On Monday, I discussed the difficulties with analysis of college and university costs that relied on either legal or largely rhetorical allocations. Today, I want to discuss the common perception that traditions of departmental autonomy are responsible for huge amounts of inefficiency in colleges and universities.1 Is the university with the department as the fundamental unit responsible for swallowing all the resources it’s been blamed for wasting?
To start off, let’s consider Jeff Selingo’s 2012 AEI paper2 describing the suggestions made by management-consultant Bain when working with UNC-Chapel Hill, Berkeley, and Cornell to reduce business-side expenses.3 In it, Selingo summarizes the type of advice Bain gives universities, such as “strategic sourcing” of vendor relationships–reducing the choice of vendors for a particular product or category. In Selingo’s 2012 paper, the example chosen was lab equipment. At USF, our most visible strategic sourcing to date has been to eliminate options on buying office supplies — we have a single-vendor contract, and you don’t have the choice to buy staplers anywhere but at Office Depot.4
Strategic sourcing is not the only change recommended by Bain, but it’s good enough for thinking about the role of departments. Selingo accurately describes the issues involved with strategic sourcing — not with stapler purchases but lab equipment, where researchers worry about the consequences of having specific equipment or substitutes. Yes, this affects what is normally an academic decision, but it’s not as hard a transition as Selingo describes, if you can show a faculty member that they can buy a particular Western States Laboratory centrifuge from the chosen vendor as well as the faculty member’s lab-supply company of choice, and if there are both individuals and processes to address special needs. This is likely to be a short-term pain, especially since new faculty will never have experienced a “buy from wherever you want” environment at that campus. I hear maybe one complaint a year about having to buy office supplies at Office Depot, and while the complaint window will have to be open longer for things like lab equipment and lab supplies, it’s a manageable transition.5
Selingo’s paper also discussed the “academic culture” issue in some abstraction, almost but not quite connected with his argument about business-process efficiency. The perception of a department-focused academic culture is central to the account written by Selingo, and many others.6 It is rooted in the operation of most colleges and universities, where the atomic academic management unit is also the fundamental disciplinary unit of a department.7 It is very common to have a small number of staff in each department, and each staff member thus handles a broad variety of duties, sometimes ranging from purchasing and payroll to enrollment and program details (course permits, admissions paperwork, etc.). There are central campus or institution services that support those functions, but the intellectual-discipline-management structure is the invisible assumption. On top of that, the common de facto budgeting system in higher education is base budgeting–that is, changes from year to year are changes to a base that is reasonably stable other than for crises or windfalls.
As a result, budgeting and management create a modular system: a university can change the leadership of a department, add departments easily, merge or close departments with great pain, and divide departments, but the department is the atomic managerial level.8 This is a way of managing organizational complexity, as it devolves the details of a complex operation to the local unit. Most departments have one or more academic programs, and the burden of sequencing courses, assigning faculty, advising majors, and so forth are commonly departmental functions. When there are incremental changes in the budget, that change leaves department chairs or their equivalents with the burden of meeting the department’s obligations under changed circumstances. Or, when there are short-term windfalls (such as happens with grant-active faculty bought out by grants), the department can spend the windfall with some discretion, justified by the rationale that the unit that brings in resources should benefit from the achievement generated by the same unit.9
All of that drives wanna-be higher ed reformers wild. Why should faculty at the department level decide all of these things? Why can’t they be more efficient, and be encouraged/required to follow better practices? The assumption in all of these arguments is that departmental governance and management is a one-way street, heading only towards inefficiency as measured by economists or those with economist-envy. To some extent this is a legitimate concern, because the decentralization of a bunch of functions reduces specialization among staff even as it facilitates specialization among faculty. But it is important to understand that the activities that are inefficient when handled by the atomic department are generally internal transactions that are mostly but not completely standardized within a college or university. The inefficiency thus depends on what someone in a department is doing that hour. The overgeneralization is to claim that what is true for transactional functions is true for everything, and that the atomic department is inefficient everywhere and forever.
But if that is the case, then why do we have so many adjuncts in higher education?
The past few decades have witnessed dramatic adjunctification of higher education in the same era that many critics of higher ed decry as redolent of inefficiency. It did not happen through the micromanagement of personnel in all universities and colleges but through the management of complexity through incremental budget changes and delegation of decision-making to the atomic department. Over decades, institutions decided that they would disinvest in full-time faculty, relatively speaking, but not through orders to hire adjuncts. Rather, administrators declined requests for full-time hires and left department chairs with the same obligations to make sure courses run. The hiring of adjuncts happened as a consequence, with the atomic department as the central mechanism.10
If neoliberalism in public higher ed has a face, it is mine–not willingly but certainly in my role as a department chair. If I am denied an opportunity to hire a full-time faculty member, and a course has to run, there are only a few options available, all of them “efficient” in a narrow economic sense: make a full-time faculty member teach an additional course/more students, hire a graduate student (for undergraduate classes), or hire an adjunct. My colleagues have never yelled at me because I sign offer letters to graduate students or adjuncts, and the program coordinators in the department are the ones who recommend whom to hire as adjuncts. And whoever eventually succeeds me as a department chair will also hire adjuncts.
