The university as a guild

From an article by Dick Herbert, “Carolina and State Authorized to go after Big-Time Coaches,” News & Observer, Raleigh, NC (October 3, 1944)

On October 2, 1944, the trustees of the three-campus University of North Carolina system authorized its two major research universities, UNC and NC State, to hire big-time football coaches. The 100-member board (representative of the state’s 100 counties) voted to allow the campuses to pay coaches up to $12,000 a year. Previous policy had capped coach pay at the level the campuses paid their department heads, or about $6,000.

The decision came after some trustees pushed for hiring big-name coaches so that their teams might improve their national competitiveness.

Little has changed, either in misguided trustee meddling or in the national prominence of Carolina and NC State football.

The university as a unique organization

American research universities are unique institutions. Their most importent elements, teaching and important elem research, are the least visible from the outside, but they’re also continually changing and dynamic. The way calculus, chemistry, computer science, economics, medicine, and political science, for example, are taught and studied today differs considerably from a decade or two ago.

Universities resemble professional guilds where young apprentices learn from masters, where the knowledge resides at the bottom of the organization, with the first violin chair, the hospitalist, or the research scholar. This organizational uniqueness, including the preponderance of individuals Peter Drucker called “knowledge workers,” calls for governance alignments closer to those of hospitals or symphony orchestras.

A lay (or outside) board of trustees or directors can insinuate itself into the internal operation of these guilds, of course, but the result will be neither good oversight nor good performance.

Another lousy decision

Yet another controversial tenure decision at Carolina has drawn unwelcomed national attention. This time the trustees refused to endorse the recommendations of the faculty and the provost in denying tenure to a Women’s and Gender Studies job candidate. It’s the second similar episode in the last few years.

Trustees can and should examine the value of university programs and departments, preferably in thoughtful consonance with the university’s senior officers. At Carolina, where a clear majority of students are female and where a “blind” admissions process might arguably result in a freshman class 80%, or higher, female, a women’s studies program makes sense. At any rate, the Women’s Studies program has existed at Carolina for decades and hundreds of students have graduated from it.

In addition, no one has suggested that Carolina is insolvent. Any financial excuse for overriding the recommendation of the faculty, the provost, and the chancellor is absurd subterfuge.

A professor at Chapel Hill has opined on the controversy, arguing tenure committees are tolerant of mediocrity. The oblique implication of his argument is that the UNC trustee decision to deny tenure was based on the candidate’s scholarly qualifications.

The problem here is not about financial exigency or the eminence of job candidates. There’s no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that tenure decisions today are materially different from those in the 1990s or that tenured professors now are weaker scholars than their predecessors.

Delegating away its authority

The deeper difficulty with the latest controversy is that the UNC systemwide board and its vast staff have defaulted on their statutory responsibility for final tenure decisions and effectively delegated it to a local, ceremonial board of micro-managing trustees.

The UNC system was designed so academic employment decisions would be the purview of the institution’s academic leaders, as they should be, just as surgical decisions are the domain of the surgeons and the playing of the violin in an orchestra the province of the violinists. Decisions by the central Board’s Personnel and Tenure committee were meant to prioritize institutional fiscal health and systemwide budgetary control.

They were not meant to pass judgement on the scholarly contributions of this topologist or that Molière scholar.

Removing the faculty’s responsibility

Auburn University’s trustees provide a disheartening example. Obeying mandates from the Alabama legislature, Auburn trustees have taken over the academic curriculum, dictated high school civics classes for university students, and dissolved the faculty senate in favor of an advisory panel appointed by the president.

What might justify such draconian take-overs? One extreme critique asserts that universities indoctrinate students, that radical professors “design esoteric departments and teach niche classes to cliques of activist students while the needs of other students and taxpayers for real education go unaddressed.”

Seriously?

Not all is perfect, of course. Questionable choices–some significant, some simply unwise or performative–have been made by university administrators and permitted by board members. They include, for example, allowing unprecedented administrative expansion and ludicrous salaries; ignoring grade inflation; funding athletic departments from gambling taxes; or starting new medical schools without proper review and study.

But the hyperbole is poppycock.

If things were so horrible, the queue of politicians, lobbyists, and former board members brazenly seeking jobs at the universities they’re entrusted to oversee wouldn’t be so long.

Today’s decisions and tomorrow’s consequences

When the largest US metropolitan areas are ranked by household income, nine of the top ten are in the West or the Northeast. Only one is in the South: Raleigh, in a region known as the Research Triangle.  

The area isn’t called the Real Estate Triangle or the Lobbyist Triangle. Its name comes from the research activities of the three major universities in the area.

Today’s rankings reflect the educational choices made in North Carolina over the last half century. Tomorrow’s rankings will reflect today’s choices.

Dr. Art Padilla splits his time between homes in Wrightsville Beach and Raleigh. He served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina System headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and the University of Arizona. He recently completed the 2nd edition of his book Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments.