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. 

Academic Questions 4: Career paths

The German for “career path” is “Laufbahn,” but the English and German terms don’t give exactly the same picture of your course through life. A path can wind around in the woods, you can lose it and find it. A Laufbahn is not like this. In German, the Bahn is the railroad. A Rennbahn is a race track; a speed-skating raceway is an Eisschnelllaufbahn. Your way along a Bahn doesn’t wander, you can’t find it and lose it and find it again.

In the US you can wander casually into and out of many kinds of work, in a way that is not so possible in Germany. Let’s say that in the US you want to set up a shoe-repair shop. According to various online recommendations, you should hunt around to find someone who will show how to do the work, or maybe you can find a course somewhere. Then you figure out, by whatever means you can, how to produce some sort of business plan. and figure out, by whatever means you can, what sort of government paperwork is required before you open your doors. Stumble along, find your path through the woods.

In Germany there is a standard formal apprenticeship and licensing process. If you’re going to put new heels on people’s shoes you have to pass a theoretical exam that includes knowledge of the anatomy of the human foot, as well as knowledge of relevant regulations and business practices. You also have to pass a practical exam after doing your apprenticeship. It’s like getting on a train that goes down a track that is already laid out, it’s not like finding your way through the woods.

The track that takes you through an academic career in Germany has some problems: it’s been under attack recently, because the early stages of the academic Laufbahn are not attractive here; it’s a reason why talented young German researchers leave the country and talented young non-German researchers don’t come. So Germany has been starting to re-lay the tracks on this particular railroad. But it's difficult.

Of course money is part of the problem: especially in professional fields (business, law, medicine), the pay is not as high in German universities as it is in the US. But I think other problems—independence and uncertainty for young scholars—loom as large as the differences in expected salaries.

Promising young scholars are often eager to be independent when they finish their Ph.D.s. They want to escape the bossiness of their dissertation committees. They want to pursue their own questions by their own means. But they are usually not completely ready to do this yet: they need advice and assistance. So how does the system cope with these contradictory demands for independence and help?

American culture has a strong independence myth, and so young scholars are officially independent. Their actual dependence is dealt with informally on the side. As an Assistant Professor, in theory, you’re on your own: no one supervises your research or (except for purposes of coordinating multi-section courses) your teaching. In practice, if you’re not too unlucky or socially incompetent, various senior people will adopt you and forward you and sacrifice their time to help with your projects.

German culture, in contrast, has a strong myth of order and hierarchy; and so, at least in the past, the theory has been that young scholars are firmly supervised. Independent action exists informally, on the side. German society has loosened up in this respect in the last generation or two but I can remember, in Bavaria in the 1970s, when the hierarchical myth was so strong that it seemed shocking to respectable society for a group of students to rent an apartment together, just as a group of equals. Communists! Anarchists! No one is in charge! The right thing was for students to live in properly organized dormitories or in spare rooms in grown-ups’ houses or apartments, where someone was in charge. (There were actually cases of people being booted out of civil service jobs because it was discovered that, as students, they had lived in roommate groups. I know what having roommates is all about, said my Munich landlord. No private property. Group sex. Don’t try to tell me anything different.) So when you finish a Ph.D. in Germany, the traditional expectation was, not that you would be independent, but that you would be working for a senior scholar who would employ you on his or her projects. This is not attractive to young scholars who have projects of their own in mind. 

In the last several years in Germany, a number of positions called Junior Professor (untenured) have been created. If you're very good, you might be able to get one of these soon after you finish your Ph.D., instead of working for years as some senior professor’s slave. The tricky thing about this, however, is that you can come to the end of your untenured Junior Professorship with an excellent record, but you can be dead meat because there isn’t a full professorship open in your field at the right moment. The tracks may not connect in the right way to move you along in your personal Laufbahn.

