Hello, I’m Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. One paradox of higher education that holds more or less true around the world is that while universities are charged with inventing the future, pushing boundaries, and aspiring contrarian and sometimes radical ideas, they’re also extremely conservative when it comes to their own affairs. Change does not come naturally to them anywhere in the world.

Today my guest is Brian Rosenberg, a former president of Macalester University of Minnesota and currently a president in residence — that’s really a thing — at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. He’s just written a book about academic politics with the wonderful title, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. In it, Rosenberg describes how powerless are most universities, those supposed bastions of evidence and truth, to get their faculty to actually pay attention to anything regarding to the science of learning. Or even getting faculty to collectively agree to change of any sort.

Brian thinks there are a number of factors behind this condition. The nature of institutional reputation and how hard it is to shift shared governance, the role of disciplines and the entrenched nature of departmental power. We discuss each of these areas in term, but to me, the most interesting part of this discussion were the bits about institutional leadership and whether we expect too much of presidents as change agents, often presidents like Arizona State University’s Michael Crow, or the University of Maryland at Baltimore County’s Freeman Hrabowski, as heroic leaders who have managed to mold institutions in new and innovative directions. But these types of leaders are rare, Brian says, and the conditions in which they concede may be rarer than we think.

But enough from me, let’s listen to Brian.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.15 | “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education” with Brian Rosenberg

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Brian, your book, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It,” is about the bias towards the status quo in higher education. Why does higher education act this way? What are the key features of academia that make institutional change difficult?

Brian Rosenberg (BR): What I tried to do in writing this book was look beyond pointing fingers at individuals who might be bad actors when whole industries tend to be resistant to change. I’m inclined to look at structural and cultural factors that lead to that reluctance. What I identified was a set of about a half dozen of these factors that I have found to be important in my career. One of them is the role that reputation plays in higher education. It is an unusually, frozen industry when it comes to reputational change. Another is the incentive system since people basically don’t like change and need to have extrinsic incentives to change. Then I looked at some of the fundamental structures in higher education, including the division of colleges and universities into many departments, the governance structure which at most institutions is a form of shared governance. Then probably the most controversial of the things I talked about was tenure and whether one likes it or doesn’t, the role that it plays, or fails to play, in encouraging change. So those are the things I focused on. And then I tried so that the book was not totally a downer to end with some examples of institutions that were asking questions that might in fact lead to some of the changes that we need.

AU: One of your first areas was about reputation and the stickiness of institutional reputation. It’s really hard to move very much for most institutions in the rankings, if you want to try and be spuriously precise about how reputation is measured. But it’s not true that there’s no possibility to move your reputation, is it? I think your argument is that because it’s so difficult to change reputation or to change prestige, why bother? Why put the effort in? But you do find some institutions that can move the needle, right? You mentioned Northeastern, Arizona State is another example, and internationally, I would probably say National University of Singapore. Maybe you can never crack the top 10. You’re never going to displace Harvard, but you can still improve things. Why isn’t that an incentive to change?

BR: I think that the examples that you cite are all legitimate. In some ways, the fact that most people cite the same examples of outliers, is a sign that they are in fact exceptional. That by and large, what’s happened at a place like Northeastern or Arizona State, or you could throw in Southern New Hampshire and a handful of other places, is the exception more than the rule. I think for that kind of change to happen, it takes a peculiar set of circumstances. In the case of Northeastern, a combination of a couple of presidents who came in who pushed very hard for change. Then one cannot downplay the importance of location. They’re located in Boston. Over the last 15 or 20 years, there’s been an increasing desire among students to attend urban universities and not only Northeastern, but Boston University, Boston College, others in this region have benefited from that. In the case of Arizona State, I think it’s a little bit different. They did change their reputation, but essentially by becoming a completely different institution. They went from being a mostly on campus regional state university to being a massive online university, even though they still have a physical campus. There are always exceptions, and those are good exceptions, but my argument, I think, still would be that is not the rule. Even with schools like that, there’s a cap on how high up they could move in the higher education food chain.

