By Barry Munitz
Barry Munitz is chancellor of the California State University,
and chair-elect of the Board of the American Council on Education.
This article was adapted from the fall 1995 issue of Planning for Higher Education,
which is published by the Society for College and University Planning, in Ann Arbor,
Michigan.
Radical changes are occurring that will alter fundamentally the nature of the university as we have known it for nearly a century. They will also transform the shared governance model we have followed since the 1950s. These changes will force adjustments in how faculty teach and how students learn, how colleges and universities are financed, and how institutions are administered. They will require that colleges and universities restructure their management processes and modify their traditional notions about academic leadership.
Universities do not change easily, and major shifts in U.S. higher education have been rare. There was a dramatic shift from the many small, all-male, often religious and classically-oriented colleges of the early 19th century to the establishment in 1865 to 1900 of new land-grant colleges that were coeducational, polytechnic, oriented to work, and open to the working classes.
From roughly 1890 to 1920 the German model of education and research introduced academic specialization and departments, deans, graduate schools and research, and large private and state universities. After World War II the GI Bill opened a new era of higher education with new community colleges, teachers colleges turned into comprehensive universities, adult and evening education, and the rise of federal-grant multiuniversities.
We face a different metamorphosis
The coming transformation may be especially difficult because, in contrast to the other three, this change will take place in an environment of socioeconomic triage. The other major changes in higher education occurred with the expectations and delivery of more money and broad public support. Never before has American higher education had to make radical adjustments with inadequate resources and with a dangerously weakened base of public support.
Between 1990 and 1993 public spending on higher education in the United States declined by $7.76 billion (including budget cuts and inflationary losses). In California, the portion of the state budget going to higher education in the past five years has gone from 13 percent to less than nine percent. And the costs of higher education are going up faster than the Consumer Price Index. There is little prospect of major new public infusions of money; it is not available, and more state and federal allocators feel it is not deserved.
There is, however, still an impression among many faculty and some administrators that as soon as the economy gets better, the money will roll in again. Tied to this naive optimism are those who believe that with a bit of trimming here and there and with better fundraising and public relations, a college or university can get by until the recovery begins and then business can continue as usual.
There also remains considerable feeling in academe that the public will soon return to an appreciation of how valuable professors and their institutions really are. This feeling continues in the face of more and more people asking with growing bluntness, "What exactly are we paying for?" Business leaders are not the only ones who view higher education as one of the few professions where the producers define the product with minor regard for the customers and where the quality of that product and its producers is rarely assessed and systematically improved.
Surveys show that voters in many states now view public colleges and universities much as they do other public agencies: self-regarding bureaucracies wasting too many taxpayer dollars. And polls reveal that a majority of those interviewed feel that the most prestigious colleges and universities are increasingly elitist, out of touch with most citizens, overpriced, pampered, loosely managed and relatively unconcerned about society's most urgent problems and undergraduate learning needs.
The challenge is not just a matter of telling "our story" more effectively. New patterns in the economy, demographics, government spending policies, technology, public attitudes, international exchanges, and the expectations of students and their families demand that colleges and universities change fundamentally, as U.S. business firms and local and national governments have begun to do. And the restructuring will have to be done in a new climate of tightening finances, as is happening in health care.
Donald Kennedy, the former president of Stanford, wrote in 1994, "Organizations seldom achieve major economic or directional shifts--even when these would plainly yield important gains--unless the external pressures are intense. We now face that kind of pressureÉIt can be used by university leaders to direct major institutional reconfiguration."
But who is to direct the reconfiguration?
The standard reference on the desirable approach to campus policy making is the "Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities," issued jointly by the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards in 1966, when faculty power had reached unprecedented heights during education's explosive growth period. The "Statement" was embellished by the AAUP in separate position papers in 1969 and 1970.
According to these documents, "The faculty has primary responsibility for curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process." In all these matters the president and trustees should "concur with the faculty judgment," which "can be overruled only in rare instances and for compelling reasons stated in detail."
However, the same documents say that the president and his or her staff have "a special obligation to innovate and initiate." The statement and AAUP papers did not envision that colleges and universities might face serious financial difficulties or that dramatic developments in society would press academic institutions to redesign the way they operated. The reality in recent years though is that too many professors have been resistant to urgings that hard decisions need to be made, and too many institutions have experienced reactions ranging from suspicion to hostility about suggestions for restructuring their institutions and prerogatives.
To question the behavior of some faculty in times of severe economic pressure and societal change is not to deny the strength, character, and composure of most of America's professors. The creativity and skill that most faculty demonstrate while carrying heavy teaching schedules and lightened paychecks is beyond dispute.
But many faculty members tend to view their own institution as different from all others in society, and largely exempt from the need for renovation. So the traditional checks and balances, the multi-level reviews, and the shared governance model which served us well in times of growing enrollments, resources and public confidence need to be reconsidered. The underlying values of the shared governance model must be preserved, but processes that more easily permit action, change and reforms should be explored.
