Universities, Mismanagement, and Permanent Crisis

Some loose, probably incautious thoughts, adapted from a couple of Twitter rants essays I’ve been writing the last few days.

The promise of the management class is that they could manage colleges better than faculty. They have wildly failed at this on every level.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 25, 2015

A multi-generation, multimillion-dollar institution (like a college) that has to administrate by emergency decree has in nearly every case been grotesquely failed by its leadership. And in the US today that describes nearly every college and university, in management rhetorics and policies dating back at least to the mid-2000s (when I first entered the profession as a graduate student).

If your college faced drastic emergency cuts after 2008, it was mismanaged. You expanded on an unsustainable basis, made the wrong commitments, spent too much.

If your college faces drastic emergency cuts now because enrollments will tick (slightly) downward in the 2010s, it was mismanaged. You had 18 years warning that this demographic wave was going to hit, 18 years to plan for what to do when it did.

As every college administration invokes generalized, free-flowing “emergency” as its justification for arbitrary policy after arbitrary policy — all of which need to be implemented now, en toto and without debate, even the ones that contradict the other ones — they are arguing that their management up to now has been so wildly and irredeemably poor that the university has been thrown into total system crisis. And yet the solution to the emergency is, inevitably, always more (and more draconian) administrative control, always centralized under the very same people who took us over the cliff in the first place!

Nor is there ever any accountability, or so much as an explanation, for how the crisis was ever allowed to happen in the first place. (Very often, of course, the guilty parties have already fled the state.)

Eternal organizations designed to last forever simply should not have to implement policy on a crisis basis — much less be forced to implement every policy in this way. Colleges and universities should have been managed so carefully up to now so that they can afford to phase in new policy changes over time, running experiments and pilot programs where necessary to ensure success. That’s what neoliberal shibboleths like “nimble” and “flexible” would actually mean in a world of rational management — graceful, deliberate movements, not wild lurching and uncontrolled crash-landing.

Careful management, good management, is the full and sole justification for the administration class that has bloated so entirely over the college landscape since the 1980s (and whose growth is still accelerating, even in the face of permanent cuts everywhere else). Simply put the promise of the management class was that they could manage colleges better than faculty. Even by their own estimation they have completely failed at this task on every possible level. Thirty years of running it like a sandwich has every college in the country living admission cycle to admission cycle, cutting budgets and services and wages every year, careening from supposed emergency to supposed emergency without any stabilization or improvement.

Even bracketing endowments and donations altogether, generally speaking colleges have a built-in client base, already own all the land and buildings, can borrow freely, and don’t pay taxes. I could devise a harder test of management acumen. So it seems to me the approximately 100% of college administrations that are now claiming emergency and desperation year after year need to cop either to their own incompetence, or else their dishonesty, or else their active malice.

Canavan’s Razor would tell us that permanent crisis is a management strategy, the unacknowledged goal of every plan. But whichever precise combination of incompetence, dishonesty, and malice best describes a particular university administration is irrelevant. The management class simply has no reason to exist at all if their interventions in the university produce not stability but crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis, after crisis…

run the university like a business, pay attention to mission-critical demographic trends before they became a crisis

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015

run the university like a business, do a rational cost-benefit analysis on new construction

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015

run the university like a business, borrow responsibly

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015

run the university like a business, follow employment laws

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015

run the university like a business, streamline overhead by “rightsizing” administration

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015

run the university like a business, spinoff or eliminate money-losing divisions like sports and fraternities

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015

 

promise? RT @claudiakincaid: @gerrycanavan and have you heard: if we don't pay them top dollar they will leave.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 25, 2015