AU: That brings me to my next question because you’ve talked about a couple of institutions where the key has been exceptional presidential leadership, right? You do have examples of universities whose presidents are long tenured, have above average power within their institutions. That would be people like Freeman Hrabowski at UMBC, Michael Crow at ASU, Leon Botstein at Bard. I think one of the things you said in the book was that maybe they’re exceptional because they came in when the institution was at a low point when they were “ripe for change” was the term you used. But as you say, maybe they’re the exception, but is that going to continue to be the case? Because the opening chapter of your book is why everybody is ripe for change, why the whole industry is in trouble. So, might we not see a lot more university presidents or university boards thinking about giving their presidents bigger powers and following that kind of leadership style?

BR: I think you are beginning to see institutions think about that and think about the extent to which shared governance is limiting the possibility of change. I’ve had conversations with a number of institutions in the wake of publishing my book. And one of the things that they have in common is that they’re seriously thinking about a strategic planning process that is less focused on inclusion and more focused on outcomes, which means concentrating more decision-making power in a small group. The danger always of a kind of authoritarian presidency is the same as the danger of an authoritarian government. What is benign can quickly become non-benign. When you invest too much power in one individual, you’re making a pretty big bet that their judgment is going to be right. So again, it’s a little bit like reputational change. People like Michael Crow or Leon or, say, Paul LeBlanc at Southern New Hampshire, have by and large been right in the bets that they’ve made for their institutions. But I’m not sure that is the ideal model that we want to follow at most. I would move towards smaller groups making decisions and acting as laboratories for change, but I’m not sure that I would feel comfortable or confident if the model was simply to bring in college presidents who acted more like corporate CEOs who as we see all the time, sometimes make good bets, sometimes make really bad bets, and the fate of the companies they lead can depend on the wisdom of those bets.

AU: You talk a lot in your book about the effect of departments or disciplines and how uneasily they sit within the university. You quote that famous line about faculty being united by common grievances about parking. I think that’s Clark Kerr, but you also had a good baseball metaphor about how disciplines affect the way a university works. Could you explain it?

BR: The metaphor you’re referring to is that I said that faculty at a university think of themselves less as members of a baseball team than as members of an all-star team. Members of a baseball team tend to prioritize the team and to think about how they fit into the overall structure of, and strategy of, and success of the team. Members of an all-star team are there as representatives of excellence at their particular position. The success of the team is less important than their own individual excellence. I think at many colleges and universities, that is the way departments and faculty function. If you ask most faculty members, they will not answer the question “what are you or what do you do?” by saying, I’m a college professor. They’re more likely to say, I’m a biologist, I’m a historian. I’m an English professor, I’m a chemist. So, there is this tendency to prioritize the part over the whole. As with all-star teams, which don’t tend to function particularly well as teams I think, it limits and hampers the ability of faculty to function as a unit for the benefit of the college or the university, rather than as members of a department and representatives of a discipline.

AU: It seemed to me that in the chapter on disciplines, you focus mainly on the warping effects that disciplines have on graduate education, right? That these basically apprenticeships, right? They’re trying to teach students the way that they were taught. So that encourages conservatism, and it encourages a certain focus on research over teaching. I don’t disagree with that, but I would have thought that the bigger effect was on undergraduate education because of the way it forces students to take degrees based on disciplines rather than say missions, right? “Missions rather than majors,” I know that’s a slogan at African Leadership University where you’ve been an advisor for some time. Why do you think the graduate channel matters more?

BR: I think the two are inseparable. The reason that I focus on graduate education is because graduate education produces the people who eventually end up at colleges and universities teaching undergraduates. So, the way that they are trained and the way they are acculturated to think about themselves professionally and their professional responsibilities begins there. Then it shapes the way they think about their professional careers, the colleges by which they’re hired, and the students that they teach. I would argue that the reason that you look at virtually every undergraduate curriculum and see the same thing faculty divided in, even at small colleges, into 30 or 40 different discipline specific departments, is because that’s the way they were trained. They were given no preparation to think of themselves as members of a college or as members of a faculty. They were trained to think of themselves as members in effect of a professional guild. My argument essentially is that the only way to fix things at the undergraduate level is to go back to that formative moment and fix things at the graduate level. If you train people to be plumbers, they’re going to be plumbers. If you train faculty to think of themselves as members of a discipline, they’re going to think of themselves first as members of a discipline. For me, the reason I focus on graduate education is because that’s what I think is the formative moment where if there is change, we could have the greatest impact.

