Back to Basics, A Sermon Delivered in 2009
These
are tough times and institutions of higher education are not exempted from
these tribulations. According to a
New York Times article of January 27 [2009],
their endowments were down 23% in five months. There’s a lot that colleges and universities can’t do as a
result of this loss in income. And
if you further consider the reduction of state support for public institutions
and of donations from faithful but strapped alumni, the squeeze is on.
What to do? We hear about faculty salary and faculty hiring freezes. Keeping salaries stet for a year may well be justified in a period of minimal inflation, but I want to return to the subject of freezing faculty hiring, especially since this freeze is best referred to as not hiring teachers. In any case, these measures will certainly save money.
Let me next refer you to an earlier Times article (January 16 [2009]) reporting that the percentage of the budgets for instruction at post-secondary institutions has substantially decreased in the past decade, while during the same period there was a notable increase in the money spent for administration.
Finally, let me draw your attention to the fuss created by the decision announced by Brandeis University to shut down their Rose Museum of Art. Three pieces in the Times were devoted to censure that move, one of them an editorial. Nobody, in what I have read has come to the defense of Brandeis.
Well, I propose to do so, even though, ever since high school, I have been a regular visitor to art museums and galleries wherever I have lived or traveled. In more recent years, I also became a collector of art, in a modest way—namely when I could afford it. Why then defend the closing of a museum? Because my career as professor and academic administrator trumps my love of art.
Crucial for me are the central missions of colleges and universities: to provide higher education to their students and, especially for universities, to foster and engage in the research and scholarship that pushes out the frontiers of knowledge. If colleges and universities don’t play those games, no other institutions in our society will do so, except perhaps feebly, inadequately.
If I am right, a lot follows. The splendid collection of the Rose Museum is an ornament, but does little to educate Brandeis students. They would be better served by a gallery that brings in traveling exhibits that actually support particular pedagogical programs. That adornment, as one of the Times articles makes clear, serves a wider community, but one that contributes little or nothing to educating the university’s students. Charity begins at home. Brandeis has prior obligations to its central missions and if this economic downturn makes it difficult for them to carry them out and sells its art collection to support those primary goals, so be it. To be sure, any contractual agreements with donors of works of art must be honored, but the reasonable if not sacrosanct rule that museums should sell such works only to buy other works of art does not seem to me to apply to a museum wholly owned and operated by a university.
In my view, colleges and universities squander far too many of their resources to entertain the public at the expense of educating their students—like no other country on the globe. Here’s a number for you: the 10 best-paid university football coaches are paid a total of $38 million a year. That of the University of Pittsburgh’s (where I served as provost a long while ago) ranks 49th, getting a “mere” $1.2 million. And it has often been shown—to a deaf audience—that it is a myth football programs bring in money, except for a tiny few. This would be clearer, even to the hard of hearing, if the universities’ bookkeeping were more transparent (a euphemism for “honest”). But typically, the cost of recruiting athletes is charged to Admissions, their hefty scholarships to Financial Aid; maintaining facilities (stadium, basketball arena and all) is charged to Buildings and Grounds, and so on. In this rough period, it’s time to eschew self-deception--not the easiest task—and get back to basics.
And that holds in spades for the relationship between expenditures for administration and teaching. I have my own example corresponding to the statistics of that Times article. The staff of the office I left as dean at Northwestern 22 years ago has tripled or quadrupled in the intervening time. Some of those additions I would have welcomed, such as more student advisors. But most of those additions are what I would call academic show bizz, contributing little or nothing to the institutions central missions.
When I came to the University of Pittsburgh from Northwestern, I found Pitt to be the most bureaucratic institution I had ever worked in. To get anything done required three signatures that were slow to come by (a statement that is literally false, but a good symbol of what I found). Defensive administering I call it; covering your rear end is a less polite formulation. Such practices are wasteful because they require more administrators (who have offices and get salaries plus benefits) and because time is money—a cliché because true. I’ve been away from Pitt for quite a while, but from what I hear things have not changed all that much. The job of administrators is to be facilitators of an institution’s primary goals and not to wash each other’s backs. These troubled times should be an opportunity for getting back to basics.
That leads me, finally, to those hiring freezes. However, if “freezing” means leaving things the way they are, it is the wrong moniker. I am prepared to bet my bottom dollar (and I am getting closer to that bottom) that almost 100% of the faculty that will now not be hired everywhichwhere were intended to be replacements for retiring or departing faculty. There’s precious little expanding now in the world of higher education. That makes that icy metaphor a euphemism! So please substitute for it “reduction of teachers.” And that’s the wrong way to go.
When I wrote up, fairly recently, my experiences in the world of education, I dedicated the book neither to a friend nor a relative, but to “all those academic administrators who work every day to foster the primary goals of the academy: teaching its students and contributing to the world’s knowledge.” These are the kind of educational leaders needed today. Perhaps it takes a jolt like our current economic woes to clarify the mind. If so, it would be a silver lining of significance.
