I recently came across this little blogpost from the UK bemoaning the fact that the Vice-Chancellor of Imperial College described professors as “like small business owners”.  The poster then went on to wonder: “if professors are small businesses, what kind of micro-state is the contemporary university?”

Interesting question.  The thing is, on our side of the pond at least, the idea that a university is something less than the sum of its parts has been pretty common for awhile now.  It was Robert Hutchins,  influential President of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1945, who once described the university as “a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central heating system”.  This was an astute observation about the nature of universities and their relationships with the disciplines that inhabited them.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, universities slowly ate the sciences.  It was a pretty good trade: by joining the university system, scientists got other people to pay for the development and upkeep of their laboratories, whilst universities benefitted from the prestige of having scientists on payroll.  But there was a certain price exacted.  Universities stopped being small, unified institutions teaching liberal arts.  They had to share space in the minds of their staff with various “invisible colleges”, the global networks of scientists that form the backbone of what we call “the disciplines”.   By the early twentieth-century, the local branches of these invisible colleges were asserting primacy over the organizations to which they legally belonged.

But then, gradually, even the bonds of discipline weakened.  WWII and its aftermath created the research university, and that changed academic priorities.  By the 1960s, Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, described the university as a “federation of independent academic entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking”.  That is: not only did universities have a weak centre, but now even the disciplines were not particularly an organizing principle.

More recently, in the wake of the internal credit-mill fraud at UNC, Kevin Carey of the New American Foundation called that university a “holding company that provides shared marketing, finance, and physical plant services for a group of autonomous departments, which are in turn holding companies for autonomous scholars who teach as they please”.  That’s actually a sort of mid-point between the Hutchins and Kerr positions, restoring some importance to departments/disciplines while still making clear the essentially independent nature of the professoriate.

There are other formulations of this basic thought – professors expect steady paycheques but otherwise act like independent contractors, etc.  Indeed, nudging us ever closer to the idea of professor-as-entrepreneur, innovation theorist Henry Etzkowitz made the point over a decade ago that research groups within a university have “firm-like qualities, especially under conditions in which research funding is awarded on a competitive basis”.

I’m not sure how many people would argue with Etkowitz on this point (I wouldn’t, anyway).  But the extension of the company metaphor to individual professors rather than “research groups”, as the Imperial VC did, seems to put some people’s teeth on edge.  Mostly, I think this is a field-of-study thing.  Professors in bio-medical sciences, physical sciences, and engineering probably “get” the business metaphor more than others because running a lab is a lot like running a small business: bills to pay, payroll to meet, this kind of thing.  Sure, the object is to make discoveries rather than profit, but the specific day-to-day managerial activities are recognizably similar.

Professors elsewhere in the university might kind of dig the “independent contractors” metaphor (because independence is cool even if there’s little or no money attached), but they’d resist the “small business” label because it comes with implications of “balancing books” and “paying for oneself”.  One could argue – as many in the life sciences might – that this is nonsense, because it’s always understood that the institution is kicking in money, at least as far as one’s own salary is concerned (true in Canada anyway – not so much in the US or UK).  But still, arts and social sciences profs tend to be very frightened of bogeymen like this, so they run like hell when it confronts them.

Of course, we don’t have to stick with business metaphors.  Some prefer musical ones (a good university is like jazz, on no account should it be thought of as a symphony orchestra, etc.).  But whatever metaphor one chooses, the point is to convey that universities are “loosely coupled” entities (possibly too loose in some cases, but that’s as may be).

Just don’t on any account suggest that “loosely coupled” has any financial implication whatsoever. That way a lot of unhappy and vocal professors lie.