Let’s suppose that in the US you are an ambitious young person trained in a good Ph.D. program, and you get an excellent first job. If you do spectacularly well, you can simply stay at the the excellent university, becoming an Associate Prof and then a full Prof. In Germany you can’t stay where you’ve been; you typically have to move to become a tenured Prof, and you have to wait until a position opens somewhere. It’s not a question of how good you are, it’s a question of when a relevant senior person retires or drops dead. (This is true for Assistant Profs in the US in fields where supply significantly exceeds demand; but once you're an Assistant you have a chance at continuity.) Or possibly a senior person will move, but they don’t do that so often in Germany. There isn’t much of a senior labor market. (See end of post for a little more on this.)

There’s plenty of insecurity in US academic career paths as well, but the nature of it is different. Of course the likelihood is that you won’t do spectacularly well when you start out. If you begin as an Assistant Prof at a very good US school you probably won’t get tenure there. So you move on to an Assistant Prof or Associate Prof position at another school; and here is where the US career path starts to look like one of those tracks through the woods that fades and divides. (I recently wrote an evaluation letter for someone’s fourth attempt at tenure. That makes a good twenty-five years of being an Assistant Prof, at four different schools.) If the research career doesn’t work out at all, you can move down to a non-research school. 

In Germany I think it’s easier to fall right off the tracks of the Laufbahn like a derailed train. For one thing, you can’t go on and on getting new Junior Professorships; you may not even be able to go on and on getting new positions as a WiMi (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter, the traditional post-Ph.D. position, in which you work for a senior Prof). Moreover, many of the German Ph.D. programs like to bring students in straight from their previous degree program, without sending them out into the world for work experience first, because there’s too much fear the students won’t come back once they leave. But if you don’t have the work experience, then you aren’t legally qualified to teach in the non-research universities in Germany (Fachhochschulen). If you fall off the research-university track, there’s nowhere in academia to go.

At least one German university recently converted to the American system (Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors). It will be interesting to see how this works and whether the practice spreads.

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Two footnotes

About the academic labor market: Why is there not as active a senior-faculty labor market in Germany as in the US? One reason is that salaries are greatly constrained by the national civil-service grades, and teaching loads are constrained by state laws. A university cannot go very far in tempting some big name away from another university by offering him or her a lot more money or different working conditions. The other reason is that, compared to US universities, German universities do not conceive of themselves so strongly as competing with one another. In the absence of such competition, why would a university want to nab an established professor from another university? Even if you could do it, what would be the point, as long as you have competent people in the fields that you need to cover? When you hire a Professor in the first place, you want to get the best person you can, of course. After that … is it the best use of the universities’ time and money to engage in bidding wars for senior talent? Does it add to social welfare and total scholarly achievement? Not a lot, so why should it be encouraged? And there are not so many professional administrators trying to build careers by raiding other schools. (This has its good and bad side; more on the lack of professional administrators later.)

About language: Life in different languages feels different, partly because the meanings that are available, the things you can pin down in words, are not the same from one language to another. But also, even when the meanings in a strict definitional sense are the same, the feeling around the meanings, the pictures that cluster around the meanings of words, are different. Laufbahn and career path are somewhat like this. Another example: the German phrase for “it occurred to me” is “es ist mir eingefallen.” The two phrases mean the same thing, but they make different pictures.  “Occur,” in the Latin root, means “to run up to,” and einfallen means (among other things) “to fall in or on.” So as you walk through the woods of the world in English, ideas run up to you like little furry animals. If you’re walking through the woods in German the ideas fall on you like ripe fruit.

Academic questions 3: Fundraising costs

German universities look with envy at the rivers of alumni donations that flow into their US counterparts and do not flow with the same abundance here. (German corporate donors will pony up for specific projects that are useful to them, but that's another matter.)

