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Dynamics of the Contemporary University. Neil J. Smelser
Читать онлайн.Название Dynamics of the Contemporary University
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isbn 9780520955257
Автор произведения Neil J. Smelser
Серия The Clark Kerr Lectures On the Role of Higher Education in Society
Издательство Ingram
In addition to proliferation within organizations, the failure to abandon what has been added in the past is an essential ingredient of accretion. This is not a feature unique to educational institutions—organizational inertia is real and alive everywhere—but it is extreme in educational institutions, and it is important to understand why. I offer of the following considerations:
There exists no ready mechanism for “going out of business” in the academy, as is possible through the mechanism of failure in commercial markets. Public institutions traditionally have been recipients of annually appropriated block grants from state governments as their main financial support, with varying degrees of control over specific programs or units within them. State governments are reluctant to let the institutions they have formed go out of business; it is difficult to imagine any one of the fifty states of the union deciding to junk one of “their” institutions—much less, the flagship university of the state—rational though that may be on administrative or economic grounds. Legislatures meddle in the administration of their institutions, but they are reluctant to kill them. Private institutions are governed more autonomously, though governing boards have also been reluctant to shut them down unless extreme economic conditions make it absolutely necessary.
We must also point to the institution of academic tenure. Insofar as an academic unit involves tenured faculty as members, this constitutes a barrier to elimination. Tenure as an institution refers primarily to academic freedom, though over time it has accumulated the element of permanent job security. It is, in principle, legal and acceptable to terminate tenured faculty when units are eliminated (below, pp. 111-12). This occurs, but with great reluctance on the part of administrators, who either avoid the possibility or find places for tenured faculty in other units. The consequence is that “[tenure] inhibits managerial flexibility in moving faculty and changing academic institutions” (Rhoades 1998: 84). We will return to other aspects of academic tenure later.
A third reason arises from a set of social science axioms that apply especially to academic institutions. The logic is as follows: if you take on a new function, you must add new a new structure to perform it (an organized research unit, an administrative division, a special office); if you create a structure you also create a group of people to staff it; and if you create a group, you also create a new constituency, one which, typically, includes as one its primary interests its own survival and enhancement. By this logic the process of proliferation of functions also generates internal political constituencies. These press their interests through strategies of argument, influence, and stonewalling, mainly in budget-preparing and budget-renewing seasons. It is a final part of this axiomatic system that administrators, for reasons of political survival, tend not to go in for outright killing of units but to shave around the edges. In hard times you stop cutting the grass, but you don’t cut the faculty. Summarizing the patterns of cuts in the 1980s and 1990s, with many periods of budgetary adversity, Altbach cites the reluctance to alter drastically programs or priorities and instead to make broad, general cuts:[S]upport staff were eliminated and maintenance was deferred. A hiring freeze was put into place, salaries were frozen, and part-time teachers replaced full-time faculty. Libraries were unable to buy books, and journal collections were cut. Yet only a handful of colleges or universities violated the tenure of senior faculty. Departments were seldom eliminated, even where enrollments were low. Administrators tried to “protect the faculty,” even at the expense of rational planning or institutional development. A few of the weakest private colleges merged or closed. Virtually no public institutions were closed, even where campus closures or mergers would have been in the best interests of the statewide system. (2001: 34)
As an external advisor to Yale social sciences in the 1990s, I witnessed that university’s effort to eliminate, selectively, several “problematic” academic departments evolve first into a significant faculty revolt and then into the disappearance, through resignation, of three top administrators instead of the removal of several academic departments (for a brief account, see Rosenzweig 1998). On the other hand, recent history records some successful efforts to eliminate degree programs and departments, engineered with great dexterity (e.g., Kirwan 2006).
In the literature on higher education we do come across some talk of “unbundling,” but most suggestions deal with outsourcing or privatization of activities without perceived direct educational functions: campus food services, bookstores, operation of student health services, security services, and plant and utility infrastructures (Langenberg 1999). Duderstadt (2000) also mentions admissions, counseling, and certification as possibilities for unbundling. There is discussion and some activity in outsourcing subjects like introductory language instruction to community colleges and elsewhere—subjects already “outsourced” to some degree within institutions to temporary faculty and teaching assistants. The actual cost reductions realized by outsourcing are no doubt highly variable. More ambitious attempts to eliminate the lower division (freshman and sophomore years) of baccalaureate-granting colleges and universities have failed (for two efforts at Stanford, see Cuban 1999), partly because of sentimental attachment to the “four-year degree” as an institutional stamp, partly because of resistance of intercollegiate athletics and alumni, and, by now, also because of the fact that the lower division provides the major sources of “employment” for graduate student teaching assistants. In a word, the talk and activity of unbundling seems more to confirm the strength of the accretion-bundling complex than it does its reversal.
THE DISCIPLINE-BASED ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT: SO STRONG AND YET SO FRAIL
One part of the great transformation of American higher education from the Civil War to the first decades of the twentieth century was the increased specialization of knowledge, both within existing areas of inquiry and by the appearance of new areas. These specializations moved from more diffuse areas of inquiry into “disciplines,” connoting the production of knowledge on the basis of “disciplined” exploration of the subject matter by using an explicit and selective set of analytic assumptions and principles. These intellectual domains differed in rigor and completeness, and still do.
Irregularly but inevitably, the organizational embodiment of disciplines in the United States became the academic department, a largely autonomous subunit of faculty members in a discipline. This distinctive creation—Alain Touraine, the French sociologist, called the department “the great American invention” ([1974] 1997: 33)—had its origins and its cousins in European systems of “faculties,” but it evolved, with variations, as a more collegial and less authoritarian model than those cousins. The “chairman”—now “chair”—even in its strongest manifestations, never reached the dictatorial dimensions of the chief, single “professor” in the German and other systems.
Despite this looseness, the department accumulated power over time and became the principal institutional reality of universities and colleges. Its constant feature is a defined, annually renewed budget and career lines. Its responsibilities have fanned out. Departments are mainly responsible for collegiate and post-graduate curricula and who teaches them; most “majors” are named after disciplines and administered by departments. Future professionals receive their training in discipline-based departments. Their professional names—physicist, geneticist, anthropologist—derive from this training. They find employment in discipline-based departments, and if they have not been certified in department-based training programs, they are scarcely employable (who will hire a “natural scientist” or a “humanist” without further specification?). Advances in their careers (rank, tenure, pay increases) are initiated and largely controlled by departments, though this power is shared with the editors of journal and with publishers of books, as well research-granting agencies, whose decisions govern the main products on which academics are assessed (Bowen and Schwarz 2005). Together, the graduate training and