Every so often, terms crop up and it seems like no one knows where they came from.  One of my favourites is “Steeples of Excellence”.  Except that this one actually has a known origin: the Stanford of the 1950s and its provost, Frederick Terman.

The term “steeples of excellence” tends to imply some focus on certain fields of study.  It’s a handy complement to the oft heard “we can’t be everything to everybody” (possibly the most overused phrase in higher education).  The idea is that while a comprehensive university must be competent – or maybe even good – at a lot of things, it has to choose the areas in which it is to be great.

Why is it so important for an institution to be great at a couple of things?  It’s an interesting question.  I think that Boards of Governors – who are community representatives – like to feel that the institution they oversee are prestigious and is reflecting that prestige on the community.  But prestige is really hard to generate: it comes from eminence rather than mere competence, and eminence is not easy to achieve in an isomorphic industry which defines eminence in fairly rigid, research-oriented terms.  Basically, you aren’t going to achieve eminence without some kind of concentration of resources that allows for expansion of research outputs.  That’s almost impossible to do across-the-board, so the idea is to concentrate resources in a couple of areas where eminence might be feasible.  Hence “steeples of excellence” – a few points poking up sharply above the general skyline.

One might reasonably expect, given its Stanford origin, that “steeples of excellence” relates to heavy investment in fields related to computer science at the expense of other fields.  And it is true that Terman set the stage for the university’s later rise to pre-eminence in many of these areas, not least by sequestering a large chunk of campus land to create one of the world’s first university business parks which did indeed come to be dominated by the tech industry.  But that’s not the original meaning of this term. 

When Terman became provost of Stanford, it was not by any means the pre-eminent university it is today.  Unlike Berkeley or CalTech, Stanford had not attracted a lot of government funding during WWII and was thus seen as something of an institution on the wane.  It wasn’t quite Clark University – a university which was universally admired in the early 1900s but was already sinking under an unrealistic financial model – but it was heading in that direction. 

What Terman did was to force every department into a hunt for external dollars.  Those that could bring it in would thrive and receive more assistance: those that could not, would not.  And the way he put this plan into action was to tie new hires in every department to the ability to generate new dollars.  If as a department chair you proposed someone who had a long publication list, but no record of bringing in government or Foundation grants, you would likely be turned down.  Excellent teaching record?  Forget it.  Bring in the dollars.  And if you could build on existing strengths in the department, get a second or third or fourth person focusing on a specific problem or topic, so much the better. 

And so, the point of “steeples of excellence” was not primarily for the university to make choices between faculties or departments.  The point was to make departments and faculties choose where they wanted to focus their energies.   Every department was supposed to have its own steeple, or at least the chance to have one.  And Terman’s job, at least as he saw it, was to incentivize department chairs to get with the program by blocking appointments he felt weren’t being sufficiently ambitious.

(For more on Terman, Stanford, and the Steeples of Excellence theory, I thoroughly recommend Rebecca Lowen’s Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford)

So far as I know, only one Canadian university ever followed this approach, and that was McMaster during the Presidency of Harry (H.G.) Thode from 1961 to 1972.  Thode was a nuclear chemist by training, and it is mainly thanks to him that McMaster has its own nuclear reactor and a thriving medical isotopes business.   His strategy, as detailed by James Greenlee in McMaster University 1957-1987: A Chance for Greatness, was very similar to Terman’s in the sense that each department was urged to specialize around a specific theme or problem which could for the basis of a research program or a graduate program which could be the best in Canada.  In modern parlance, Thode’s approach was slightly more of a “Blue Ocean” Strategythan Terman’s, but that probably reflects the institutions’ different financial situations.  It’s hard to know if Thode was consciously imitating Terman, but the similarities are hard to miss.

The extent to which this approach would still work in the United States is unclear.  To a substantial degree, it depended on the generosity of many private foundations and a generous system of federal overhead subsidies.  The latter certainly does not exist anymore, and the former stopped most of its transformative support for institutions like Stanford in the 1970s.  In Canada, Thode’s more modest system existed without either of these sources of support, but it did depend on a massive increase in base funding which came to a screeching halt around the time he stepped down as McMaster’s President (see back here for more on that).  I suspect it is harder now, but it’s difficult to say for sure.

But in any event, it’s not clear how the erosion of this earlier notion of “steeples of excellence” morphed into its newer version, which involves central administration picking winners at the levels of fields of study or “themes”.  Possibly, picking winners between disciplines level is a lot easier to explain to Boards of Governors, donors, and governments than is picking winners within disciplines (in fact, the whole notion of disciplines does not translate well outside the academy, but I’ll leave that for another blog).  Possibly, the cost of scientific infrastructure has increased so much that in some fields, departments cannot pick “winners” alone, but must rely on choices made by central administration, and executed through the efforts the Advancement and Government Relations functions.

That said, I suspect most Presidents and VPs Research would argue that in modern steeples-of-excellence theory they do not so much “pick” winners as recognize those who have been picked by peers: that is, they will place their bets on those scholars who already receive a lot of money from other peer-reviewed sources like granting councils.  At best what they do is provide incentives to other parts of the institution to form structures which allow them to both reinforce and benefit from these “steeples”.  For instance, at l’Université de Montréal several disciplines – most notably philosophy – have found ways to organize themselves so as to take advantage of the institution’s excellence in Artificial Intelligence.

In any event: Steeples of Excellence theory is an important concept to understand if you’re interested in institutional development.  But it’s even more important to understand that it has multiple potential meanings which open the door to a wide variety of potential institutional strategies.

The blog is off next week for a recharge. See you on October 30^th.