Wannabe U

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

"Make no mistake about it," James Whitmore, president of Wannabe University, announced to the two hundred people attending the retirement party for one of the university's lawyers. "This is a university in transformation." A few people smiled. Some clapped. For the past few years, the president had informed legislators, donors, trustees, members of the University Senate, parents—almost anyone whom he was invited to address—"This is a university in transformation."

Everyone at the reception had often heard the term "a university in transformation," but they probably shared little, if any, consensus about what that term meant. No one ever had the audacity to ask publicly, "Just what do you mean, President Whitmore?" Nor did or could anyone challenge that "it" was occurring, whatever it might be. When the president of Wannabe University said what the university was doing, one listened.

Now in the seventh year of his presidency, James Whitmore stood tall in the classic business wear favored by university administrators: a dark suit, well cut but not too fashionable, white shirt, conservative tie, more Brooks Brothers than Barneys. His hair was also conservatively cut, a few wisps of the gray-brown falling gently on his forehead. Handsome enough to be a United States senator, President Whitmore had arrived at the reception relatively late and had stood on line, waiting his turn to wish the retiring lawyer well. He had already served longer than the average term of the president of a public research university.

The crowd, almost as lily-white as Ashton, the home of Wannabe University, had arrived slowly and milled around the ballroom, named for a former chairperson of the university's board of trustees. The ballroom was large enough to hold twenty round tables, each seating ten people; several twenty-foot-long tables burdened with hors d'oeuvres; and a mingling crowd smiling and unobtrusively reading one another's name tags—all punctuated by student servers carrying trays of stuffed mushrooms and teeny encrusted hot dogs. Today, though, no one sat except a vice president in his wheelchair. The long tables held trays of grapes, strawberries, and melon balls; carrots and celery strips, some olives; slices of American and Swiss cheese, crackers. The French doors to the twenty-by-twenty-foot alcove, which sometimes served as a bar, were closed. Instead, the refreshment tables also held glass pitchers of iced water and two large punch bowls filled with a pinkish liquid that begged for lemon to diminish its sweetness.

The retiree had arrived early to greet his invited guests as they filtered off the foyer elevator and stopped to pick up their name tags at the portable institutional table hidden by a white institutional tablecloth. Almost all of the guests knew the routine. Mainly administrators—some from the central administration, others from the schools and colleges, a few from the retiree's church—they had visited this hall for other receptions: retirements, dinners for student athletes receiving academic awards, even the Sunday brunch auction of the local chapter of a national women's service group. Most had attended so many university receptions that they could glance at the refreshments and calibrate the retiree's status at the university, just as they could count the deans, associate provosts, department heads, and vice presidents attending this party to gauge how much the lawyer mattered.

When a provost left the university and the central administration threw a party, they knew, the refreshments were fancier. Those same student servers, but more of them, circulated with trays of scallops wrapped in bacon or miniature Chinese scallion pancakes; tables were burdened with shrimp and an assortment of soft cheeses; a silver-colored fountain spewed melted chocolate, its base surrounded by trays of strawberries; and if the provost had served the university for many years, the guests might even include trustees, who would be formally welcomed by the president when he spoke. (One never ignores the presence of the twenty-one members of the board of trustees, twelve of whom were appointed by the governor. Students and alumni elected their representatives to the board, and several state commissioners held automatic seats on the board.)

There were no trustees today. But when the president had stood on the snaking reception line, his mere presence had created a bit of a lump as though the snake had ingested a meaningful meal, for many guests were as dutiful about greeting President Whitmore as they were about greeting the retiree. Some of his staff surrounded him on the line. Not the provost and the vice provosts; they came and went independently, just as their offices were on the ground floor and so separate from the (symbolically higher) second-floor offices of the president, his "personal" assistants, the chief financial officer, and the chief operating officer in Top Hall, the small building shared by the central administrators who mattered.

