As universities are under attack by activist boards and unfriendly legislatures, as they face increasing political pressures to align their teaching and research with the agendas of conservative politicians, and as even Presidents of flagship systems in ostensibly liberal states call for “viewpoint neutrality”, Andrew Ross Sorkin and his colleagues at the New York Times decided that the real problem of higher education may be the provenance of their leadership. In a poorly researched and concerningly biased Dealbook article, Sorkin and other pundits argue that “modern universities require different kinds of leadership” than the ‘academic-heavy’ management that they perceive as the culprit for the many of higher education’s problems. The difficulty is: they are just completely wrong.
Sorkin and the other Times hot-takers get one thing right in their little conservative pile-on: modern universities are large and complex organizations, “multibillion dollar enterprises”. For them, this requires expertise that are simply absent among academics, calling for people with MBAs that, while uncorrelated to actual performance, give the impression of independence and professionalism. What the Dealbook authors fail to see is that, precisely because of the complexity of higher education, senior managers are often quite professionalized, and quite limited, in their capacity to act. This is more so the case when they are subjected to governing boards that have their own agendas, leading to even narrower possibilities for action.
As managers of large payrolls, awards and grants, student tuition and personal information, real estate, investments, and a host of other areas, university administrators respond to a panoply of formal regulations and informal standards. University accounts? Highly structured and constantly checked for their compliance with state-imposed mandates, donor restrictions, and general accounting principles. Course approvals? Long processes of vetting that may include a number of experts on pedagogy and education checking for the quality of instructional approaches and designs. Grant applications? Highly mediated experiences that require various divisions on campuses to coordinate IRB approvals, proposed budgets, HR constrains, and various other layers of bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is consequential: it establishes limits on what administrators can do, whether former academics or outsiders to academia. Michael Cohen and James March said as much in their now classic Leadership and Ambiguity, a study of university presidents. Although seen as agents of change, most had relatively little direct control over their organization’s fate.
Why, then, direct attention to restricted presidents rather than their overseeing boards in the recent coverage of the New York Times? I see one plausible explanation. Through his rather uninformed and ignorant criticism, Sorkin is joining conservative voices across the country in effectively calling for more active intervention by governing boards in their university’s affairs. University boards are the legal bodies where most authority truly resides. They hold ultimate control of all sorts of policies and appointments. At the University of California, they sign off on our policies, our appointments, our pension, and on the viability of our careers. Historically, their work has occurred in tense cooperation with faculty and campus administrators, who advise on policies, their implications, and potential courses of action. The line was always relatively clear: the Regents selected leadership that embodied their vision, but seldom intervened directly in the organization, other than approving capital development projects by authorizing the system to take on more debt. In recent years, just as elsewhere, our governing board has become more of an activist, at times unilaterally defining the meaning of university policies, including those concerning the limits of academic freedom. Such is the case of Jay Sures, a University of California Regent reappointed by Newsom to a 12 year term in 2020 and who has (unwittingly?) become a darling of the right-wing media as a defender of certain restrictions to free speech on campus. This is the true target of people like Sorkin and the far-right, I imagine: not so much to dismantle higher education but to better control it by making those who really hold power (politically-elected boards) more effective at exercising control. It really is no surprise that this has been a topic of conversation among consultants like McKinsey for some time, who see reconfiguring the composition and operation of university boards as a key for the future of higher education.
Alternative explanations may also exist. It may simply be the case that Sorkin is just another ignorant, overblown pundit produced by social media. This is also certainly true. Alas, I fear it is not the only plausible explanation.