I’ve recently had reason to ponder some of the mysteries of university management. I’ve concluded that it’s much harder to run a university in a moderately efficient fashion than it is to run pretty much any other type of organization. And I say this not because of the multiple veto- (or at least go-slow) points that get set up through the process of academic governance, but rather simply because disciplinary structures stand in the way of most useful economies of scale.
There are a few ways in which universities can achieve economies of scale. More students mean it’s possible to invest in more sophisticated registrarial processes and tools and lower average costs. Same with things like health and student services: size allows greater investment in human resources which in turn drives the ability to make gains through specialization. Same with IT, food services, you name it. Size allows big universities to do things that small ones can’t dream of doing.
But turn to the academic side and instead of gains through specialization, what you get is increasing unwieldiness.
Within some – but by no means all – departments, size can imply economies of scale. In most science disciplines, for example, the main undergraduate courses can be taught by pretty much anyone with tenure. Regardless of whether a physicist specializes in astronomy, materials sciences, nuclear physics or quantum photonics, they can probably teach most first and second year courses. This is good, because it means a department can hire specifically to build up strength in certain research fields without having to worry too much about who is going to teach the half-dozen big intro classes.
Try something similar in humanities or social sciences and you’d get your head cracked open by rioting academics. In these fields, research specialization and teaching specialization absolutely go hand in hand. You want an ASIAN history specialist to teach CANADIAN HISTORY 100?? A Comparativist to teach Intro Political Theory? Have you gone absolutely BARKING mad?
The point I want to make here is twofold. Obviously, the inability of academics to switch between one field on another makes economies of scale incredibly difficult. In effect, the scaling only works at the disciplinary level, and not even across all disciplines – substantial chunks of humanities and social science make it difficult to create economies of scale even really at the departmental level. In other words, the production function of a university of 20,000 students spread across 20 disciplines is probably quite different – and much less disastrous – than a university of similar size with 60 disciplines.
Now that’s all just economics. Think about it from a management point of view. It’s clear that running a university is more like running a conglomerate than running a unified corporate entity. The university resembles a holding company than anything else: one that contains dozens of corporate entities with no necessary mission overlap or even basic similarities in production functions. In an ideal world, you would try to wring a few efficiencies out of the overlaps that exist. In practice, the people running the individual businesses/departments are so hostile to the idea of having to share with other businesses/departments that such efficiencies are almost never more than notional.
All of which is to say that universities are incredibly complicated entities, with an instinct to always increase in the degree of complication in the system (more centres and institutes! more joint Master’s programs!), and where every complication can be guaranteed to raise costs by working against economies of scale.
It’s not so much that “faculty are obstreperous and a barrier to efficient university management”, though that is how the problem of university management is sometimes framed. No, it’s much more fundamental than this. Universities only made it into the 19th century by doing a Faustian deal with scientific disciplines. Essentially, universities ate the disciplines, thus acquiring the prestige that came along with their greater rigour, but in return they had to accept each discipline’s cost structure logic and foreswear the possibility that new disciplines would arise to kill the existing ones.
When it’s this hard to use economies of scale to increase efficiency, you can see why so many university leaders choose the simpler path of trying to balance books by raising revenues. So much simpler to get a few more international students than to face he unremitting horror of trying to wring efficiencies out of dozens of different business units, each with its own impeccably thought-out but mutually-non-reconcilable boutique production functions.
Would you want to manage such an entity?
Thought not.
So maybe, just maybe, spare a generous thought for all the folks who try to keep this tottering behemoth on the rails. No doubt they individually can make some howling errors at time. But when you really stop to think how complicated universities are as business entities, it’s a freaking wonder they manage to stay afloat at all.
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Of course scientists may teach across their disciplinary specialisations more than humanists not because of their innate flexibility and humanists’ bloody mindedness, but because of the nature of their disciplines. The sciences are much more hierarchical in cognitive structure than the humanities as Bernstein (1999) explains which in turn is determined by the nature of the phenomena they investigate as Bhaskar (1978) explains.
