One of my favourite authors on strategy is Richard Rummelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, which I highly recommend to anyone. He has a newish book (2022) out called The Crux which I read a few weeks ago. Today, I want to talk about it in relation to higher education.
The thesis of this book, as the name suggests, is that too often strategy does not create an organizational improvement because it does not deal squarely with the key problems that the organization actually faces. This isn’t because organizations shy away from conflict over hard questions (though this is sometimes the problem); figuring out what is the actual “key problem” is harder than you might think. Think about, say, Canada’s record on innovation: are we bad at it because we don’t have the right policies or is it, as some say, because of cultural factors like aversion to risk? How would one know one way or the other? Hence the reason good strategy is elusive.
So, I started thinking about how this applies to universities and colleges. In their strategic plans, what implicitly is the crux? And the answer of course is immediately apparent. It is money.
Of course, institutional strategies don’t usually say this outright, but reading between the lines I think it’s pretty obvious. With few exceptions, the diagnosis of every strategy is “If we had more money, we would be able to hire more profs/do more research/do more fun stuff with the community”, and as a result the implicit strategy is that management should do anything it can to get extra money through government relations (GR) and fundraising. Implicitly, institutions are never doing anything wrong, they just aren’t doing enough of (whatever it is the institution is already doing), a problem which can only be rectified with money.
To be fair, sometimes, you get a slightly more sophisticated version of this which says “actually, it’s about focus.” If only our institution did less stuff (“we can’t be everything to anyone”), then there would be more funds available to do all the cool stuff in whatever areas still remain after difficult choices have been made. It sounds a bit better, in the sense that there is sacrifice involved rather than just waiting for gifts and handouts, but it’s basically the same strategy: MORE, but only for the favoured activities/sectors.
It’s understandable, of course, how this state of affairs came to be. If money is the only problem, then no one has to change what they are doing (apart from the GR and fundraising folks, perhaps). It’s a comforting analysis because it challenges no one inside the institution to do better with what they currently have. But – hear me out – what if we treated each of those three classic buckets of activities (teaching/research/community) as a separate business (so to speak). What if strategic planning involved asking ourselves directly questions like: “how can we get better at teaching?”, “how can we get better at serving the community”, etc., and then moving directly to the question of “what is preventing us from being better at teaching/research/whatever”? And from there, to the crux.
I don’t think many people would argue that the crux of the problem in teaching at most institutions is a lack of money, for instance. The issues are largely ones of skill and commitment. Institutions can do lots of things to nudge these along, if they so choose. For instance, they could enforce mandatory professional certification and upgrading in teaching the way Dutch institutions do, or require more rigorous and evidence-based program reviews, or not treat doctoral training like an apprenticeship. There are loads of possible ideas here: that is, if institutions actually wanted to treat teaching as a crux issue.
Nor do I think most people would argue that the crux of the problem of achieving better community relations is a financial issue, either. It’s about who you choose to engage with in the external community, and how you engage them. Those are not things that require a lot of financial investment. Money is not really the crux here, either.
(And research? Well, money probably is the crux in research, at the level of the institution, anyway. You need more money to acquire better research infrastructure, hire better scholars, etc. But it’s only in research. One might suggest that the reason institutions pretend it’s true of all missions is because for most academics the institutional mission is indivisible from its research mission in a way that other two or not. Which isn’t true of course, but it would be mighty handy for a certain type of professor if it were).
Perhaps the biggest problem strategy barrier is that universities are conglomerates. They do research AND they do teaching AND they provide various benefits to the community, each of which has a different crux. The real crux, perhaps, is that a proper strategy would articulate the relative importance and hence distribution of resources across those three missions. But North American universities at least (less so colleges) have more or less designed their entire political economy so that no one can ever ask this question.
Anyways, I don’t think this is a problem necessarily restricted to higher education. To some degree, all non-profits face similar issues of assuming money is always the barrier. But it does strike me that universities and colleges do themselves a disservice by hewing to this practice. Sure, money always helps. But there are ways to improve higher education that don’t cost money (or much money, anyways), and choosing not to attempt them doesn’t bring the sector much credit.
Or, to put it another way, the crux of the problem is that the sector often behaves as if “not making waves” within the institution is of more importance than tackling key issues like improving the quality of teaching and learning. And few if any seem willing to identify that as a crux, let alone attempt to solve it.
3 Responses
Money is a resource, available or not at a given point in time. It is one of many constraints, not the only constraint. It’s absence drives innovation and deciding on trade-offs, there are always trade-offs. It is never a problem or solution.
I have to take issue with the notion that enhancing teaching and learning is not dependent on money. Some of the simple steps that would be very beneficial include:
1) decreasing class sizes, particularly in the first two years (implies more professors)
2) restoring labs to classes that have lost them because of lack of funding (this reflects my bias as a scientists, of course) (majors in my programs have less than half the amount of lab activity than they did when I started in 1990)
3) investing properly in work-integrated learning and co-op programs, particularly for institutions that did not get on the bandwagon for those types of activities.
4) funding senior research projects (right now these are funded from supervisors’ grants, which can be a limiting factor).
5) reducing the dependence on sessional faculty (for some obscure reason these are called adjuncts in some institutions). This is no reflection on the excellence and commitment shown by sessionals (who do a lot, perhaps even the majority, of lecturing in some faculties) many of whom are postdocs and grad students and professionals who have many other demands on their time. Other sessionals are fully qualified PhDs who are trying to make a living teaching at absurdly low rates of pay, and thus forced to take on insanely heavy teaching loads and can’t plan for a future they may not be part of. Replacing a lot of sessionals with ongoing faculty would allow the incumbents to invest time in program and course development.
6) Infrastructure. Labs, computer labs, classroom IT and AV and many other things are, in many institutions including mine, in dire need of a face lift and new investment.
University administrators can only do so much in terms of re-allocating money to that type of activity, given that they are judged to a huge extent on the prestige of their institution, which unfortunately is heavily dependent on rankings, which in turn seem to be far too dependent on research dollars brought it – and chasing those dollars costs a lot of faculty time and institutional money.
I enjoy your commentary: it’s always intelligent, and much better informed than anything I could come up with myself. In this case, though, I’m afraid that I disagree root and branch.
To begin with, I think the crux for universities is a lack of moral courage — or perhaps moral confidence — in what we do. This is why it seems odd not to think that what we’re doing is wrong, as when you write that
“Implicitly, institutions are never doing anything wrong, they just aren’t doing enough of (whatever it is the institution is already doing), a problem which can only be rectified with money.”
But in an important sense, they aren’t doing anything wrong. It is perfectly fine, even admirable, to dedicate one’s life to reading Dostoyevsky, or tracking solar winds, or creating better processors, or training nurses. All of these are good, and even virtuous, but we seem unwilling to defend them as pure goods. If what we’re doing is worthwhile, then we should not stop doing it.
Thinking of my colleagues, I expect that almost everybody is constantly trying to get better at what they do. The assumption of strategy, however, is that we can only improve by being led at the institutional level. Hence, we don’t have institutions which respect lecturers who sweat over their PowerPoints, but instead have institutions which hire people to tell us all to stop lecturing. Institutions already spend lots of money on teaching centres, reconciliation initiatives, innovation centres, etc. These often make no difference to actual teaching, reconciliation or innovation, but they also cost a lot in money and also time, both of which could be spent on the stuff that we lack the courage to justify.