The most powerful of the president's staff—a man in his fifties, pale, suited but jacket unbuttoned, his hair blond-brown with the beginnings of a tonsure—shook hands with the social science professor immediately in front of him. "I'm Peter Lynch. I work with the president," he informed her. There would be no need to announce his identity and rank to administrators, not even department heads. They all knew who Peter Lynch was, but faculty members might not. For them, the transformation of the university meant less familiarity with central administrators, less of a say in university affairs, larger classes, more pressure to publish and get grants. Nonetheless, even the social science professor understood that Lynch's presence and the attendance of so many central administrators from Wannabe University's "non-academic" sector contradicted the budget for refreshments. The lawyer had apparently done his job well, devoting his last years at Wan U to assisting the push to improve the university or at least to increase its prestige. When he took the podium to address the guests, he spoke with sincerity: "I have no doubt that if I come back in ten years, Wan U will have risen in the rankings to be one of the great American universities."

The lawyer would not have to wait that long. In the tenth year of his presidency, at a reception honoring the founding of Wan U, President Whitmore announced: "This university has been transformed." Now the guests were seated in a long rectangular room in one of the older buildings on campus, the white gold-domed ex-library that currently housed such administrative officers as the vice provost for enrollment management and the vice president for student affairs, and offices that "processed students," such as the Office of the Registrar, the Office of Student Financial Aid Services, and the Office of the Dean of Students. On this occasion, the audience included people from more of the university's constituency, several specially invited students, some administrators, some faculty (mainly those active in the University Senate and a few department heads), a few alumni, two trustees, and the families of speakers. When the town's mayor, the state historian, and a black alumnus delivered their addresses, they too affirmed that this "transformed" university is a special place.

Unfortunately, neither the president nor the other speakers fully explained what they meant by "transformation." Rather they cited a series of "measurements," what the university website and a provost's presentation to the board of trustees were eventually to call "Points of Pride": Students included more valedictorians and salutatorians than ever before; the freshman class had higher scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test than previous classes; more underrepresented minorities were enrolled; student retention had increased. Some faculty had received million-dollar research grants. The university had achieved a higher ranking in the annual college edition of U.S. News & World Report. (Although those rankings have neither a solid theoretical or methodological basis, administrators care about those rankings, because potential students and their parents consult them to plan college applications. Improvement in those rankings influences the flow of applications [Monks and Ehrenberg 1999; Stevens 2007].)

At least one faculty member wondered about this litany of accomplishment. What about how the basic processes associated with education had changed? Was the focus on education or more efficient management? What about the presence of more and more managerial personnel and the increased centralization of administration, the interminable forms, the emergence of the university as an explicitly capitalist institution weighing revenue streams and seemingly paying more attention to the components of the university that brought revenue, such as the dining halls and cafeterias, rather than those that did not support themselves, such as the counseling services for students with "personal problems"? What about the ever-larger classes and the increased pressure on faculty to engage in funded research?

These processes of centralization, bureaucratization, and commodification seemed as crucial to the transformation of Wannabe University as the "Points of Pride" proclaimed by President Whitmore, perhaps even more so, for they had a direct impact on the work environment, particularly its atmosphere. But even though a fundamental change in institutional processes is central to the transformation of a university, President Whitmore stuck to the sorts of quantified accomplishments that seemed to express such basic American ideological themes as "With hard work, anyone can join the ranks of the elite" and "We can achieve prosperity through education." I will consider these themes later in this chapter and the processes of centralization, bureaucratization, and commodification in later chapters. For now, I note that President Whitmore was using the language of the managerial literature about higher education and that he was bold to declare that Wan U was participating in "institutional transformation."

INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION

In the literature about higher education that seems designed for college administrators, such terms as "institutional transformation" and "university in transformation" have a specific meaning. They refer to profound change, as defined by Eckel and his colleagues, who studied twenty-six colleges or universities seeking to transform themselves (Eckel, Hill, and Green 1998: 3; cf. Eckel and Kezar 2003: 17; Keup et al. 2001). That definition asserts that "institutional transformation"

1 alters the culture of the institution by changing select underlying assumptions and institutional behaviors, processes, and products; 2 is deep and pervasive, affecting the whole institution; 3 is intentional; and 4 occurs over time.

