The
original topic for this edition of SQUINTS was review of the proposals from the
first (President Truman’s) presidential commission on higher education, circa
1947. It seemed a relevant
starting point for assessment of U.S. higher education, given that most of its
recommendations have yet to find their way into collegiate reform by 2012.
Sixty-five
years seems a rather long gestation period, even for the measured character of
leadership of American higher education.
To add some angst to the picture, family and college student debt from
the unchecked escalation of collegiate costs, coupled with states slashing
public higher education support for decades, now exceeds one trillion dollars,
and counting.
Over
the last several weeks the University of Virginia, famously founded by Thomas
Jefferson, has been racked by controversy, stemming from the improperly executed action of a handful of board plotters to fire its president
along with a ton of obfuscation of the reasons.
This
week, in a courageous, strategic and brilliantly conceived effort, not, to
address the debt issue, Indiana University’s trustees voted to solve the
problem by approving an educational program to increase student financial literacy.
The
same board of IU geniuses also approved a new “school of philanthropy.” Not articulated was the mission; there is likely a need for academic work on philanthropic process, on not-for-profit (NFP) and non-governmental organizations (NGO), and on their functions. However, that work and research would appear better executed within existing collegiate work on organizations, finance, administration and marketing, than creation of still another school bureaucratic and overhead structure. This appears to be a constant symptom of the growth syndrome driving many universities, unchecked expansion along with overhead rather than creative use of organizational thinking to reduce burden. Whatever, let’s hope a vaccine can be found for the condition.
The College Debt Issue
In
a few months the student debt issue has escalated, in Congressional partisan squabbling
about how to pay for keeping the interest rates on that debt (the principal now
exceeding one trillion dollars) from doubling, and has finally started to
penetrate the sheltered environs of university boards of trustees or visitors.
Yes,
the business of higher education is allegedly education, when it can be
interspersed with recreation and sports; so what’s the beef with IU’s quest for
financial literacy for its students?
Aside from that educational effort being belated by a few decades,
perhaps the question comes from the script of an old TV ad for fast food –
“where’s the beef?”
Metaphorically, where is the beef, i.e., where is a strategic plan for
higher education reform, for increasing classroom productivity, for cleaning the
bureaucratic stables, for seeking sustainable cost reductions, and thereby reduction
of tuition? The notion of better educating students (and their families) to fully understand how they're being gored by a system out of control, while failing to address causes, stretches credibility?
Successive
U.S. president’s commissions on higher education subsequent to Mr. Truman’s
have made numerous suggestions for reducing the cost, and improving the
productivity of U.S. higher education; virtually every proposal over a half
century has been rejected by institutions increasingly independent of their
original funding, in favor of growth as a goal and expanding functions well beyond the education mission. That thrust in turn has in part at least been driven by the complexity of a
university’s stake holders: Faculty
who can see themselves as independent contractors rather than employees,
bargaining for higher salaries; alumni who respond to sports and glitz but shun
educational achievement; expanded research roles that require far greater
investment; faculty refusals to regularly reassess their curricula as a reality check; Federal mandates; management that frequently cannot decide just what its role is or
aspires to emulate our corporate world and its salaries.
Generically,
cost reduction in any complex organization also has a long history of strife –
the other guy’s costs are always the ones to be reduced, resulting inevitably
in conflict and gridlock in any system that cannot be operated traditionally based on command and control. Universities, in existence for almost a millennium, have been a more
complex organizational system than “businesses,” even our largest, and to
succeed in their primary missions and venues have been managed differently than
businesses. Yet, the process of
cost reduction itself can be highly disciplined and governed by strategic
goals. The writer lived one
admittedly simple version of the challenge, but that had to be addressed in
quick time.
The
first company managed had a customer mix consisting of 80 percent businesses
termed mom & pop operations, and 20 percent national chains. The former bought small quantities of
equipment and paid relatively higher average prices; the latter bought on
annual contracts and paid far lower prices. In the space of a few years the industry experienced a
major shakeout, with national chains acquiring the smaller firms at an
unprecedented rate. Within two
years, our firm’s mix of customers went from the prior 20/80 to 80/20 chain
dominance. With that shift, the
average dollar revenue per unit of the equipment sold was virtually cut in
half, though the unit volume increased.
Left untouched, the scenario had the potential of abruptly cutting the
firm’s profits by more than 50 percent.
As a division of a Fortune 50 company, one’s tenure promised to
be short-lived indeed if that trajectory was unchecked.
A
solution, with the full engagement of a work force on the same page, was major cost
reduction of the products’ and distribution costs via creative changes that
maintained product quality and service delivery.
Essentially, every consequential line item on the product’s bill-of-materials
was methodically and creatively rethought; necessary, materials, process, made
versus vended, just-in-time sourcing, inspection versus process control, packaging,
post-sale service and upgrades? In
a period of two years, as the average revenue per unit dropped, the percent
(not absolute dollars) product margin was retained, while product appearance
and function were actually enhanced.