On the other hand, many presidents seem equally reluctant to "innovate and initiate," even though many campus executives recognize that inertia or hunkering down could put their institutions at risk. When the better faculty step forward to help redesign their own professional world, are they really invited by their presidents to participate in the institution's leadership? Do provosts and presidents honor and reward those scholars who bring their imaginations, knowledge, and experience to bear directly on their own institution's problems?
In a recent column in The New York Times, William Honan wistfully recalled the college and university presidents of yesteryear as "striking figures" who did not shrink from pressing their institutions in new directions or speaking out on the important issues of their time. Where are such leaders today? Honan asked. Few of today's presidents, provosts or deans have spoken out on human rights, attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities or National Public Radio, welfare reform, school reform, health care, international trade, crime and drug use, or family responsibilities toward the young.
The argument against taking a personal stance on broad social issues is traditional and clear. Presidents assert that they have enough responsibility undertaking the enormous range of assignments tied directly to educational and intellectual pursuits. They are concerned about diluting this mandate if they attempt to engage issues beyond those responsibilities. Indeed, they worry whether their institutions' relative independence would be threatened, and even whether they would be inviting retaliation if they become participants in what they perceive to be a political process beyond their legitimate boundaries.
My concern is that academic executives understand the distinction between taking a personal/political stand and helping the state and the country address more than just specific higher education issues by hosting and framing the debate. From an institutional perspective the president's responsibilities might reasonably be focused upon raising the issues, gathering a variety of perspectives, creating a context for analysis and focusing upon potential resolutions--everything short of political pressure--but far beyond the recent tendency to avoid any public policy involvement.
To usher in the new era
A new kind of leadership is required to manage in higher education's changing environment. Managing an institution's financial cutbacks requires different skills and different procedures. Supervising structural changes also requires a different style of executive leadership. Leaders of major academic change must be willing to take risks and be accountable, must have a strong sense of daring and possess great courage and tenacity, must know how to sell the new departures to many constituencies, and must develop workable leverage and constraint mechanisms to alter internal patterns and behaviors. They must be organizational architects and passionate builders and reshapers, willing to surrender being liked for being respected. To do this, however, presidents must be recruited, supported and rewarded by faculty and trustees for trying new approaches and candidly confronting current challenges.
In sum, the current stalemate needs to be broken by the willingness of colleges and universities to accept a different kind of presidential leadership and a renovated governance partnership. But several other changes will need to pave the way.
The first change needed is in the selection process and criteria for presidents. At present three of the most important attributes that a successful presidential candidate must have at the great majority of institutions are a strong record as a teacher and scholar, some experience with administration that went smoothly and without controversy, and a proper disdain for academic management. Each of these three attributes seems open to serious question.
To be a transformational leader in higher education requires a major talent for managing organizational change, skill with people, and a dedication to intellectual life, as well as an ability to speak and write well. What is essential is that one knows how to find and care for great teachers and scholars. The narrow qualifications for a college presidency should be broadened.
The requisite that the candidate should never have been controversial or in trouble with his or her faculty is also subject to challenge. It results in "safe," shrewdly evasive, survivor presidents who would rather compromise than fight. It almost guarantees a relatively passive and non-entrepreneurial person because people who have battled for greater excellence, less economic waste, and new ways of doing things are almost certain to have made some enemies.
The third change necessary is a new attitude toward the leadership and management of academe. Colleges and universities often distrust persons who set out to learn the difficult craft of university administration and who discuss their leadership aspirations openly. In business, the potential leaders are usually identified fairly early and are deliberately assigned positions that allow them to develop the all-around expertise necessary for top management. Their professional ambitions are understood and monitored.
At most colleges and universities, however, a comparable grooming of possible future leaders would be frowned upon if not strongly criticized as inappropriate to the historical values of campus administration.
But the only way we will have education leaders who are imaginative, strategically daring, and professionally trained is to depart from higher education's traditional view of campus leadership as the last bastion of proudly amateur management. After all, a dozen or so U.S. universities have annual budgets of a billion dollars a year, and hundreds of colleges and universities have operating budgets of a quarter billion dollars or more.
Higher education is trying to manage itself as if today's colleges and universities were still snug, little, collegial communities of 2,000 or so souls as they were in the 1920s. Colleges and universities have become huge, fragmented, complex and very expensive enterprises. But our attitude toward their management is stuck in old notions of amateur and unobtrusive administrators, working collegially with a cooperative faculty who all share the same values. It seems grotesquely and perhaps suicidally inappropriate.
A forward-looking response is neither unimaginable nor unreachable. If the strongest, most caring faculty join with the most competent and courageous presidents, deans and vice presidents to examine how new management patterns can serve both their interests, we will survive the triage crisis and be better for it.
Our colleges and universities once lived on the colorful periphery of American life. Now the powerful intellectual base demanded by modern information-rich society puts higher education under everyone else's microscope. We can, we must foster a new generation of higher education leaders--faculty and administration--with academic integrity and fiscal management skills, to guide colleges and universities in the 21st century. u