One of the problems in being a university manager is this assumption that being in charge of all or part of an organization means you actually have some control over what goes on inside it.  But this is not, in fact, true, or at least not in the way that anyone outside academia would understand the word “control”.  This is because individual universities are basically ants.  Individual biological entities?  Certainly.  But more importantly, they are part of a larger colony or superorganism which fundamentally structures and codes the identity and life of any individual ant. 

That superorganism is academia. 

The analogy isn’t perfect, obviously, but there’s a fair bit of truth to it.  Any single institution’s ability to go against prevailing academic norms is extremely limited.  Want to value teaching over research?  Make service a bigger part of the institutional offering?  Good luck.  Academic norms, as inscribed in various disciplinary cultures, contain far bigger incentives to the individual professors who make up a university than an institution could ever hope to dream of doing.

Professors’ power – such as it is – comes above all else from their membership in a disciplinary society.  Jane is an Economist, Ralph is a Biologist, etc.  These are not quite “professions” in the traditional sense, but they are subject to similar logics – each discipline has learned societies that preside over standards for entrance and performance, for instance.  And it is to these norms that everyone is in obedience.  Individual institutions’ ability to buck the superorganism is highly circumscribed; for the most part, institutions are “takers” of whatever the superorganism decides.

(To be clear – and this is where the analogy breaks down a bit – there isn’t really “one” academic superorganism, but rather many disciplinary ones.  In many ways, the right way to think about a local university is as a holding company for a group of disciplines that set up shop in a particular town.   So the University of Regina, for instance, is in some ways better thought of as a holding company for a set of disciplinary groupings in the area: the South Saskatchewan Association of Chemists, The Wascana Biologists’ League, the Sherwood Sociology Society, etc.  But as far as entrance and promotion are concerned, most of these global disciplines tend to move in similar directions over time, so for our purposes, it does not do too much violence to the superorganism metaphor to refer to it in the singular.)

The point is that an ant has very little ability to confront the superorganism.  And yet, individual ants get their funding and support from local governments whose interests may differ from the superorganism.  Certainly, they are within their democratic rights to ask individual ants to achieve certain things with the money they are given or to produce certain benefits from the outside.  But, to be blunt, the superorganism does not care about any specific community.  The superorganism lives on peer review, which by design excludes the views of those outside the superorganism.   In the superorganism paradise, someone would just hook up a money machine to the peer review system and it would go on sustaining itself forever that way.  

And so individual ants are sort of stuck.  They have to respond to conditions (i.e. political and financial ones) in their local environment, but at the same time, they cannot stray too far from the superorganism without risking losing touch with the larger colony. 

This, my friends, is what university management is about.   

Governments are barely aware of the superorganism.  When they deal with universities, they think they are dealing with individual organisms with self-volition.  It is in the interests of both the ant and the superorganism to encourage this deception because if governments truly understood, they would be horrified (in large part because governments view themselves as the heads of superorganisms of which institutions are a part).  We sometimes think of universities as being important because they create an opportunity and a framework for collaboration across disciplines.  That’s true to some extent, but to an even larger extent, universities-as-institutions and the bureaucracies that they sustain exist as camouflage to hide the superorganism.

Inside institutions, academics sometimes roll their eyes at how university managers try to camouflage the superorganism.  The branding.  The strategic planning.  The public relations.  Why can’t we just get on with being part of the superorganism, they say?  And this is natural.  After all, profs derive their professional identity from the superorganism rather than the ant, so all this ant-centric activity can seem pretty pointless.  But all this activity is crucial to maintaining the connection with the superorganism.  If governments and donors actually believed individual institutions had no identity and volition of their own, it would be game over for universities as we know them.

It may seem to some that I am belittling university managers here, but really it is quite the opposite.  Creating just enough ant-identity to make independence seem plausible to funders while remaining within the rules of the colony is no easy task.  It’s a constant balancing act, and people who do it well are a treasure.