Now is a good time to quit higher education…
…if you don’t love it. Traditional higher education in the United States is facing a number of challenges. Online education altered the landscape, and with funding and demographic changes, schools are struggling to make the traditional model financially viable (something described well in Capitalizing on College by Joshua Travis Brown). We can add generative AI to the list of troubles. Even if it does not do the more dramatic things promised in the near future, AI already contributes to on-campus academic dishonesty in an astonishing and disruptive way. What is to be done?
While higher education figures things out, this is an optimal time for fair-weather friends to depart. At almost every university, there is some professor who no longer loves the discipline or who has tired of students. There are professors who are “too busy to read.” There are administrators who do not want books in offices and who do not think there is any future for the disciplines they allegedly shepherd. There are staff at liberal arts colleges who cannot define the liberal arts. There are coaches who dissuade athletes from pursuing challenging majors, while receiving university paychecks. If there are more people than there are jobs, let’s only keep those who are passionate believers. And let everyone who thinks those passionate believers are fools go on their merry way.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, higher education benefited from a wave of young people and quite a bit of enthusiasm. Campuses grew. Contracts multiplied. Administrators became more comparable to business leaders, in paychecks and titles. As a result, higher education both attracted and developed its own managerial class. Staff and administrative roles proliferated. Earlier this year, Inside Higher Ed published a great essay titled “How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?” by Austin Sarat. Sarat talks about the “vice presidentialization of higher education,” and how “the trend is a sign of a shift in power from faculty to administrators, who are focused on protecting and managing their college’s brand. It is another sign of the growing administrative sector in American colleges and universities.” One result of a booming “education sector,” or education “industry,” has been leaders trained to see themselves as executives and managers and act accordingly (and pay themselves accordingly).
But the corporate world does not graft well onto higher education. CEOs strive to maximize profit for shareholders, but university presidents do not serve shareholders. They typically serve at the pleasure of a board, but ultimately, they serve students, faculty, staff, and the school itself, including its alumni. Universities are also non-profits and, in some cases, are public. Importing titles and metrics from the business world indicates a misalignment with the college model. Sarat points out that “the title ‘dean of students’ suggests a job that is student-facing, working closely with students to maximize their educational experience. The title of ‘vice president for student affairs’ suggests something different, a role more institution-facing, dealing with policy, not people.”
Partly as a result of their managerial perspective and their attraction to the “industry” rather than individual institutions, too many of college leaders believe our best bet is for higher education to become something entirely different from what it is. They want to “pivot.” At campuses across the country, people are asking: What if we didn’t see ourselves primarily as a university, but as something else?
As incredible as it may seem, some of our leaders have turned to the wisdom of the soldier with the Zippo in Vietnam, who thinks the best way to save the village is to burn it to the ground. If we look at the University of Chicago, it is struggling to function as a university today in part because its own leaders tried to make it into something else, some kind of hub for innovation, as though the best universities are not some of the least innovative places on the planet institutionally. There are administrators willing to put down $500 million for an innovation-oriented campus with an expected enrollment of 1,000 and an experimental approach to revenue in a new city. Yet many say they cannot afford to “prop up” the traditional disciplines. There are administrators who cannot accept traditional programs out of step with their beliefs about the future of education, even if they bring in money, as happened with the Honors College at the University of Tulsa.
You cannot run a university “like a business” without reckoning with the ways it is unlike most other businesses. The “outputs” are very unusual. A flourishing university is not judged by maximized profit or diversified revenue streams. A flourishing university is one that produces well-formed, educated individuals who are both employable and enjoyable to be around. Put simply, healthy universities serve the common good. That’s why they have non-profit status and why so many people donate money to them. It is true that you won’t pursue that well if your university has crippling debt or you lose all your property or enrollment, but you certainly won’t achieve it without considerable love and an approach that goes beyond “running it like a business.”
Universities are peculiar institutions, and they need peculiar leaders. They need people who believe in higher education itself and who love particular schools as distinctive places. At few other businesses are you expected to be able to defend the importance of Shakespeare and provide for animal dissection and field a good starting five for basketball. Some administrators may doubt the value of Shakespeare, but many teenagers and their parents do not. K-12 classical education is surging. Many, many people are tired of screens, are tired of always being online, and are wary of AI. It’s possible that some universities will find an advantage in being behind the tech times, offering shelter for refugees from big tech.
While some universities push for every syllabus to look the same and to exist solely on a screen, others may have the courage to benefit from Gen Z’s deep respect for authenticity (and perhaps even older generations’ rising nostalgia, which is fueling nearly the entire entertainment industry). There are universities all over the country that want a simple, conventional menu of majors and fail to capitalize on their geographic advantages. There are many colleges with distinctives whose potential has yet to be discovered.
More than ever, higher education needs visionary leaders and inspired faculty and staff. Even simply pursuing survival is insufficient, because the emphasis falls on the wrong thing. The emphasis has to be on quality education and well-formed students, not just graduation rates or ROI or grant funding or athletic championships. We cannot measure success that way, because we won’t even find it that way.
Even in the business world, success is best found through an oblique approach, as shown in John Kay’s book Obliquity. For example, an emphasis on excellence often does better at delivering profit than an emphasis on profit. This is the story, for instance, of Boeing. The oblique approach is affirmed by Built to Last, a business classic, by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Both books are full of examples of companies that only focused on profit and market share and failed, while companies that pursued excellence and understood the value and potential of their products survived and thrived. We are watching Southwest crumble before our eyes because they stopped believing in something bigger and gave up on their distinctives. Some of our universities struggle despite massive endowments because they fail to believe in and align their efforts and organization with their missions.
Anyone who thinks higher education is doomed or that it is not worth keeping alive should leave it behind. Such prophecies can be self-fulfilling if they transform colleges beyond recognition. We have an overabundance of PhDs and staff and administrators for the financial and demographic realities of the next few decades. A realignment is coming to higher education. Those who are hostile or indifferent to the endeavor should escape now because the opportunities are shrinking. Among qualified people, let’s let passion and belief do the sifting. Those institutions that flourish in the wake of this realignment will be those that embrace the unique goods of higher education and the particular charisms of their places and traditions.
A successful university is an alma mater, a nourishing mother. It requires love to animate it and to make it work. It must be personal and particular. Maybe the fiscal, demographic, and technological challenges will weed out those who lack this love. If you’re an administrator or professor who thinks that is foolish, please get out of the way and let the fools get on with the pursuit of knowledge and truth, reasoning together in their non-profit spaces, and failing to serve easy political ends while keeping alive an archaic tradition of education. Only such fools have any hope of keeping these institutions alive.
Image Credit: “The Moscow University in the Mokhovaya Street”
