Why do universities keep writing strategic plans?  It sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. 

Every institution has a strategy, in the sense that it has a sense of “where it wants to go” and how to get there in a tolerably efficient manner.  These strategies aren’t always written down, but they exist nonetheless: that is to say (to get all Mintzberg for a minute) that strategy can be “realized” without being “intended”.   Writing a strategic plan is – in theory at least – an attempt to be more intentional and hence more efficient about strategy.  Strategy tells you where you want to go, planning works out how to get you there, and in theory a good strategic plan integrates those process – one of synthesis, one of analysis, into a workable set of guidelines for action, goals and objectives to keep everyone in an organization on a common track.

The thing is, once you have a strategy, why would you keep revising it?  Generally speaking the only reason you actually need a new strategic plan is if you plan on changing strategy.  Universities rarely, if ever, do this in a substantive way: rather, most strategies tend to build incrementally on one another, if at all.  So why does everyone keep doing them every few years?

Well, in a few cases the answer is that they genuinely need to change strategy, but in many cases the answer has to do with performativity The answer, basically, is that if they don’t do it, they risk not being taken seriously as a strategic actor.  That is to say, they create strategies in order to demonstrate to others – mainly governments and big donors – that they are capable of acting independently and strategically, rather than because they need new strategy.  I mean, if you’re not capable of this, why bother with independent governance?  Why not just have universities be run directly by governments, for instance as is the case in large parts of the Global South and was until quite recently true in much of Europe as well? 

(Note: some universities are so big and bad and obviously capable of doing their own thing that they don’t need to do produce strategic plans every few years.  U of T does not, for instance; neither does McGill.  It’s only for smaller fry.)

Anyways, the problem here is that in fact universities are not actually strategic actors, or at leas not fully so.  And that is because universities are, in organizational terms, “loosely coupled”.  In some ways, this is just a nice way of saying that quite often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, but it’s more than just that.  Universities often have difficulty moving concertedly in a single direction because – especially at larger institutions – there are way too many different things going on inside the holding company known as a university for one vision of “where we want to go”, that is to say “strategy” to emerge.

Let’s assume that a university is “for” three things: teaching, research, and service to the community.  With respect to teaching, can there genuinely be a campus-wide view of “where we want to go” in terms of instruction which is inclusive of every field of study?  Is it possible to base strategy on distinctive notions of “teaching”?  Well, I wouldn’t say it’s impossible – a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the example of Maryville University in Missouri which has done something of this sort in terms of adopting technology and individualized learning plans.   There is also the example of the University of Melbourne which decided to radically simplify its degree system and tack on an extra year of study to its undergraduate degrees.  But absent an extraordinarily visionary leader, it requires an awful lot of internal discussion – more than most institutions are willing to devote to it.  It’s one of those things that individual faculties can do a lot more easily than full institutions, which is one reason why faculty strat plans read a lot better to academics than do institutional ones: the faculty ones can speak more authentically to the teaching enterprise a lot more easily than do institutional ones.

Now, what about research: can strategic plans speak authentically to research missions?  Well, here I point to a recent book entitled Reforms, Organizational Change and performance in Higher Education: A Comparative Account from the Nordic Countries (Pinheiro, Geschwind, Foss Hansen and Pulkkinen, eds).   This is one of those books that I love, and which are only ever produced by groups of European academics: actual fact-filled evidence-based examinations of how particular management concepts or processes affect academics in real life, as opposed to the po-faced and largely evidence-free polemical arguments with dispensations of the term “neo-liberalism,” which often passes for scholarship on these issues in North America).  This book investigates the series of managerial changes in Nordic universities which came about in the wake of a wave of university reforms in the period 2000-2008, which included greater institutional autonomy and freedom in management structures but also an increase in competitive and performance-based funding mechanisms, and what they found was quite fascinating.  While institutions did bulk up on management in order to improve internal co-ordination in order to do better at capturing external funding, the very fact that so much of the funding was now composed of funds for which individual or scholars would compete (i.e. in the way that has been normal in Canada for at least six decades through the granting councils but was still relatively new at the time in Nordic countries) meant that the institution itself actually had very little role to play in co-attracting funding.  Long-story short: granting councils make it a lot harder for institutions to act as “strategic actors”, in some ways reducing them to mere holding companies for individual scholars’ own research ambitions. 

(This, by the way, also explains why larger institutions in Canada lobbied hard for the Canada First Excellence Research Fund that doles out huge wodges of cash to a very few institutions who are good at one thing – it actually restores to institutions the role of strategic actor.)

Anyways, since most institutions have difficulty articulating a “where we want to go” on either teaching or research, what they therefore tend to do is talk about teaching and research in terms which are divorced from what actually happens in classrooms and laboratories (more student academic support, more money to do research….stuff), or talk about things which have nothing much to do with either, but which can be directly run by administrators themselves (student services, community connections, etc.).  And yes, this shows “strategic actorship” of a type – institutions can say they will do things and get them done – but only on a restricted number of topics.  To a significant degree, faculty have a practical veto over “actorship” and the practical difficulties in getting them to work together for some common goals which transcend their own (mainly disciplinary) interests is challenging, even if everyone has the best of intentions.

In fact, one of the very few ways in which institutions or faculties can in fact regain actorship over things like teaching and research is in the act of hiring.  There is very little institutions can do to shape professorial activities once hired.  However, in the act of hiring, it is possible to shape entire institutional futures (since hires can stay at an institution for 30-40 years) by choosing to build strength in clusters of related academic topics (eg. Water, China studies, Poverty), either within or preferably across disciplines.   

Given this, it is a bit remarkable how little time is spent in universities thinking specifically about hiring as a strategic activity.   It’s not as though we don’t know that it works: pretty much all of Caltech’s strength as an institution, for instance, can be traced to a very calculated set of about a dozen or so strategic hires between 1910 and 1930.  We just don’t talk about it or engage in it very much or – and this is the key part – linking it to strategic goals very often, either at the institutional or (maybe more appropriately) the faculty level.   

Tl:dr: universities engage in strategic planning because they want to be taken seriously by outsiders.  But because of the very nature of the university – not least the freedom professors are given by their access to outside research funding (e.g. granting councils) – it is difficult to create institutional plans which truly seek to create strategic change in areas central to academia.  Hiring processes offer a different path to achieving strategic change, but Canadian universities for whatever reason seem reluctant to engage in them (overtly, at least).