What to do? We hear about faculty salary and faculty hiring freezes. Keeping salaries stet for a year may well be justified in a period of minimal inflation, but I want to return to the subject of freezing faculty hiring, especially since this freeze is best referred to as not hiring teachers. In any case, these measures will certainly save money.
Let me next refer you to an earlier Times article (January 16 [2009]) reporting that the percentage of the budgets for instruction at post-secondary institutions has substantially decreased in the past decade, while during the same period there was a notable increase in the money spent for administration.
Finally, let me draw your attention to the fuss created by the decision announced by Brandeis University to shut down their Rose Museum of Art. Three pieces in the Times were devoted to censure that move, one of them an editorial. Nobody, in what I have read has come to the defense of Brandeis.
Well, I propose to do so, even though, ever since high school, I have been a regular visitor to art museums and galleries wherever I have lived or traveled. In more recent years, I also became a collector of art, in a modest way—namely when I could afford it. Why then defend the closing of a museum? Because my career as professor and academic administrator trumps my love of art.
Crucial for me are the central missions of colleges and universities: to provide higher education to their students and, especially for universities, to foster and engage in the research and scholarship that pushes out the frontiers of knowledge. If colleges and universities don’t play those games, no other institutions in our society will do so, except perhaps feebly, inadequately.
If I am right, a lot follows. The splendid collection of the Rose Museum is an ornament, but does little to educate Brandeis students. They would be better served by a gallery that brings in traveling exhibits that actually support particular pedagogical programs. That adornment, as one of the Times articles makes clear, serves a wider community, but one that contributes little or nothing to educating the university’s students. Charity begins at home. Brandeis has prior obligations to its central missions and if this economic downturn makes it difficult for them to carry them out and sells its art collection to support those primary goals, so be it. To be sure, any contractual agreements with donors of works of art must be honored, but the reasonable if not sacrosanct rule that museums should sell such works only to buy other works of art does not seem to me to apply to a museum wholly owned and operated by a university.
In my view, colleges and universities squander far too many of their resources to entertain the public at the expense of educating their students—like no other country on the globe. Here’s a number for you: the 10 best-paid university football coaches are paid a total of $38 million a year. That of the University of Pittsburgh’s (where I served as provost a long while ago) ranks 49th, getting a “mere” $1.2 million. And it has often been shown—to a deaf audience—that it is a myth football programs bring in money, except for a tiny few. This would be clearer, even to the hard of hearing, if the universities’ bookkeeping were more transparent (a euphemism for “honest”). But typically, the cost of recruiting athletes is charged to Admissions, their hefty scholarships to Financial Aid; maintaining facilities (stadium, basketball arena and all) is charged to Buildings and Grounds, and so on. In this rough period, it’s time to eschew self-deception--not the easiest task—and get back to basics.
And that holds in spades for the relationship between expenditures for administration and teaching. I have my own example corresponding to the statistics of that Times article. The staff of the office I left as dean at Northwestern 22 years ago has tripled or quadrupled in the intervening time. Some of those additions I would have welcomed, such as more student advisors. But most of those additions are what I would call academic show bizz, contributing little or nothing to the institutions central missions.
When I came to the University of Pittsburgh from Northwestern, I found Pitt to be the most bureaucratic institution I had ever worked in. To get anything done required three signatures that were slow to come by (a statement that is literally false, but a good symbol of what I found). Defensive administering I call it; covering your rear end is a less polite formulation. Such practices are wasteful because they require more administrators (who have offices and get salaries plus benefits) and because time is money—a cliché because true. I’ve been away from Pitt for quite a while, but from what I hear things have not changed all that much. The job of administrators is to be facilitators of an institution’s primary goals and not to wash each other’s backs. These troubled times should be an opportunity for getting back to basics.
That leads me, finally, to those hiring freezes. However, if “freezing” means leaving things the way they are, it is the wrong moniker. I am prepared to bet my bottom dollar (and I am getting closer to that bottom) that almost 100% of the faculty that will now not be hired everywhichwhere were intended to be replacements for retiring or departing faculty. There’s precious little expanding now in the world of higher education. That makes that icy metaphor a euphemism! So please substitute for it “reduction of teachers.” And that’s the wrong way to go.
When I wrote up, fairly recently, my experiences in the world of education, I dedicated the book neither to a friend nor a relative, but to “all those academic administrators who work every day to foster the primary goals of the academy: teaching its students and contributing to the world’s knowledge.” These are the kind of educational leaders needed today. Perhaps it takes a jolt like our current economic woes to clarify the mind. If so, it would be a silver lining of significance.
March 3, 2009
An April 2016 addendum. I published a piece--in Inside Higher Ed-- that condoned Brandeis's resolution to convert some of the belongings of the Rose Museum into cash to beef up funds to be devoted to education with the reasoning indicated above. I was throughly bawled out by the head of a university museum: no exceptions! Regarding the comments here about universities, things have only gotten worse since 2009. See my remarks in this blog on the "Dubious Future of the American University," December 15, 2015
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