I had an interesting discussion on twitter a few days ago about the nature of University strategic plans, and specifically, why they are rarely written in a manner that feels meaningful to faculty. Having pondered it for a few days, I thought it would be worth jotting down some ideas.
- The university is, in most cases, a loosely-coupled organization. For the most part, people in Fine Arts could not care less what is going on in the Faculty of Agriculture (and vice-versa). Even within individual departments, teamwork is to some degree optional (you have your classes and research agenda, and I have mine). This is not surprising because the real rewards system in higher education lies within the structure of each discipline. The famous and somewhat unfair question “is your allegiance to your university or your discipline” matters here.
- Issues of discipline vs. university aside, to a significant degree professors behave as if they are independent contractors who nevertheless get a steady pay check from some place called “the university” which far from being a common enterprise, is rather a set of services one uses selectively and sometimes even reluctantly. That’s not to say everyone behave or feels this way, but a sufficiently large proportion does, making the notion of common enterprise problematic.
- Or, to put it another way: “The Faculty exists to protect the department from the University. The Department exists to protect me from the Faculty. And the Department can go jump in the lake.” Many professors believe at least two if not all three of those sentences. This makes universities platforms for independent teaching and research rather than an organization with a coherent value proposition of its own.
- But while the university looks like a particularly anarchistic jazz band from the inside, from the outside (i.e. from the POV of governments, students and parents), it’s an orchestra. That is, someone is in charge, and everyone has a part to play in a common purpose. In fact, they’d probably be pretty annoyed to find out no one is in charge. And so the people nominally managing the university (the Board, the administration) are obliged to make out as if the organization does have some common purpose beyond everybody doing their own worthy thing.
- One of the ways they assert that there actually is a university, and not just a group of departments connected by a steam plant, is to make strategic plans.
- Strategic planning as performed in universities is borrowed from strategic planning in the corporate sector, with a few differences:
- Companies have unique value propositions. With very few exceptions, universities do not.
- Under no circumstances are strategic plans allowed to make fundamental trade-offs between constituent different parts of the university. All boats must rise.
- Prestige, not profit, is the measure of success (as indeed it is for individual professors within their own disciplines).
- The only strategic plans that actually meet all three criteria are strategic plans which focus on increasing net revenues to the university. Co-incidentally, senior administrators have also noticed that funneling money to faculty does generally keep them happy. Not unreasonably, this leads senior administrators to believe that as long as the money keeps flowing, the faculty will be happy.
- Strategic Plans are therefore written primarily with the governments and major philanthropists in mind. Keep them happy, and money will keep flowing, and faculty will be happy, and new projects can be started, and prestige will rise.
- Corollary: strategic plans are usually written in ways which require faculty to do as little as possible. They are agendas for administrators, not faculty.
Now, for those faculty members that are happy simply puttering along on their own – that is, those who most senior admins believe are the median professors – this whole thing works out just fine. But not everyone feels that way. And for people who want a stick with which to beat admins over the head, one of the easiest things in the world is to pick up a strategic document phrased in language designed to speak to governments, businesses and philanthropists and say “this document is too corporate, it doesn’t speak the language of science and academia”.
No kidding. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Are there other, more inclusive, ways of doing strategic planning? Sure. But they require much tougher discussions about actual academic priorities, discussions that might involve campuses being more than just platforms for individual research agendas, or which might involve sacrificing some activities for the good of others. And though we might wish it were otherwise, there aren’t a lot of examples of shared governance bodies being up to having those kinds of discussions.
I invite feedback.
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Great post! This is why the average tenure of business school deans is so low (less than 3 years in NA). Inspiring strategic change & fostering systems alignment is a Herculean (if not virtually impossible) task within the academy. Developing an inspiring and differentiated, yet realistic, strategic plan (as required by AACSB accreditation) requires visionary leadership & passion, paying close attention to the views of external stakeholders & environmental shifts, much internal discussion & listening, and tapping into the aspirations and concerns of the faculty and staff. When I became dean, a mentor advised that for any new strategic initiative to have success, I would need to raise the necessary external funds. In this way, I could hire specifically for the new initiative, and no existing faculty would need to be asked to adjust their focus. Once the new initiative proved itself and gained traction, some existing faculty would voluntarily join in. This advice turned out to be prescient. As a result, much of my time is spent fundraising & launcing pilots, as well as developing 5 year strategic goals, alongside operational priorities and plans for their achievement.
That’s really interesting. Thanks for that.
You don’t have a source on the avg tenure of biz deans do you? Never seen that before.
I’m particularly sensitive to the multiple value propositions that need to be negotiated. The best part of working at a university is being the annoying noise in the room who keeps asking ‘what is a university for’ and try to chart the answers.
I read a ton of strat/academic plans while i was working on first one (for a short time) and then the academic plan (for a long time). One of the things that really stood out to me were the assumptions being made regarding the student body. If, as you say, the only audiences being served are gov. and donors then that would make more sense. If the ‘students are coming to university to get a job’ stuff is really what the government thinks is happening, it speaks to me of the paucity of good qualitative research being done. True, there isn’t a student in the world who isn’t going to check the ‘do you want a job’ checkbox on a form they’ve been forced to fill out, but that particular motivation isn’t something I’ve seen very regularly in undergrads. If I understand your argument, then you and I would agree that the best way of affecting the direction of universities is to try and change what donors, governments and (thought not connected to this piece) parents think its for. Then the strategy could follow.
I think I was fortunate to work on a sub-doc of the strat plan as it gave me a little more latitude to address specific challenges with direct solutions. There certainly was resistance to that. A desire to speak grandly about the direction of the university and let the details follow after. Have you seen other documents coming after a strat plan that are more faculty focused?
Well, I think most academic plans are more faculty-focused, because they are in effect mid-range operational plans that by necessity deal more with day-to-day mechanics.
I think there’s a case to be made that we need more academic plans and fewer strategic plans.
I think you really nailed it with this one Alex. Although I think its important to include to bring departments together to give an opportunity to participate, we shouldn’t be surprised or dismayed when many faculty would prefer not to spend much if any of their time “developing the strategic plan” Colleges may get a little more interest or participation from faculty but really they also are more interested in what the college can do to improve their own classroom experience with students not what they can do for the college. Its important if we want their involvement that they see how it will translate into a better experience at the classroom level for all.
Universities might not have distinct value propositions relative to each other, but they do relative to the other sorts of institutions that exist in the world. And as neo-corporate documents, strategic plans evade that fact.
I think your argument hints at, but does not quite state, why strategic planning has such a bad reputation. Being corporate-looking, they offend the notion that a university is not a for-profit enterprise. They therefore undermine trust in the very process by which we might, as you say, sacrifice “some activities for the good of others.” After all, who would wish such sacrifices to be adjudicated by the very people who refuse to talk about how universities are unique institutions?
No. Look, strategy started out as a military thing, and armies aren’t for-profit. A strategy is just a statement of aims and a theory about how to use resources in the best way to achieve those aims. For-profit vs. non-profit status changes your aims, but not the need to plan the effective use of resources.
You yourself said that “Strategic planning as performed in universities is borrowed from strategic planning in the corporate sector” and that they are “phrased in language designed to speak to governments, businesses and philanthropists.” And that makes those who create them sound like they’ve lost the plot about what a university is or should be.
Whether these writers deserve the distrust heaped upon them is another matter. I’m pointing to a paradox: strategic planning documents erode trust and therefore undermine their own implementation, simply by being strategic planning documents.