I’ve been pretty tough on my alma mater in the Bacon’s Rebellion blog, but I’m detecting positive auras and penumbra emanating from Charlottesville these days. In a recent speech, Meredith Woo, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia, said some surprising things. First, she extolled the value of “virtue and character” — concepts that I thought had largely died out in Higher Education as hopelessly antiquated, bourgeois and politically incorrect. It’s good to know that someone still champions them.
Further, Woo indicated a willingness to make the kind of hard choices that leading universities must make in order to constrain costs while also pursuing excellence. Reading between the lines, I see her taking a page out of the business playbook. UVa, she seems to say, should reallocate resources from fields that generate a return on investment to fields that generate a higher rate of return.
As we remap the intellectual strengths of the College, we also need to make choices about the areas—or subfields—that need to be accentuated and nurtured, as we prune weak or unnecessary branches. No university has every possible department and no department has every possible subfield. We will endeavor to be known for the fields and subfields—some old, some new—in which we have unquestionable strength.
That is a greater departure from the conventional wisdom in academia than it might appear. In “
The Revenue-to-Cost Spiral in Higher Education,” Robert E. Martin explains the inflationary bias in the price of higher education (a topic that I blog about with some frequency). Higher Ed is dominated overwhelmingly by not-for-profits, he says. Instead of maximizing profits, universities exist to maximize institutional prestige, which they accomplish by recruiting prestigious faculty, admitting students with the highest SAT scores, building championship athletic programs, erecting magnificent new buildings and the like — all of which require spending more money.
There are no financial metrics such as Return on Equity or Return on Investment in academia by which to measure performance. Even if such metrics existed, it wouldn’t matter. There are no outside parties, as there are in the for-profit economy, to discipline under-performing management teams via buyouts or takeovers. Accountable to no one, university managements pursue their own agendas.
Colleges and universities allocate resources largely on the basis of internal politics, in which the interests of administrators prevail over those of the faculty, boards of trustees, alumni and students. “The incentives in higher education … lead to a bias against reform and a bias toward increasing revenues,” writes Miller. Enacting painful cuts to under-performing programs leads to controversy and unpleasantness. It’s far easier to fund new initiatives by seeking money from outside sources. Universities, unlike private companies, feel very little pressure to reallocate resources to uses that generate a higher return.
If I read Woo correctly, she is bucking the trend. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking on my part but the new management team at Virginia — Teresa Sullivan as president, Woo as dean — is off to a promising start.
Related
I’ve been pretty tough on my alma mater in the Bacon’s Rebellion blog, but I’m detecting positive auras and penumbra emanating from Charlottesville these days. In a recent speech, Meredith Woo, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia, said some surprising things. First, she extolled the value of “virtue and character” — concepts that I thought had largely died out in Higher Education as hopelessly antiquated, bourgeois and politically incorrect. It’s good to know that someone still champions them.
