Managing Universities

 

Week 1: Introduction to the Course---The University

  • Readings
  • No Student Essays due until Week 2
Every course has a purpose, and this one focuses on issues of managing universities with a special emphasis on research universities. Management is a technique; it is not an end in itself. Academics manage by using a collection of tools and processes to implement values and achieve objectives. All organizations manage themselves in some way. Mangers can do things on the spur of the moment or they can manage with rigid inflexible hierarchies; they can respond to external pressures or internal politics. They can mange by objective or manage with zero-based budgeting. They can do value-based management. They can follow Total Quality Management or Continuous Quality Improvement. They can implement participatory or autocratic, bottom-up or top-down management. Whatever the name, all universities do management. The more complicated the academic enterprise the more management it requires.

Management is essential to the success of any organization, and many experts give advice. Bookstores carry shelves of how-to books on management theories. They offer different sequences of magic steps guaranteed to produce business success. They often coin a catchy phrase to capture the essential meaning of their management prescription. Frequently, these books reflect the success of particular business people who attribute their achievements to the special principles outlined in their book.

If read carefully, and everyone should read some of these, most management books focus on the obvious. They identify some simple principles and present them in effective ways. The core principles are:

  • Know the business
  • Know the customers
  • Appreciate the employees
  • Pay attention to the money

Everything else elaborates on these themes. Much of what appears in management books is style rather than substance. For example, some talk about managing by walking around or managing by example. All of this is style that reflects primarily methods of communication. While style is surely interesting and useful, it does not replace the substance of management.

Popular books on management usually charm the reader with a skillful breezy style, but often they make no allowance for the complexities of organizations and the widely varying characteristics and circumstances of different enterprises. Everything that a management guru says, works somewhere in some business under some circumstances. Many such books have interesting insights, but most offer buzz words that often fail to resolve the specific challenges of real organizations. Indeed, if a science of management existed, we would need only a few books to explain it. The proliferation of how-to-succeed-in-management books reassures us that management is practical art, not an experimental science.

Those who observe and study management in similar organizations over time discover that successful managers (deans, department chairs, program directors, vice presidents/chancellors, provosts, and presidents/chancellors, for example) employ highly diverse styles and techniques, and nonetheless achieve great success. Others with identical styles using similar techniques achieve much less. Style and technique are not the core issues of management. They have their purposes and uses, but they do not replace the substance of management, nor do they replace the essential component of fortunate circumstances or plain, simple, good luck.

The readings for this week and the next, offer perspectives on the university and its purpose. For universities, knowing the business involves an understanding of purposes and core values. The first week's items present some of the conversation about what higher education ought to be and what it has been. David Dowling's chapter on "History" in the e-text The Ideas of a University give some historical perspective to the notion of university within our social and cultural heritage. Thomas Jefferson's description of what the University of Virginia ought to be provides a foundation document for the invention of the American public university. "Managing the Research University" provides a contemporary view of the dynamics and structure of these institutions. Throughout this week and next we consider the fundamental tension inherent in the two conflicting notions the American university serves:

  • The ideal notion of the university as a charmed place of pure thought and liberal intellect.
  • The practical notion of the university as an efficient generator and transmitter of the useful knowledge that creates the American economic dream of a good life for individuals and the nation.

The conversation about these two notions constitutes a fundamental value conflict that has and will continue to engage students of American higher education. If academics want to know the business and know the customers, they must come to some understanding of these conflicting traditions in American higher education and reconcile these contradictions for themselves and their institutions.

In the conversations in class and on-line, we begin with some of these issues. We may not resolve them, but we must engage them.

  • What, in a paragraph, would describe the purposes of the university?
  • Why do Americans have such ambivalent attitudes towards the goals and purposes of higher education?
  • Have the big, public, land-grant universities and the major private research institutions abandoned the liberal arts tradition in pursuit of unabashed commercial pragmatism?
  • Why have the faculty guilds survived so long and so effectively in American universities?
  • What elements of organization and culture make managing universities such a challenge?

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