From the outside, universities look like a single united entity, with many administrative subdivisions – kind of the organizational equivalent of the United States. However, the closer political analogy is actually early 1990s Yugoslavia: at a very basic level, universities are the sites of permanent civil wars between central authorities and the disciplines whose interests they purportedly serve.
Disciplines – which, except for law and theology, mostly started their existence outside universities – allowed themselves to be subsumed within universities over the course of the early 20th century. They did so for administrative reasons, not intellectual ones; bref, it seemed like a good bargain because universities offered a way for disciplines to obtain much larger amounts of money than they could get on their own. Governments (and to a lesser degree, philanthropists) found it easier to do business with universities than with, say, random groups of anthropologists or chemists. Similarly, banding together within a university made it easier for disciplines to attract the ever-growing number of students and, with them, their tuition dollars. The deal was that the anthropologists and chemists would lend their prestige to universities, and in return the university would take care of raising the money necessary to meet academics’ need for space, students, and steady pay cheques. The idea that the university had any corporate interests that superseded those of the disciplines at an intellectual level was simply a non-starter: disciplinary interests would remain supreme. As far as academics were concerned that was – and is – the deal.
Thus, there is little that drives academics crazier than the idea that a university might deign to choose between the various disciplines when it dispenses cash. If an institution, in response to an external threat (e.g. a loss of government funding), says something like, “hey, you know what? We should stop spending so much money on programs that lose money, and redistribute it to programs that might attract more outside money”, they are immediately pilloried by academics because who the hell gave the university the right to decide which disciplines are more valuable than others? When you hear people bemoaning universities acting “corporately”, this is usually what they’re on about.
This attitude, which seems so normal to academics, provokes absolute bewilderment from the outside world (particularly governments and philanthropists), who believe universities are a single corporate entity. But they’re not. As ex-University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins said, universities are a collection of warring professional fiefdoms, connected by a common steam plant. A more recent formulation, from the excellent New America Foundation analyst Kevin Carey, is that the modern university is just a holding company for a group of departments, which in turn are holding companies for a group of individual faculty research interests. In other words, Yugoslavia.
But the actual point of a university, the reason for its existence beyond sheer administrative convenience, is that it serves the advancement of knowledge by getting the disciplines to act together to tackle problems in ways they would not do so independently. And that means that the university’s raison d’etre is, in fact, to continually make choices on resource allocation across disciplines, to the areas that make the most sense, both financially and intellectually.
Yet there exists within universities a substantial and determined constituency that claims it is immoral for institutions to make such choices. Much of the incoherence, idiocy, and sheer weenieness of university “strategy” documents come from senior managers trying to square this circle: appearing to make choices, while acting in deference to the autonomous disciplinary republics, to avoid actually making any.
In short, strong disciplines are necessary and important to insure academic quality. But letting them run the university is madness.
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This is somewhat simplistic in that it tends to treat “financial” and “intellectual” choices as if they are the same thing. For example:
“If an institution, in response to an external threat (e.g. a loss of government funding), says something like, “hey, you know what? We should stop spending so much money on programs that lose money, and redistribute it to programs that might attract more outside money”
Is it necessarily the case that programs that lose money are doing less important intellectual work than programs that make money? Or does money and students flow to programs for somewhat more capricious reasons (e.g., popularity, easy, interesting, perceived ‘corporate value’ by government bureaucrats, chicken-and-egg scenarios where if you don’t have sufficient resources you can’t grow your program so it becomes less popular which leads to fewer resources, which . . . ), etc. The largest most popular (for students) Department on most university campuses is Psychology, and I’m not entirely convinced that Pscyhologists do work that is any more intellectually important than History or Anthropology or other smaller departments.
And while I’m all for interdisciplinary collaboration, it is somewhat naive to think that just because you house researchers with different interests in the same ‘holding company’ they are going to be able to collaborate any better than they could by walking down the hall or picking up the phone. Their research will not become more interdisciplinary. I’d suspect that only the committee work will, which means that chemists will now have to sit through doubly long meetings because they will also have to provide input on all of the activities of the anthropologists and everyone else who has been put together into their holding company.
I’m also not convinced that there really is “a substantial and determined constituency that claims it is immoral for institutions to make such choices”. The objections I see are not that choices need to be made, but rather that they are being made primarily, or even entirely, for financial instead of intellectual reasons.
I found the article balanced and interesting, but a couple of notes on it:
1. Law and theology did start outside universities, or rather they started universities. Irenaeus pioneered the teaching of the code of Justinian, and started the first lessons at the university of Bologna simultaneously. The early theology schools grew up around figures like Abelard, or Ivo of Chartres, both of whom taught freelance. Moreover, many disciplines seem to have begun in universities, at least insofar as we can call them disciplines rather than practices. The bargain you describe — where the disciplines grant universities prestige, and the universities provide them with, as you put it, “space, students, and steady pay cheques” — isn’t some recent innovation from the introduction of anthropology or something like it to the curriculum. Much of the time, it’s not even a bargain. Rather, it’s the university’s raison d’être: a university exists to provide a corporate structure for intellectual concerns, to take care of the paperwork, tuition and all that crap so that professors can profess.
2. University administrators aren’t qualified to choose between disciplines on intellectual grounds. There’s an old joke that deans, never mind senior admin, don’t read and can only count: they’re not qualified to read someone’s book on (say) Islamic Art of the Abassid Caliphate, especially if it’s written in Persian, and can only count up the number of publications, or look to how many students are taking the course.
3. If there were a real market demand for disciplines, there’d be no real reason to pursue them in a university in the first place. The institution should serve intellectual inquiry, not the other way around. This is what renders strategy documents truly pernicious: they attempt to direct intellectual inquiry, rather than subordinating the institution to it. The expectation seems to be that experts will abandon or at least alter their live’s works in order to pursue “community-driven engagement” or whatever.
4. Moreover, serious intellectual inquiry requires long-term commitment. I’ve used the example before, but if you want experts in Arabic thought, you need an earlier generation of experts to train them. Some mucky-mucks from the admin cancelling everything with low enrolment isn’t just shallow, but a blow to the mission of any university worthy of the name. In the same way that we need libraries to guard books, even if no one is reading them at the moment, we also need universities to preserve forms of knowing, even if no seventeen-year-old sees an obvious way that it’ll lead to a job. I frankly don’t trust administrators to believe in this or to work for it, and not to scrap programs every generation or so in favour of some new and popular trend.