Thus, when President James Whitmore first declared Wannabe University to be a university in transformation and then proclaimed it to be a university that had transformed itself, he had implicitly asserted that the administration had purposively altered the university's culture, assumptions, behaviors, processes, and products. That is indeed a bold claim, especially because it is so difficult to define the culture of a large American university and to streamline its often cumbersome processes.

To understand the problem of change, one must understand something of how American universities work. As Clark (2004: 133) explains:

The American system of higher education ... combines very large size, extreme decentralized control, great institutional diversity, sharp institutional competition and substantial status hierarchy. Its most important feature is the radical disbursement of authority. It is a system composed both of major private sectors, in which over 2,000 private universities and colleges of all sizes operate under individual boards of control, devising their own viable niches, and of numerous public sectors in which another 1,600 institutions fall primarily under the 50 states rather than under the national government.

They all must respond to national policies, such as those governing student loans, research grants, and minority admissions. But, Clark (1983) says, they develop their own responses.

The structure of nonprofit institutions of higher education is also decentralized. To be sure, there is a central administration that reports to some sort of board of trustees, managers, or overseers. At some institutions, the central administration has much authority, at others less. The kind and amount of authority exerted by that central administration expresses itself in such crucial matters as appointing and tenuring staff and planning and executing budgets, although it affects less controversial matters as well. Conflicts between the central administration and the faculty are endemic to American universities, as discussed by Thorstein Veblen (1918), almost a hundred years ago.

On the whole, whether they are organized into academic departments or colleges, professors tend to be oriented toward their discipline. Mostly, members of disciplinary departments and colleges are oriented toward their professional colleagues and professional associations, as well as the logic implicit in their area of expertise. Many of them see administrators as "mere" managers, whose activities should serve such "core academic values" as advancing knowledge for its own sake. (Many managers perceive this disdain and resent it.) To be sure, many scientists do not understand the concerns of professors in the humanities or social sciences and vice versa; their last exposure to one another's areas of expertise and concern may have been the general-education courses required of undergraduates. Conflicts may also arise between professors working in professional schools, such as business and law schools, and those in the liberal arts and sciences. However, as different as their disciplines may be, professors tend to believe that their activities are the crux of higher education.

Conversely, administrators tend to believe that their own activities define the essence of the university. They see the world in radically different terms than faculty do. Where a professor may define a grant as the funds that enable research and support graduate students, an administrator may see a revenue stream. "Instead of being arms of the state, or representatives of the professors, [administrators] are, in pure form, the leaders—'captains' —of autonomous enterprises" (Clark 1983: 209). Instead of engaging in the competition of discovery, "their efforts on behalf of the welfare of individual institutions leads toward market-like interactions in which competition is the catalyst for change" (209). They may disdain individual professors or even the professoriate as unrealistic or unworldly. For instance, when administrators "decided to grow the undergraduate enrollment"—to invoke the business language that one provost customarily used when speaking to the board of trustees—professors created a hew and cry for additional faculty appointments. However, central administrators may find such desires naive. From their point of view, one can always squeeze another student in a lecture hall (if one has enough large lecture halls and the additional students are not seriously inflating the faculty-student ratio and so affecting a school's competitive edge over other colleges and universities). However, every additional hundred students may mean one has to hire another librarian, additional servers in the dining halls, and additional janitors, as well as to find additional spaces for beds. At Wannabe University, the chief financial officer has calculated such formulas innumerable times. As an administrator experienced with budgets explained, professors "have no appreciation for the mechanics" of running a university.

The central administration is oriented toward its competition with other institutions for students and for potentially profitable inventions (intellectual property) that may become technology transfers (an invention that moves from the university to the corporate sector ideally bringing profit to all; see Powell and Grodal 2005; Slaughter and Leslie 1999; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Etzkowitz, Webster, and Healey, 1998). It may also be oriented toward such auxiliary revenue streams as athletics, theatrical performances, and even the economics of managing the university as a city (such as its police and fire departments, its "town green" or student union, and even its restaurants and hotels, more properly identified as student cafeterias and dormitories).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Wannabe Uby Gaye Tuchman Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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