Academic Questions 6: Administrators are special people

One rainy evening we were sitting in the back room of the pub in the next street, a distinguished German historian and Archangel and I. In the US universities, said the historian, you have professional deans and other administrators, who make a career of it. Is that a good thing?  

At the German university where Archangel and the historian both profess, deans are elected by the faculty of their colleges for two-year terms. It’s a part-time job, often temporary; it doesn’t take people very far out of their research and teaching, so it isn’t very hard for them to get back. (Nobody is hired from outside the college for the sole purpose of being a dean.) Administrators above the dean level sometimes also have their jobs for a few years and then rotate back into regular faculty positions. This kind of rotation is not so likely in the US because administrative jobs are bigger in scale and scope: they take you too far away from research and teaching. By the time you have your full-time administrative job figured out, it’s hard to get back to scholarship.

So faculty governance still exists here, big time. To turn the historian’s question on its head, is that a good thing?

We all complain about the proliferation and professionalization of university administration in the US. What has become of faculty governance? we say. And of course everyone can tell stories about the clueless professional administrators who obstruct the work of teaching and research in costly ways, and the stories can even be true.

And everyone in Germany can tell stories about the clueless amateur administrators who obstruct the work of teaching and research in costly ways, and these stories can also be true. (The VP for Finance who can’t read a budget statement competently, the President who has never run anything bigger than his own office and expects to make decisions for a big university the way he has made them for his secretary and doctoral students.)

But it’s pointless to take sides for “faculty governance” versus “professional administration.” It’s like governments and markets: it isn’t helpful to take sides vigorously for one or the other when we need some of both. The question is how to get the right mix and how to get them to work together effectively.

The troubles around the scholars-and-administrators issue are typical troubles of specialization. Managing a big university is a specialized task, like teaching brain surgery, and you don’t really want part-time amateurs doing either of these things. The advantage of specialization is that you get people who are giving their full attention to the job at hand and (at best) know a lot about doing it.

The disadvantages of specialization? Durkheim was so wrong when he thought that specialization would lead to more social solidarity because we would all need each other more and therefore find each other more attractive (The Division of Labor in Society, 1893). One of the big disadvantages of specialization is that it means we don’t understand each other, our experiences and interests and values are too different, and we sometimes find each other very unattractive.

Fortunately, there are people who are both good scholars and good managers and therefore don’t suffer so much from the deformations of specialization. But you can’t populate all the universities in the country with people like this. There aren’t enough of them. Hence we have to live in universities populated in part by people who are scholars with minimal administrative skills or administrators with modest scholarly credentials—extreme contemplative and active types, as people in the ancient and medieval worlds would have said.

And how shocking the contemplative and active types find each other at times, if we look at end-of-spectrum instances. For the extreme activist, ideas are mostly tools for getting something done: now you pick up one tool, now you pick up another, as circumstances demand. So now you passionately espouse one set of ideas in order to move a project forward, and later you passionately espouse a different set of ideas to move the project even farther. Which (if either) of the sets of ideas is true does not matter so much as reaching some practical goal: growing the organization, winning the election, saving the rainforest. To the contemplative type, this is shocking: this is dishonest or grossly negligent.

Conversely, for the extreme contemplative type, practical matters are mostly tools or occasions for refining ideas. What is interesting about organizational growth or elections or saving rainforests is how the processes work. The contemplative type often seems more intellectually intrigued by organizational maneuvering than practically dedicated to making sure that the good guys win. To the active type this is shocking: this is irresponsible or humanly cold.

And each extreme type can see the other extreme type as lazy. The contemplatives don’t prepare properly for business meetings! Don’t contribute sensibly to the re-drafting of important policy statements! Don’t answer emails promptly! Do nothing but gaze at their metaphorical navels!—that is, their mathematical models of the universe or their ancient potsherds. The administrator fumes inwardly: These people are so self-indulgent! They’re just promoting their own careers by publishing another useless article, and they don’t care about how we’re going to raise the revenue that pays their salaries.