Coupled with greater physical volume provided by the chains, the
company’s dollar profits actually materially increased. Critically, to achieve such cost change
was a consuming full-court press in double-time; there is no such thing as a free lunch.
The
questions are: Are our
universities objectively up to or can they even internalize that level of focus and effort;
is the university model of organization compatible with that form of focused
effort; is there, metaphorically, a higher education “bill-of-materials” that
can addressed as in the simple example offered; paradoxically, though it is
looked to for intellectual leadership, can higher education actually break with
traditions and inertia to develop major creative solutions to improving learning and at
lower cost? I believe there are affirmative answers to those questions, but not without material change in higher education beliefs, a willingness to seek creativity, and accept some risks of demanding higher performance from both their student and faculty populations.
Where Risk Resides
The
last few weeks have witnessed the unfolding, perhaps unraveling is more
apropos, of a higher education soap opera, that if it wasn’t indicative of what
is coming at higher education, would have offered enough intrigue and slapstick
to offset summer TV reruns: The
sorry spectacle was of ignorant and secret plotting by a small cabal of the
University of Virginia’s board of visitors (along with allegedly the support or
instigation of a billionaire alumnus of UVA) to oust Dr. Teresa Sullivan, its
president of just two years. The
basis of the coup was that Dr. Sullivan had allegedly not moved with enough
aggression in two years in addressing escalating costs or alternative
pedagogical methods applicable to higher education.
Below
are seven citations that tell the University of Virginia story to date. They will not be replayed here, but
they are both an object lesson for would-be outside reformers, as well a
warning bell that change in higher education is even more complex than in
public K-12. For a good example of
how not to reform U.S. higher education, and worth your attention:
The
UVA example has four major thrusts, three of which are generalized. The issue particular to UVA is the
failure of its board of visitors and the principal instigator of the coup to
reflect any transparency or any sense of good management. The UVA board’s methods violated
literally every caveat of contemporary management of any organization
regardless of its categorization.
Therefore, one general issue is whether reform of higher education, ala
K-12, should take the course of corporate attacks on the establishment to force
change, a risk of quickly becoming its motif?
The
other issues that can be generalized to this discussion are what are viable and
sustainable education cost reductions, what pedagogies and which rubrics work
for improving learning productivity, and whether the processes to achieve
either and the timetables should be set by external stake holders or set within
the institutions?
The Gut U. S. Higher Education
Challenges
For
better or worse, the University of Virginia has become the camel’s nose in the
Arab’s tent, to put the least onerous spin on that brouhaha. That nose is, should corporate reform,
and its conceptions of what parts and at what rates higher education processes
can be changed, be the modality for reform of our colleges and universities?
The
counter is, U.S. institutions of higher education have been in denial of need
for change, along with public K-12 education, for most of the last half
century, and some majority of their number has abandoned higher education first
principles in favor of an expansionary, corporate form of organizational logic
and goal setting. The issue is
that reform of higher education is far more complex than the same mission for
K-12.
Reform
challenges:
The complexity of the core institution; there is far
more complexity in the operations, and diversity of forms of collegiate and
university process. A proposition,
there is more disparity between our best collegiate work – the ivies and
upscale techs – and our worst – too many of our so-called community colleges,
high school 2 – than the best versus the bottom quartile of public K-12.
Most undergraduate higher education curricula are
less obsolete than their public K-12 counterparts, but selectively fall short of being
contemporary expressions of their genre’s science and art. The sciences including neural biology fare best, followed by
medicine, law and the humanities.
Schools of education in their present state of knowledge should likely
be put out of their misery, or declared startups, and political science seems to have gone underground.
Most of the nation’s overripe, overfunded, and
overrated B-schools have never in a half century fully melded basic disciplines
with business theory, moving from fad to fad, nor ever effectively reflected
business practice at a high level and its ethical demands. Current practices in too many
corporations massaging greed like a mantra indicate the U.S. has reaped in the
moral products of its B-schools what it sowed, and there has been only one
major rethinking of its disciplines and curricula since WWII. That in turn had
to be pounded into the B-schools by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations. B-schools in other nations are now besting this American higher education creation.
The cost of four years of U.S. higher education in
general exceeds the cost of 13 years of prior formal education process, and if
current research is believed, those four years produce very little change in
learning. Paradoxically, public
K-12 practices classroom instructional dogma with marginal knowledge content,
while higher education steeps itself in assumed knowledge virtually thoughtless
about how to optimally explicate it in the classroom.
U.S. higher education reflects an interesting
paradox; its products – the alumni – exhibit remarkable, even exaggerated loyalty
to places where they did baccalaureate work; but if truth be told, most of
those institutions view most of those alums as semi-educated and with mild
contempt, patronizing their institutional interests to solicit contributions
and procure endowments. In recent
years, the better-managed and most contemporary divisions of most colleges and
universities have been their alumni offices, the rainmakers.
