that their lives would be so much easier if only administrators would get out of the way and let them get on with the job; heaven, they think, would be a university without any administrators at all, except, of course, those in charge of payroll. The truth is that if it weren't for administrators, there would be no class schedules and therefore no classes to teach, no admissions office and therefore no students to dazzle, no facilities management and therefore no laboratories to work in, no tenure process and therefore no security of employment, no budget officers and therefore no money for equipment, travel, lectures, and teaching awards.

James I of England once famously (and prophetically) said, "No bishops, no king." I say, no administrators, no life of the mind.

Bravo. Administrators can now feel vindicated! At the very least, Ginsberg and Fish's criticisms may cancel one another out. Quite neatly.

So, what happened to the original claim of this blog. Universities are all about the students. Right? Yet, I've blathered on and on, not even talking about students, which may say something in itself.

Well, I will get to that claim... in my next post.

In the meantime, here's a preview from one of my favorite books, The University of Utopia, by Robert M. Hutchins (former President of the University of Chicago during what must have been the glory days.)

...the function of education is to take boys and girls and develop them as human beings to the highest possibility that they have: to train them to make the best use of their gifts.