Thus, blaming the atomic department for the financial woes of a university is misguided, for two reasons. One is a matter of where the higher-education money has gone in the past 40 years. The atomic department has already been partially marginalized in terms of university expenditures, with the shifting of higher-education employment away from full-time faculty and department staff and towards hourly, professional, and technical jobs outside academic departments. That fact means that a large chunk of potential savings from so-called transactional efficiency lie outside the atomic department, or at least do not necessarily conflict with the atomic department. The second reason is more subtle: the inefficiencies associated with an atomic department structure are in certain areas and not others. In some ways, an atomic department is inefficient in handling internal transactions, and depending on the department also in structuring faculty time. In other ways, the atomic department is perfectly consistent with efficiency: departments have responded to incremental changes in base budgets by hiring adjuncts and graduate students (the latter where there are graduate programs to draw them).
Can a university be run without an atomic-department structure? In the various papers already available on the American Enterprise Institute page on “stretching the higher ed dollar,” there is a mix of utopian (or lazy) abstractions and also some more interesting challenges to historical college and university operations. None of the more reality-grounded proposals dismantle the departmental structure, though a few have imagined workarounds. Of note is Paul LeBlanc’s essay, with a fascinating combination of operational details with his grasp of larger issues.11 In his mind, it is possible to have a modern university that operates an entrepreneurial unit for competency-based degrees at the same time that it offers a residential college experience. That structure separates atomic departments from the competency-based education. In the past 15 years, many such quasi-independent units ran afoul of either financial constraints or campus politics. But at least for now, it looks as if LeBlanc has managed the tensions, even if Southern New Hampshire University still ranks very low on Forbes’s crude evaluation of college financial stability.
But maybe we do not need to nor should marginalize the atomic department. In an earlier paragraph I tossed in a quiet time bomb, mentioning that one of the ways departments may be inefficient is “in structuring faculty time.” In practice, there are multiple ways of making classes cheaper to operate. Within a department, those choices are to hire adjuncts, hire teaching assistants, assign full-time faculty to teach more students (either more classes or more students per class), or pay full-time faculty less. All of the asserted “disruptive” alternatives are in essence one form of the above or a combination. Whether that process happens inside or outside a department is irrelevant for the financial implications. Rather, those mechanisms are essentially workarounds for the presumed inertia embedded in a departmental structure.
One critical assumption of pie-in-the-skie “disrupters” is that a non-departmental structure will make better decisions on the academic issues than the atomic department. Better not just in eliminating inefficient use of faculty time (however defined, usually narrowly) but also better in balancing those considerations against morale and retention of faculty, rigor of coursework, and the details that are often embedded in that complex entity that now we can define as departmental culture. At its base, a departmental culture is not the managerial-disciplinary melding but the disciplinary judgments about what is important to teach, to expect in colleagues. Can that go awry? Sure. But as we’ve seen from for-profit “management” of the curriculum, there are plenty of ways that centralized, non-faculty-oriented programs can gang aft agley. Utopian schemes to bypass faculty governance ignore the fact that there are risks to all structures. Maybe the mature discussion here is how to manage those risks, not use faddish language as an ideological trump card.
To put the issues of the atomic department in context, we can see the management challenge involved in “stretching the higher education dollar” as lying fundamentally in three areas, for most public and non-profit institutions:
Streamlining business operations. For business operations, the type of work Bain does is valuable, though you don’t need to hire a management-consulting firm. None of the issues described by Selingo have been bypassed in the committee I’m on.
Setting appropriate goals. Here is where university-level governance is most likely to fail. Trustees generally do not hire university presidents to tamp down unrealistic expectations about athletics or the resources available to support research.
Overseeing departments. The issue here is balance and common sense. Given the frequent rotation of top administrators, the key is the level just above departments (or whatever the atomic unit is). At USF, that’s the college level. The core skill required of a dean is knowing how to oversee appropriately, and for that–surprise!–understanding what happens at the department level is an important source of knowledge.
Too bad none of the essays on the American Enterprise Institute site touch on the last issue. But that is what “stretching the higher education dollar” requires–knowing what is reasonable and what is possible in practice.
Notes
This is different from arguments about labor costs. Skyrocketing faculty salaries is a myth.
AEI = American Enterprise Institute.
That paper that will almost certainly be the basis for a chapter in the September-released Stretching the Higher Education Dollar, edited by Andrew Kelly and Kevin Carey. If the papers available on the American Enterprise Institute website are any reliable indicator of the final chapters, I’d recommend reading the chapters by Selingo, Paul LeBlanc, Ben Wildavsky, and Robert Martin. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with the arguments in those likely-to-be-chapter-manuscripts, but that they are interesting and made me think.
Office supply purchasing is not the extent of discussions or planning around strategic sourcing.
Caveat: New faculty may have had experience buying lab equipment off eBay, so they’ll certainly think restrictions on vendors is bureaucracy run amok. Well, yes, that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw, but it is with a guaranteed saving.
“Others” includes authors of other likely chapters in the Kelly-Carey volume who are less grounded than Selingo’s.
Some departments are combinations of disciplines, a phenomenon more common in professional schools than in arts and sciences.
If an institution has a school, division, or college as the atomic level, the basic dynamics don’t change.
This explanation omits institutions where departments have restricted budgetary authority but are still supposed to manage curriculum and other processes with budgetary consequence. This explanation also omits any college or university where the next layer up has a fantasy of micromanaging. In my experience, you can micromanage departments for some pieces, but not many and not for long.
One could make the same argument about ginormous class sizes at universities: the university provides the class space or the online server, but the atomic department creates the schedule and sets class caps.
LeBlanc is one of the few who uses the disruption metaphor in an interesting way.