Bernstein, B. (1999). Vertical and horizontal discourse: An essay. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2), 157-173.
Bhaskar, R. (1978). On the possibility of social scientific knowledge and the limits of naturalism. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 8(1), 1-28.
This accords with my experience – in the smaller Canadian university economics departments in which I worked, there was an implicit expectation that faculty had to show some willingness to take on basic undergrad courses across the spectrum, because it was the only way things could work (at the University of Regina I had eventually taught pretty much everything). But in larger research universities, the implicit contract is that we will *not* be asked to do this – if there is a need for someone to fill a basic undergrad class in financial management, for example, this can only be done by hiring a specialist in financial management – which leads to (irreversible) increases in faculty numbers, which leads to the Sisyphean struggle to find more tuition revenue to meet the cost obligations. And as specialist faculty create new majors and, yes, more joint Masters programs, these too are irreversible future financial obligations, since to bring a major to a close is the equivalent of the end of the academy…
With respect to the History example, I would submit that History departments can still argue for recruitment on the basis of need of special expertise because of their contributions to the economy of scale. Long gone are the times when a Dean or Provost would approve a faculty search simply on the basis of need of academic expertise, unless the requesting department has a lot of majors, or teaches a lot of students in large first-year courses, or brings in a ton of research revenue (or is considered sacrosanct for other extenuating circumstances). Humanities departments form a two-class society in many universities: those that have or teach a lot of students, like History, and those that navigate the precipice. The latter departments very much do expect all hands to teach general introductions to their subjects at first-year level, and they try to do it well and make those classes interesting and relevant.
Small departments also often do recognize the advantages of mergers to leverage economies of scale, if this helps them to sustain programs and achieve their academic goals. More often than not, it’s a matter of intelligent dialog rather than clashes between faculty-sense-of-entitlement against administrators-know-it-all-better.
On the other hand, large and generically successful departments, like History departments, could make stronger contributions to the overall economy of scale of a university by teaching general overview courses on Introduction to World History in first year: five sections of 300 students each, instead of 10 specialized first-year courses at 150 students each. But then again, why would they do that when they cross-subsidize other programs already anyway? (They might prefer the World History course with large sections to free up faculty time for research, but that is a different story.)
With respect to overall numbers of programs, I would caution that too much concentration on a relatively small number of best-selling programs makes universities boring. Boring is the enemy of excellence. I would submit that a university that would only offer Computer Science programs, but no Mathematics programs, would soon be less relevant in Computer Science and experience a drop of enrollments (and a drop in research revenue). The same would apply to Engineering programs without science programs, or English without offerings in foreign languages and other humanities. The argument about the “well-rounded graduate” has been overused, and I am not repeating it. My point is that best-selling program offerings without accompanying complementary offerings can demote those bestselling program offerings to mere disciplinary boot camps without much appeal to top-level curious students.
I’m coming to this late. Sorry.
I would like to observe two things:
First, this seems symptomatic of breakdowns of some disciplines. If history (for instance) was still seen as the study of documents, especially concerning statecraft, one could teach the relevant skills in large first-year classes, before students then go off to study particular periods and places. This is no longer the case: there are many other techniques involved in oral histories, eco-histories, economic histories and so forth. It’s obviously not a bad thing that we have more diverse disciplines, but as a result, we’re unlikely to agree on what’s fundamental to each discipline and worthy of presentation in first year.
Second, what you describe seems symptomatic not only of the structure of some fields, but also of the general difficulty of squeezing economies of scale out of a university. Some services can be provided more cheaply to more students, but they tend to become rather alienating and bureaucratic when they are. Your example of science classes scaled up only makes sense if the courses are taught as lectures, not labs, and if the marking is either automated or handed off to underpaid members of the precariat.
The whole of academia is subject to Baumol’s cost disease, because one can’t meaningfully increase efficiency.