Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education/Governing Academia: Who Is in Charge at the Modern University?

Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education

David L. Kirp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003

Governing Academia: Who Is in Charge at the Modern University?

Ronald G. Ehrenberg, ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004

One of the essential questions dogging the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is whether collective action-by a state, an enterprise, or an institution (like a university)-is more effective (or more efficient) when regulated from the top or when responding freely to market forces. The old Soviet model failed because the command economy served hugely stupid assumptions (not to say pathological illusions). Yet there is something disturbing and repellent about an amoral marketplace in which winners (like Enron) take all from losers (like the flimflammed people of California). How can we be both as smart as we assume the invisible hand to be and as moral or as good (or at least as "progressive") as governments ought to be?

Two new books on higher education look at this dilemma from divergent perspectives. One-Governing Academia: Who Is in Charge at the Modern University?-grapples with how institutions are governed. The other-Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education-looks at how institutions have transformed themselves with explicit responses to market forces. One conies away from reading these books together with the clear impression that we have reached-passed, even-a tipping point in the way higher education is evolving. Once considered a sacred trust, holding and cultivating the wisdom of the ages for succeeding generations, higher education has perhaps now become complicit in the market mania of our age.

As the state has progressively withdrawn its financial and moral support (nay, as it has leveled outright assaults on institutional integrity), the power of markets has driven more of our lives. So, have colleges and universities begun to turn the critical choices that they formerly made in exercising their public trust over to paying customers? Are they more like resorts with smorgasbords, serving clients instead of acting in their best interests? "Governing" or "deciding" or "choosing" is perhaps no longer for lay trustees or even so much for the professional and intellectual trusteeship of the faculty if an institution is to attract the resources it needs to survive and thrive in an increasingly market-driven world.

Ronald Ehrenberg's 2000 book, Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, was a tour de force in the economics of higher education. In Governing Academia, he has edited a collection of essays by a varied group of authors-including administrators and scholars-that aims to describe "how higher education is governed." But the authors write more about the kind of economic algorithms and perspectives they use to understand decisions than about the street-level politics in which the players in governance engage. Some of the essays are extraordinary, though, and the book's impact will be felt through powerful insights from subsections of these essays. The book does not, in the end, however, form a coherent whole, nor even an especially consistent narrative. (But, then, "governance" is not an especially coherent subject.) Its style varies from the clear and compelling to the off-putting use of "propositions," formulae, and abstractions.

The paper by Gabriel Kaplan, a University of Colorado public affairs professor, comes closest to "describing how higher education is governed." It reports the results of a massive governance survey sponsored by the AAUP in 2001 and compares those results to findings from an AAUP survey conducted circa 1970. It thus provides both a contemporary "state-of-things" report and a sense of the thirty-year trends.

The more recent survey focused on how the norm of shared authority is implemented. Not surprisingly, it found that things have changed since the earlier survey. But contrary to much current commentary on the subject, Kaplan found that faculty influence has grown significantly on a wide array of decisions, such as those having to do with faculty appointments and tenure, some administrative appointments, and the setting of average teaching loads.

The book's opening chapter by James Freedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College and the University of Iowa, is an especially candid look at his own experience as president of two major institutions of higher education and his relationships with his boards. His thoughtful reflections and suggestions for practice are, by themselves, worth the price of the book.

The chapter by Susan Lohmann, a UCLA political scientist, is a lucid examination of the historical roots of the culture of university decision making. She focuses especially on "deep specialization" as academe's core value, which makes decisions at the department level "impenetrable" to outsiders. (I simplify her argument this way: historians don't understand theoretical physicists; economists don't understand literary scholars; and presidents don't understand anyone. Yet they have to come together to decide important issues affecting them all.)