Higher education faculties excepting the high end of the breed have become a fairly
arrogant lot, assuming they can’t be replaced, willing to threaten
administrations with relocation to extract higher salaries, many not perceiving
themselves as employees, and possessing in general less loyalty to their
institutions than many hourly employees exhibit to companies where stably
employed. Collegiate faculties
have resisted for over a half century studying and learning how to teach.
Sports are exploited in public K-12 in a perverse
fashion to smoke parents and divert their attention from education, but the
collegiate sports mess beggars that misapplication, increasingly being the
collegiate tail wagging the collegiate dog, generally corrupting it.
The former corruption is only matched or exceeded by
the chase of endowment dollars from successful alumni with egos that exceed
even their balance sheets. This
form of funding, hyped unceasingly, has become a form of university and
academic foundation corruption that rivals the political super pac. More dangerous, that link with donors
has now fostered the “Gates effect,” breeding wealthy advocates of self-styled accelerated
collegiate change but lacking the wits to even understand the system being
attacked.
There are undoubtedly competent academic managers,
but little agreement about how they should be prepared for the assignment or
what those attributes are. Increasingly,
where the thirst for dollars has been stoked, many deans and program leaders
have been selected because they are willing to roll the dice on their
disciplines or are con artists rather than academic leaders. In one article cited above, UVA’s Dr.
Sullivan is described as the opposite, doing precisely the things generally
associated with successful organizational management; somewhat bizarre then,
being ousted for doing what good managers are supposed to do.
In another article cited above, higher education’s
increasingly Achilles’ Heel, no pun intended, is the lack of preparedness of
trustees and visitors to be the needed collegiate oversight, many appointed for
purely political reasons rather than competence to materially effect collegiate
strategic choices; e.g., the case of UVA, or IU, or Miami University another proximate example of the endowment addiction and misdirected spending, or practically every state institution
of U.S. higher education. The
weakness doubles down on the tragedy usually represented by incompetent or
self-interested K-12 school boards.
Lastly, the saying should be tattooed onto every
fledgling trustee or visitor given the responsibility of high-level collegiate
oversight – COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ARE NOT BUSINESSES, NOR SIMPLY CREATURES
OF TRADITIONAL MARKETS. This may
be hard for many of our so-called corporate reformers to grasp, even those who
manifest good business management instincts and skills; it will never be
grasped by many contemporarily who have substituted simplistic political ideologies
about markets for awareness in 2012, just 76 years short of a millennium since the
formation of the university concept.*
On the Cusp?
Political
dysfunction in the U.S. has now forced onto our K-12 schools a reform agenda
that lacks intellect, even common sense, and now is at the cusp of colliding
with public higher education in the same fashion. Both attacks were earned and are deserved by the
inattention and hubris of their respective administrative universes in addressing their respective purposes and means, but the repercussions for
American progress are dismal.
Higher education, because its institutions can’t easily get lost in a crowd of
100K entities all invoking local control, may be more vulnerable to misdirected change than public K-12.
The
above views will elicit squeals of protest, but they come closer to the
challenge of U.S. academic progress than the naïve assessments issuing from
those institutions. If there is
any counterpoint, it is ironically that our colleges and universities are
generally being guided by competent resources, who still command enough of the confidence of most of their stake holders to avoid the "reform" confrontations of public K-12. They could deflect externally dictated alleged
reform long enough to launch the needed change processes from within.
Are they strategically smart enough, with the courage to use the opportunity? Good question.
Are they strategically smart enough, with the courage to use the opportunity? Good question.
Footnote: UVA's governing Board of Visitors, in an afternoon session on June 26, unanimously voted to reinstate Dr. Teresa Sullivan as President of the University of Virginia. It remains to be seen whether on July 1 Virginia's Governor will reappoint to that Board its present rector, Helen Dragas, the alleged architect of the coup to oust Sullivan with something less than due process even in the corporate world. Ms Dragas, a graduate of UVA's Darden graduate B-school, apparently took little awareness of managerial excellence away from that division, also alleged to be a focal point of the ouster attempt.
The issue, whether our nation's B-schools are currently the right source of a template for higher education reform, was briefly addressed earlier in this post. Reaffirming the sentiments, our B-schools first need to clean up their own act before exporting present dogma to our universities as a whole. Clearly, the present cadre of alleged corporate-based reformers, and the naiveté they represent, should not be calling out either higher education's reform's strategies -- "dynamic" slogan or not -- or its tactics without being taken "back to school."
*The
concept of the university is generally traced to the formation of the
University of Bologna (Italy) in 1088.
Subsequently, the universities of Paris, Oxford and Cambridge were formed. Harvard, for example, traces its
founding to 1636. Our public K-12
schools by contrast are mere toddlers.
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