The problem of (management) knowledge in higher education is distressingly complicated but, like most complicated things, is one that requires urgent attention. How should we run universities? How should we plan their academic programs? Reward efforts of their staff and faculty? Work with organized labor? Anticipate catastrophes? Plan the design and deployment of information systems? Comply with a panoply of regulations? The list of questions is long and ever-expanding, reflecting perhaps our organizations’ constant adaptations to their always messy, changing environments.
One of the greatest ironies of these questions is that they are asked of institutions that are in the business of producing knowledge. Universities have as one of their goals to produce new knowledge about the world, a kind of knowledge that, by extension, is relevant for the survival of universities. Scholars across many institutions study insurance and risk, for example, thinking about how to build more resilient organizations. And yet, when questions about the future of higher education are asked, most of these scholars contribute not to the discussions. Scholars across a few organizations study climate change and climate adaptation, yet their voices are seldom part of the conversations on how to redesign our campuses and operations into the future. Management scholars and accounting scholars proliferate across higher education, but not so in discussions about restructuring and re-budgeting, where their expertise might be of use. It is as if our institutions were unique, exceptional, requiring expertise that are untethered from those we produce in our offices and labs.
Why is this so? One reason concerns jurisdictional battles. Ove the years, management consultants have come to occupy this niche, often with disastrous consequences. Having little stakes in the game, their interventions treat higher education as just another service industry, largely ignoring the broader ecology as well as the potential to restructure institutions in creative ways. Their cookie-cutter techniques might fail to address these questions in a durable manner (don’t kill milk cow, I guess) and may too often align with the immediate interests of management, but they also grant senior administrators and governing boards a veneer of independence in their actions making them even stronger.
But another, perhaps less obvious, reason is that academics—particularly those with full-time, tenured positions—tend to avoid doing the kind of work that management does. We are rewarded, after all, by our research (and less so our teaching), not our service or administrative contributions. You may sit on a thousand committees above a million bureaucratic plateaus, but that will go into a section of your CV which is largely invisible during reviews and promotions. Administrative work is valueless, for many academics, even though it can be world-changing in ways few publications are. The line of sight between the professoriate and administration has been lost, partly because we have stopped looking in that direction in the first place.
This is tied to another feature of the problem of management: academics are terrible administrators and often have The Dumbest Ideas ™ in the system. The phrase “why can’t we pay that with the endowment?” stands as an example, showing a very limited knowledge of how budgets are structured on campus. But so do proposals that seem to be well thought through which, in addition to being disconnected from facts, ignore the work that keeps our campuses going and the potential coalitions that might be forged to answer our most pressing problems. At a recent meeting, for example a group of faculty was told that their graduate program would be severely curtailed in terms of the number of students they could accept. “Non-sense!”, said one scholar, “all we need to do is grow undergraduate enrollments to increase the number of graduate students we can accept”. Wonderful! Someone who understands budgeting practices! But when confronted with the stark reality that this would require increasing enrollments by 80%–much more than what the dedicated staff of that unit has managed to accomplish in seven years of strategizing and thinking—the scholar minimized the concerns and insisted on the excellence of their approach. The staff, largely responsible for running the programs? Minimized or simply not invited to the conversation.
I love the metaphor that Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò gave us in his Elite Capture: power is about “being in the room”. And being in the room requires, on occasions, sacrifice from other tasks. The problem of management knowledge in higher education isn’t just ‘interests’ and the politics of governing boards imposing their wills on our systems of teaching and research. Those are real rooms we have no access to. But, to a certain extent, many in our profession have decided to leave some rooms they once had access to while closing the doors of the rooms they now control to those who should be there—staff, students, lecturers, and so forth. Some things are under our control—if not at the level of university boards and school politics, at the very least in the confines of our own departments. Change starts somewhere. Opening those doors would be a solid step in the correct direction.