Sometimes it seems that way. The latest example comes from the College of Saint Rose, where the president, Carolyn Stefanco, has won an award. What great accomplishment deserved recognition?
Stefanco, the president of Saint Rose, received the award two months after announcing the elimination of 23 faculty positions — many of them tenured — and 12 academic programs. She pitched the cuts, part of an attempt to fix a $9 million deficit, as a way to save money while investing in the college’s more popular programs.
Oh. “Popular” programs. I’m in one of those! Good thing I don’t have to worry about biology being shuttered, and it’s that other side of campus that’s more at risk. Who needs foreign languages, for instance? Or in another trend I see a lot of, let’s bugger philosophy. What a joke major
! Don’t you know the purpose of college is to get a high paying job
, to cite a recent exchange.
The award was for being a “disruptor”. It comes from…business. Of course.
“Disrupter,” a word native to start-up culture, typically describes someone who balks at conventional wisdom and comes out ahead. A disrupter discovers newer, better ways to run businesses and manipulate industries.
“To flourish in business these days is to make disruption and change work for you and your business,” Mike Hendricks, editor-in-chief of the Review, wrote when the paper announced the winners. “You have to recognize the need and opportunity for change and risk the status quo.”
We do need better ways to support higher education — I think faculty would welcome innovators who could shake up the status quo, because we’re getting worried. The problem is that a university is not a business, and our goal isn’t to make money — it’s to teach and learn. Coming in and disrupting education to make more money kind of ignores the whole function of the institution. It would be as if a business hired me, an academic, to “disrupt” their status quo, and I declared that I was going to “disrupt” that whole crap about profits and economics and instead redefine their purpose to be all about giving their expertise to the community. I don’t think it would go over well with the stockholders.
Unfortunately, the people who’ve been handed the reins of our universities are too often sitting their with a stockholder mentality.
Unsurprisingly, the faculty had a no-confidence vote on Stefanco. Also unsurprisingly, the board of trustees affirmed their confidence in her.
Once universities are thoroughly walmart-ized and the non profits are pushed out by marketing and competition, then begins the race to the bottom, quality-wise. After that only the scions of the oligarchy will be able to get private tutoring or attend ivy league schools.
So why aren’t universities in control of the faculty again? Wasn’t that the historical way of running scholarly institutions?
It’s a huge disappointment. One of the professors getting eliminated is an excellent blogger over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money – I hope he lands on his feet somewhere else.
And why a goddamn award? It’s a private college with a small endowment (less than $50 million), so I get that they have to make cuts if they’re running a multi-million dollar deficit. It’s not something they should be celebrated for, though.
Is this kind of misgovernance a trend in countries that are not the US? There are ancient and respected universities in some other countries, as I recall. At present the US is a destination of choice for students from many other countries looking for post-baccalaureate education, but if this trend continues I can see other countries becoming the first choice in our place.
**cough** Margaret Spelling **cough** University of North Carolina system **cough**
I’ve heard of disruptive technologies before – something that does the old thing in a completely new way (and better) as opposed to being the old way with a small improvement. But I’ve not heard of it in a business context, which was … just as well.
To be honest, I can’t see the novelty in this. We screwed up the balance sheet, so we’ll fire people until the numbers look ok again. That’s Plan A-F in business and industry, for heaven’s sake. That said, I admit I never understood how that is actually supposed to work. You’re kicking out people making you money to cut cost, so by the next quarter all the new money will come … from … uh. Is it just too long term to plan that far ahead?
Argh…. I am so sick and tired of “disruption” being misused. In a business context, it’s a term with specific meaning coined back in the ’90s that has since been used as a meaningless buzzword. It does not mean “discover newer, better ways to run a business”. The best way to describe it is the way that comes off as an insult to the disruptor: “a crappy product for a crappy customer”.
In this specific instance, disruption is not happening. Not in the business meaning, anyways. Focusing on “popular” courses is specifically focusing on already established business. That would be a sustaining change, aka basic business practice. In this case, all that’s been done is a basic layoff and removal of less profitable business sections to focus on receiving higher profits from their higher-profit areas. That’s so far from disruption that it is actually textbook symptoms of a business that is being disrupted (not one that is doing the disrupting).
I also don’t agree with making schools profit-focused, but they aren’t even using or applying business terms correctly. Seriously, it comes off as incredible incompetence.
#2
The original European Universities emerged from the late eleventh century (possibly the late tenth if we’re counting the medical schools of Salerno) to the early thirteenth. They were basically guilds – either of masters (Paris) or of students (Bologna) or of both (Oxford, Salamanca, etc.) – which acted to regulate and promote the interests of their members. Before the University provided a kind of institutional stability in higher learning, the educational and research culture of western Europe tended to be much more fluid and less constant. Some Cathedral Schools and independent fee-charging masters in big cities offered higher learning, but their schools generally didn’t last beyond the deaths of individual masters, and they generally taught only what said masters were interested or competent in. Peter Abelard is perhaps the best and best known example of what the pre-university world was like – he taught logic and theology in Paris from a very iconoclastic perspective. Once Universities offered a kind of institutional stability, it was possible to create fixed curricula, formal degrees, fixed stationers to facilitate the copying and dissemination of books and a community of scholars from which new research and new understanding could more easily emerge.
Admittedly the vast majority of Medieval students were either from very wealthy backgrounds or supported by church benefices (especially the postgraduates studying theology), but the whole point of the institution was education, not profit. There was, of course, complaining about how so many people wanted to study Law and Medicine – the dismissively named “artes lucrativae” – and get rich from the knowledge, but these were postgraduate subjects in any case, and required a first degree in the Liberal Arts to progress to. The alternative was Theology, and that had such cultural cachet that the complaining was generally along moral lines rather than due to fears that they were being priced out of the market.