Alumni groups of a sort--the "Friends and Supporters of University X"--have existed at many of the universities here for some time, but they are not big operations. Consider LMU in Munich, which has as good a claim as any institution to be the best university in Germany. It now has over 50,000 students and is a very internationally aware, go-ahead kind of place. it has an alumni organization that was founded more than ninety years ago and has all of 2,400 members. The alumni do come to networking events, I think, but they keep their hands firmly in their pockets. Professional development personnel are few and frustrated.

It’s not that people don’t give, here. Contrary to what you might suppose from reading some of the US press, Germans don’t expect the state to do everything. They donate, they volunteer, they found nonprofit organizations in droves. If you have to be picked up by an ambulance in the US, it probably belongs to either the fire department or a for-profit company. Here, if it doesn’t belong to the fire department it belongs to a charity supported by private donations. Donations and volunteer labor get the homeless into shelter on cold winter nights, stock and staff food pantries, maintain footpaths in the countryside and classes in Turkish classical music and I could not begin to tell you what else.

So it’s not that people don’t give; they just don’t give much to universities. The universities do not occupy the same cultural slot in Germany as in the UK and US. They don’t have the same emotional, imaginative resonance; and emotional resonance has something to do with where the money goes.

When Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing about Oxford,

            Towery city, and branchy between towers,

            Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, 
                 river-rounded …

who was writing great lyrical poetry about the University of Berlin?  You have to be kidding. 

On a less exalted note, universities do not have songs here. American university songs—alma maters, fight songs—seem as peculiar here as Japanese company songs do in the US. (One night when we had a young Berlin friend over for dinner, Archangel and I started in on “Far above Cayuga’s waters” by way of explaining the term “alma mater.” The young friend looked at us if we were absolutely barzoomy. Why?? she said.)

Similarly, I don’t think there is a German equivalent to the Oxford scenes in Brideshead Revisited, or C.P. Snow’s novels about university politics at Cambridge, or popular murder-at-Oxford books. The university in Germany is more like an ordinary workplace. Anglo-Americans don’t emote about the dreaming towers of the business district, and Germans don’t do it about the universities. Which tend not to have dreaming towers in any case, but miscellaneous rooms scattered inconspicuously around the middle of town. The only German university towers that come to mind are the one that was recently demolished in Frankfurt (big event, it had to be blown up), and the ugly tooth-like high-rise of the U of Leipzig, which the locals satirically call the “wisdom tooth.”

There is less emotional attachment to universities here because the university you went to is not particularly part of your identity here. It’s not evident to me that Göttingen people are different from Tübingen people in the way that Harvard people are different from Chicago people. In the US, the university is often a transforming experience: it’s an important contributor to making you who you are. Going to college means leaving home, socially or geographically or both, and learning to be a somewhat different person in a different world. It’s like the initiation rites in hunter-gatherer societies, in which adolescents are sent out into the bush or jungle to lose their childhood, learn the adult lore of the tribe, undergo possibly dangerous challenges, and come back as different, grown-up people. 
 
German universities do not have so much of this ritual resonance. In the US, if you go off to an elite university your high school friends may be a thousand miles away. It can't happen here, you can't be a thousand miles from home and still be in Germany. In the US, even if you go to State U an hour from home, it may be your first experience being this close to white people, or to black people, or your first experience in a town this big, or this small. The same is not likely to happen here: there's much more social continuity between Gymnasium (college-prep high school) and university. 

There's also more intellectual continuity here. It's possible in the US to get into a decent university even if you went to a high school that bans books or at least discourages reading, that believes the goal of education is docility and correct answers to multiple choice tests. And then the university is fabulously liberating. So you're grateful to it and later you give it money. The Gymnasia are not so likely to be intellectually dead, and so the universities get less love for being intellectually alive.
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So you can look at the cost of fundraising in the US as being the cost of operating the development office, which is relatively easy to estimate and to use in local decisions (for example, do we need another staffer to focus on bequests?). Or you can look at the cost of fundraising as including some of the costs of a culture in which fundraising will be highly successful--and then the costs are not easy to estimate and are largely out of the reach of local decisions.