Mr. Jefferson's university breaks up

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by David L. Kirp, Patrick S. Roberts

Because it is more self-sufficient than other campus units, Darden has less of a stake in these machinations; it is unaffected by the hiring freeze, for example. And since recessions inspire prospective students to return to the safe harbor of school, M.B.A. applications have risen significantly this year. But the economic downturn is likely to have a major long-run impact on an institution that has opted to live by the marketplace. Darden's transition to self-sufficiency coincided with the greatest uninterrupted era of economic growth in U.S. history, and the school benefited accordingly. It was easy enough in that climate to forget that firms can cut costs even more quickly and severely than legislatures reduce budgets. "Ailing companies, including giants like Ford, are sending far fewer managers to $100-a-day classes," observes Forbes Magazine. Executive attendance was down at Darden by 15 percent in 2001. The school has reacted in true entrepreneurial fashion, offering a free web-based course on "Leadersh ip in Turbulent Times."

The market and the Holy Father

It's too early to know how a privatized Darden will fare in "turbulent times," but the move to privatization has already had a major impact. In its eagerness to enter the top ranks of business schools, Darden has made the pursuit of money its main activity. In doing so, it has de-emphasized research, for which there is no immediate market payoff. Faculty energy that elsewhere would be devoted to scholarship is expended on topics dictated by the needs of executive education.

Still, by the conventional index of success, the strategy has worked brilliantly, as the school's dramatic rise in the Business Week rankings attests. Is there any reason to believe that other universities won't make similar deals with their business schools, and that for their part the business schools won't compete more vigorously for corporate-training money? If that's the case, then the Darden School embodies the future--and what works for business schools can be adapted to other potentially profitable units of the university, especially the professional schools.

Since the founding of the first European universities in the thirteenth century, universities have had to defend themselves against powerful outside forces that would dictate how they manage their affairs. For all the accommodations they have made, the best ones have attempted to preserve a space for the pursuit and transmission of knowledge. "The university was controlled by and had to fight for intellectual purity against the Church," says Gordon Davies, the longtime director of Virginia's Council of Higher Education, "then it had to fight against the crown, and now it's against the corporation."

"There has always been a tension between the funding source that could control thought and the university," Davies adds. "We always have to say that the earth goes around the sun, even if it doesn't comport with what the Holy Father says." In place of the Holy Father there is now the marketplace, but for higher education the underlying question remains the same. Does the academic commons that Thomas Jefferson tried to embody in his design of the Lawn--professors and students with diverse academic interests coming together in a single open space--stand a chance in this dollar-driven era? Can a university maintain this kind of intellectual community if learning becomes just another consumer good?