Conversely, to a non-activist, it seems that the activists don’t make any effort to think. They babble buzzwords! They're trying to promote ideas (and worse, trying to make me promote ideas) that were shown to be absurd twenty years ago, and they don’t even know it because they don’t bother to read any more! They want to admit and pass any student who can write a big enough check, and they don’t think about the long-term consequences! And so on. The scholar fumes inwardly: These people are so self-centered! They’re just promoting their careers, with their strategic planning meetings and branding initiatives, and they don’t care how much it interferes with the teaching and the research that are the whole reason we are here. 

And each side feels sorry for itself because each side thinks, I am working so hard and people don’t appreciate it.

Of course we can do better than this, and much of the time we do. We manage to live together without mutual resentment, and indeed with some Durkheimian mutual appreciation. We understand that you don’t actually want Ludwig Wittgenstein trying to run a large organization, and you also don’t want people pretending to be professors of philosophy when their talents consist primarily of getting stuff done and selling it in the marketplace (not Wittgenstein’s strengths).

We need professional administrators. The question is where we need them and what they should be doing. I think that German universities often have more trouble with where and US universities often have more trouble with what.

German universities often lack management strength in the layers between the individual (chaired) professor and the president-VP level. There’s a tendency for responsibility to accumulate excessively at higher and lower levels, with a weak space in the middle. Archangel once came home fuming because the person laying new computer cable in his building thought the university president had to determine the path the cable was to take. I believe the university president at the time was a historian of the early Christian church. (A nice man with no clue about computer cabling.)

The consequence of the weak middle is that too often things do not get done. The President and VPs can't do it all, and the professors have other interests. Hiring processes bog down (maybe you could delay hiring someone to teach those classes until next year, when we would have more leisure to process the forms?), admissions processes fall into chaos, the classroom space and the requirements for classroom space don't match up, and if you can find a room of the right size the roof leaks. (Not unknown in the US, either, of course.)

The disadvantage of the weak middle is not only the difficulty of getting infrastructure-type things done, like hiring and space management. It is also possible to ask whether recent German scandals about plagiarized and purchased Ph.D.’s would have been as frequent if admitting Ph.D. students and supervising their progress had been more of a middle-level matter—if there had been more input at a department level—rather than being left so much to the individual supervising professor (who may be supervising far too many Ph.D. students to keep a very close eye on most of them).

US universities often have a better structural balance of power across levels of the hierarchy (or so, at least, it seems to me). But the balance of power between scholarly and non-scholarly priorities in the US, at all levels, can be more problematic.

Revenue must be raised, in the US: students and alumni and corporations must be persuaded to write large checks. Obviously the institution cannot continue unless they do so. And equally obviously, the factors that will motivate these people to write large checks overlap only partially with high-quality scholarship and teaching. There are many generous and thoughtful check-writers out there, but any fund-raiser will tell you how sensitive fund-raising is to glamor factors.

Consider the building where each floor was sponsored by one or more corporate donors, who got their names on the floor--but none of the corporate donors wanted their names on the basement. (Basements are inglorious. Tough luck if your department got assigned to the basement.)

Consider the students who must be admitted and given degrees, in spite of dubious performance, because their families or companies are big contributors. (In some corrupt parts of the world, rich parents will hire a substitute to take university exams for their child, who then gets the degree the substitute has earned. Because US higher education is more efficiently managed, it asks the important question, why should we let these people write checks to substitutes when they could write checks to us instead? --Just kidding, sort of.)

Consider the administrators’ enthusiasm for departments that get big grants—which may only mean that their research is more expensive, not that it’s more valuable or important in other ways. (Can’t you philosophers and linguists and mathematicians find a way of doing scholarship that would cost more money? If not, what use are you?--Just kidding, sort of.) This can be an issue in German universities, too, admittedly: the big grant money the natural sciences bring in looks impressive to presidents and policy-makers, while the human sciences look like cheap dates.

Well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, as they said in the old Westerns. Administrators gotta patch together a semi-functioning organization against all the disastrous forces of entropy, and scholars gotta build untestable string theories and analyze sixteenth-century sonnets. And good luck to us all.