Academic Administration: Ethical Issues

   At some time in the mid nineties, Steven Cahn, the editor of Issues in Academic Ethics and an old friend asked me to do a book on the ethics of academic administration. Nothing had been written on that subject, as far as I could find, so I wrote reams that made it into the wastepaper basket before I found an entry into the subject. My conceptual model in The Moral Dimensions of Academic Administration (1999) thus became the hospital, with the relationship of institution to patients that of professional and client, rather than that of vendor and customer. The book received a number of favorable reviews but certainly not a lot of sales.

   Below are some excerpts from the Postscript that looks—“glances” would be more accurate—ahead to today, about two decades after the months during which I wrote the book.

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   Everything that was said about institutional collaboration with student consumerism is heightened to the maximum degree where a college or university exists to make a profit. Indeed, the “logic” of student consumerism points to profit making; for why should an institution not reap a benefit if it supplies wares for which purchasers exist? The notion of professional service to a client is replaced by the conception of a vendor of products that are wanted in the marketplace. Such an institution will be profitable to the degree to which its administration can determine what the market wants and maintain a faculty that works to satisfy those demands . . . .Administrators become full-time managers of employees who perform desired services, and faculty members become employees who serve.

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   The consumer appetite for less rigorous is nowhere more evident than in the University of Phoenix, a profit-making school that shuns traditional scholarship and offers a curriculum that critics compare it to a drive-through restaurant . . . . That makes the word “university” a homonym, with a quite different meaning when place before “of Pennsylvania” or in front of “of Phoenix.”

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   . . . . [S]ome boards of trustees of private IHEs [Institutions of Higher Education] . . . have eagerly talked of imposing the corporate model on the academic institutions they oversee. . . . [They] regard their academic institution’s president as its chief executive officer . . . . They pine for the efficiency that is induced by an ever-present need to be concerned about the bottom line.

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   In order truly to rethink the role of academic administrators as corporate executives and managers, on the one hand, and faculty members as their employees, on the other, they must find some IHE equivalent to a product . . . and a quantifiable bottom line . . . .

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      But the push to impose the corporate model requires making sure that the performance of administrators remains measurable, since accountability is thought to depend on that fact. When the push is hard enough and, to a degree, successful, the result is a hierarchical organization, rather than a collaborative one, with administrators directing the faculty. . . . The judgment of the educator must largely yield to that of the vendor.

   I next briefly discuss the effects of  the formation of unions in Institutions of Higher Education. I will conclude these selections from the book’s Postscript with short excerpt from the final paragraph.

   Some of the trends here sketched out are more with us than others, but none lof them is mere alarmist fiction. Moreover, where any of these tendencies is actualized . . . : Academic administration becomes management so that its moral dimensions are covered in discussions of business ethics. . . . [More important, if these trends] were to become widespread, they would bring about the demise of traditional colleges and universities . . . .

   See the piece I posted in this blog on December 5, 2015, entitled “The Dubious Future of the American University.” Whoever might be tempted to look at the entire book, Amazon offers quite a number of very inexpensive “new and used” copies of The Moral Dimensions of Academic Administration. As always, comments are very welcome.