Wait, I thought it was students who were waging a war against education?
I get that academics are “sheltered from the real world” and don’t understand business and all that, but why do business people think they understand academia or how to make academic institutions function most effectively?
Numenaster@4: Is this kind of misgovernance a trend in countries that are not the US
Definitely it’s a thing in Canada, which is in fact not the US though sometimes even we lose sight of that. My dad’s university has had a corporate board for decades, constantly appointing presidents who try (but fail, due to the union) to hire all adjuncts, pay nothing, abolish tenure, etc. Constantly the reason is to cut costs because the University has such a terrible budgetary problem… pay no attention to the half-million a year they spend renovating the President’s house.
Of course, when the student paper pointed out such a large vanity capital expenditure in a year when the University was begging to increase tuition, a budgetary emergency emerged which forced the University to cut all funding to the paper (IIRC that got reversed).
A HA! Proof that PZ is a pinko commie socialist who hates America and doesn’t want it to be Great Again.
Because business people assume that everyone shares their goals? Like, if you are good at running a business to make money for you and your stockholders, you might assume the purpose of the university is to make money for the president/high administration, rather than money being something you need to accomplish your actual goal of educating students and/or having a good reputation for research and scholarship.
well if they think higher education is something that should be run like a business shouldn’t they do the normal business practice of doing a through analysis of their business and their industry before they just start making layoffs to shore-up sagging profit margins? Sadly this sounds like many corporate stories, a company is not growing particularly rapidly hires a new CEO who maybe from a very different industry or is taken over by some corporate raider who make a series of short sighted decisions that eventually drive the business to the wall leading to disintegration and bankruptcy.
Sad to see in any higher education institution go through this.
uncle frogy
ksiondag@7: “I also don’t agree with making schools profit-focused, but they aren’t even using or applying business terms correctly. ”
I have long characterized a great deal of the behavior of college administrators as “cargo-cult business”; this fits into that paradigm nicely. Alas.
Oops. I meant “cargo-cult management”. FWIW.
I’m not sure it’s fair to say university administration has a lock on cargo-culting. Seems pretty common throughout the business world.
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Waaaaaay back in the mid 1980’s while waiting to go into a Stage II Chem class a fellow student said something like that. The rest of the class gave them a look of horror and several, myself included, said we were here to learn to think. I do sometimes wonder if the ratio would be reversed these days. Especially since students in NZ generally now end up with sizeable loans that my generation did not.
Laying people off when the numbers are red is so old school it does in fact get used as a first instance even when totally nonsensical. I was once present at a company meeting where the manager showed presentation from which it was clear that the numbers are red due to badly calculated offers and closed contracts (made by his predecesors) which caused the end product (our main product at that time) being cheaper than the raw material. An analyst from headquarters even calculated that if the whole plant run without personell, it would still run red numbers. Yet the proposed solution – lay offs. After I asked the manager at the meeting, in front of assembled personell, how that adresses the problem, he fidgeted awkwardly and then said that it does not, it is just a standard book keeping trick to temporarilly improve the look of the numbers. Of course the numbers remained red until the pricing was fixed, but with the added benefit of losing some other contracts due to low personel and making a lot of people unemployed. Yay!
The “run it like a business” does not creep only into academia in US. It also creeps into politics across EU and it is used as a slogan. Some politicians do not see money from taxes as a means to running the state, they see it as a goal in itself.
Same reason business folks think they can run government better than politicians. Drink water in Flint Michigan as an example of the end product. It all fits within the same Venn Diagram circle of folks who have a hammer thinking everything is a nail.
The aggrieved faculty commenting on the Higher Ed story linked make some interesting points:
1. Apparently the $9M deficit is not an ongoing operating loss but a one-time write down of properties from a poorly thought out building program that saw the college overcapitalise on prestigious buildings.
2. Apparently the past president who drove the program that led to the $9M deficit left service with a massive payout.
So, as usual, the executives make the bad decisions and skim off huge rewards while the working staff who provide the actual coalface services get shafted.
Rob wrote:
I’m sure it probably is, but I do not blame the students. The students didn’t design the system where a college degree is used as an easy sorting method for hiring managers who want to winnow the list of applicants to a more manageable number. A college degree has become the price of admission to even be allowed to apply for decent jobs for those looking for entry level positions. They’re just playing the game they were forced into, so the sneers of “entitlement attitudes” have always rang a little hollow to me.
numerobis #16
Absolutely. I suspect it has something to do with how the top brass is completely isolated from the day-to-day operations on the floor. The people making decisions tend to be the people who know least about how the actual work is done.
That may be why they choose primitive tools, such as lay-offs, for solving problems. To come up with a more elegant fix would require them to understand the business and who has time for that?
So if disruption for disruption’s sake is considered good, doesn’t that make it part of the status quo? Can I get a disruptor award for implementing the policy that change will only be made when there is clear reason for the change and a demonstrated advantage to the new way of doing things, not just any time someone feels the need for a change for change’s sake?
The “disruption” and “award” are a joke, but there is some real reason for the cuts.
This is a small private college, not a university, and the programs that were cut had few or no students.
So there is that. Sounds like the building program (I live near there, so I witnessed it) caused the problem, but unsustainable programs need to either have better recruitment or go away. A program in some cases was one professor. Its disappointing but a small college like that can’t offer everything.