I had a discussion a few months ago with a government official who was convinced she knew what was wrong with universities. “They have no discipline,” she said. “They just go out and create new programs all the time with no thought as to what the cost implications are or what the labour market implications are, and so costs just keep going up and up.”
I told her she was only half right. It’s absolutely true that universities have no discipline when it comes to academic programs, but the problem really isn’t on the creation side. When universities start a new program, it has to go through a process where enrolment is projected, labour market uptake estimated, and all that jazz. And yes, there is a certain amount of creativity and outright bullshit in these numbers since no one really knows how to estimate this stuff in a cost-effective manner. But basically, these things have a decent track record: they hit their enrolment targets often enough that they haven’t fallen into disrepute.
The problem is that these enrolment targets aren’t hit exclusively by attracting new students to the institution; there is always some cannibalization of students from existing programs involved. Therefore, while each new program might be successful in its own terms, these programs were succeeding only by making every other program in the faculty slightly less effective.
And here’s where the lack of discipline comes in. At some point, institutions need to sit back and take a look at existing programs, and be able to prune them judiciously. When resources – particularly staffing resources – are static, if you keep trying to pile on new programs without getting rid of the old ones, all you get are a lot of weak programs (not to mention more courses staffed by sessionals).
And here’s one of the biggest, dirtiest secrets of academics: they suck at letting things go. They are hoarders; nothing, once approved by Senate, must ever be taken away. Prioritization exercises? Never! After all, something might be found not to be a priority.
Getting rid of academic programs is one of the purest examples of Mancur Olson’s Collective Action problem. Getting rid of any given program will hurt a few people a lot, while the majority will barely feel the benefits. The advantage in terms of political mobilization always goes to the side who perceive themselves to have the most at stake, and so they are very often able to mobilize support and stop the cuts (this point is made very well in Peter Eckel’s excellent book Changing Course: Making the Hard Decisions to Eliminate Academic Programs). But over time, if you can never cut any programs, then the collective does start to hurt, because of the cumulative effect of wasted resources.
Of course, Olson’s theory also gives us a clue as to how to solve this problem: there need to be stronger incentives within institutions for people to support program closures. One way to do that would be to introduce a one in, one out rule. That is, every time Senate endorses a new program, it has to cut one somewhere else. Such a rule would mean that pretty much anyone in the university who has an ambition to open a program at some point would have an incentive, if not to support specific program closures, then at least to support an effective process for identifying weak programs.
Might be worth a try, anyway. Because this hoarding habit really needs to stop.
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Perhaps there’s a way to avoid hurting “a few people a lot” while still achieving the benefits of program renewal and change. The biggest issue in closing a program is what to do with the faculty members in it. Most universities have complicated redundancy procedures that make it easier to let the program wither on the vine than to cut it. But in either case, good human resources are being wasted. If universities would invest in retraining those faculty members for other tasks, would that not be a better use for resources in which the university has already invested a fair amount of money?
This might be easier in some programs than others. For example, in my field (German studies, but this would apply to most language programs), enrolment at the undergraduate level is very weak. But most of us have very good training in literature and/or linguistics, cultural studies, etc that is adaptable to other disciplines. Instead of closing us down or letting us die a slow death, couldn’t we be given one-year sabbaticals to develop courses for other programs? We could continue our own research programs, and even grad programs where they exist, but our undergraduate teaching could shift to other areas of the humanities and social sciences.
There would be many obstacles to such a plan, not the least of which would be the resistance of other faculty members who are dedicated to the disciplinary specialization model, our own resistance to teaching what would likely be more elementary courses, and the inability of universities to coordinate the activities of its faculty in such a coordinated and comprehensive manner. But at least it’s an attempt to think about how to make the best use of resources already available to the universities.
Good post. Great diagnosis. Not sure if your solution is workable though. It would immediately be rejected as “divisive” and destroying “collegiality”. Would make for great balloon debates on Senate though.
Thanks Nick. There’s probably a whole other blog in the question “can cuts ever be collegial”?
The solution would be to make a real commitment to the disciplines, and stop coming up with new things. What can go into fashion can also go out of fashion, and probably will in a couple of decades. Moreover, new programs, as you point out, cannibalize existing programs, exacerbating the churn. The time and effort necessary to create a discipline, or even to create an expert in a discipline, is so high that only a more-or-less permanent commitment makes it worthwhile.
Good luck to any university trying to seriously cut programs. The negative reaction when our institution tried to cut *courses* with zero or very low enrolment was intense.
Sometimes the drivers of creation of new programs are external to the University, too. Here in Alberta, there were significant cuts to budgets in the early to mid 90s, massive retirements, salary cuts (and over-expensive retirement incentives) etc. Then the government quite cleverly (from their perspective) micromanaged the re-expansion of the University budget through things like the Access fund, Enrolment Envelope funds, etc. The net effect of this was that we could only get money back by either taking on more students, or by creating new appealing (to government, if not necessarily to the students) programs. This trend continued until quite recently – in order to get any new resources, new programs had to be proposed (even if in effect they had substantial overlap with existing, strong programs). And Deans and Provosts always want new resources.