Minds for hire: exploring ideas and practices in the areas of planning and managing - on the boundary - Brief Article

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Sept, 2001 by Mario Moussa

George F. Babbit, that disturbing creation of novelist Sinclair Lewis, never quite knew what to make of academic types. Babbit was pure business. He loved hustle on the job, ample servings of pork and mashed potatoes at dinner, and back-slapping good fun at the Chamber of Commerce. He detested those "irresponsible teachers and professors" who refused to whoop it up for "rational prosperity." If he had his way, they'd all be fired.

Babbit lives on in the current debate about tenure, faculty unions and the commercialization of academia. It's full of outsized characters and harsh opinions.

On one side you find the ruthless pursuit of profit and lowbrow culture. Standing shoulder to shoulder are the capitalist Nowhere Men--Babbit and his fellow Boosters. On the other, the defenders of learning and higher values. Unfettered and free-thinking faculty members shore up the last bulwark against the onslaughts of the market.

Op-ed pieces trade on versions of this either-or picture. In a recent New York Times editorial, journalist Ellen Willis compared today's university to a corporation. Faculty members are employees who must increase their productivity. Students and parents are customers to be satisfied. Most disturbing of all, "merit pay" has become "market pay"--salaries are determined by demand for professors' services rather than scholarly achievement.

Decrying administrators' attacks on faculty governance, Willis quotes an old labor movement saying: "The boss organizes the shop." Another professor, defending traditional tenure policies, quotes Alexander Hamilton: "In the general course of human nature, a power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will."

So, either you are a member of a community of scholars or you are an enslaved factory worker.

To be fair, administrators opt for similar stereotypes in defending themselves. NYU dean Catharine Stimpson fears that unions will impose an "alien model"--an industrial model--on academic life. Teaching, learning and research exist somehow in protected spaces, the quiet groves on the edge of the market.

Not surprisingly, labor relations experts put a different spin on the industrial model. Academic life has already changed, irrevocably, since universities now operate like businesses.

As two academics recently put it in the Chronicle of Higher Education, faculty and professional staff have become "cogs" in commercial-like enterprises.

Factory work or the life of the mind? Medieval philosopher Peter Abelard was a serious thinker, and he made money off ideas, like other teaching masters who gravitated to Paris in search of economic opportunity. Abelard's was a mind for hire.

But, if you want another way of framing today's commerce vs. academics debate, maybe a 12th-century tutor is too remote. Try a dose of contemporary MBA economics instead. Robert Zemsky of Penn's Institute on Higher Education has shown it can be a mind-clearing tonic.

Basic Law of Economics: buyers purchase goods and services only when value exceeds price. The extra value equals consumer surplus plus producer margin. True for car buyers, true for parents and students paying for education. With a nod toward economics, university administrators have begun using terms like "institutional margin" in setting prices.

Is this Babbitry? No, because the fatter the margin, the more ideas a university can fund. Universities should maximize revenues--to keeping alive valuable programs and projects that might not survive elsewhere. A solid pricing strategy, supported by carefully chosen cross-subsidies, protects the life of the mind.

Colleges and universities have always been commercial-like enterprises, all the way back to their medieval roots. Participants in the current debate often ignore the peculiar mix of market economics and lofty purposes that makes administrators' jobs so hard. True, even administrators fall back on inappropriate metaphors that recall a time that never was.

So, does the industrial model fit these unique enterprises? Perhaps, but you probably won't find many shop bosses running them.

Mario Moussa, principal with CFAR, Inc., a management-consulting firm.