AU: Brian, let’s turn to the issue of shared governance. I know you showed proper respect to the value of this tradition in the book and what share shared governance can achieve. But you also make the excellent point that one thing shared governance has trouble with, precisely because it is always about seeking consensus and therefore necessarily being inclusive to trade off things between different interests, it has trouble saying what a university ought not to do, right? Or maybe more accurately what it should stop doing. It’s easy to add things in shared governance, it’s difficult to stop doing things. I’m curious, can you imagine a set of rule or norm changes in shared governance that would overcome that problem? What would it take to create a shared governance system that can say no?

BR: It wouldn’t necessarily take, I think, dramatic changes. In fact, even in my own career I’ve seen the different outcomes when you have relatively small differences in shared governance. For instance, when I was at Macalester, the faculty handbook stated that in order for a program or major to be eliminated, it required a vote of the full faculty. In my 17 years of Macalester, we did not eliminate a single program. We added lots, as you said, but we did not eliminate any. It created, as you’d expect, all kinds of problems in terms of staffing levels and meeting student enrollment needs. By contrast, when I was at Allegheny College as a faculty member, faculty had an advisory role in the elimination of programs or departments, but the ultimate decision rested with the president and the provost. I actually participated in a faculty strategic planning committee that gave advice that actually recommended to the provost and the president that the faculty had to be downsized for the financial health of the college. We didn’t have to make that call and we certainly didn’t have to persuade our colleagues to vote. That decision ultimately was made by the provost. Who, after considering all the input he got, announced that certain programs were going to be either eliminated or reduced in size. So, I think you can have lots of input, but the big difference is where the ultimate decision-making lies. I think that change is subtle, but deeply important.

AU: The last of the five causes of institutional stasis that you list is tenure. I think you make an incontrovertible point, which is that tenure is currently constructed, makes it too easy for faculty to say no to structural or curricular changes that they dislike. Not least of all because they can simply wait out any provost that they find inconvenient. Let me push back a little bit on this one because there are countries where tenure as we think of it in North America doesn’t exist. For example: the UK, Spain, Italy. I wouldn’t have thought of many of those countries universities as being particularly pro-change, right? They’re not more amenable to change. Can we really say that tenure is such a big factor here?

BR: It’s a great question. By the way, I’ve been asked a lot of questions, and this is the first time I’ve been asked this one. So, thank you for that. A couple of points. First of all, I think that my argument would not be that tenure is the sole impediment to change, but one of them. So that even in the absence of tenure at these institutions in other countries, you still have some of the same factors. Like one form or another of shared governance, or the importance of reputation or incentive systems. But the other big difference is that, if you look at countries like Spain, Italy, or the UK, they all receive much larger public subsidies for higher education. They’re much less expensive and therefore they are not, at least in the near term, under the same kind of budgetary pressure that you see at so many American colleges and universities especially private ones. They don’t feel the same pressure to change that many American colleges and universities might feel. Absent that pressure, it’s highly unlikely that either they are going to change or the faculty is going to move to change. But a lot of the other factors, like the allegiance to the disciplines, shared governance still exists in one form or another at those institutions. But it’s a good point. And it’s a good reminder that even if tenure went away tomorrow. If some of the other factors remained in place, change would not become a piece of cake. It would still be challenging.

AU: Do you think of these five pillars of non-change as being interwoven rather than five independent pillars?

BR: Yeah, I do. Certainly, tenure and shared governance are deeply interwoven because if you go back to the 1966 AAUB statement on shared governance, it’s pretty clear that the faculty that they’re referring to in that document, even though they don’t specify it, are the tenure to tenure track faculty. That’s the way it works at most institutions. If you look at the role of the disciplines, the people in those disciplines who have the most authority and power are people who are tenured. So at least in those areas, they are very much interwoven as they’re interwoven with incentives. The group at any college that probably has the least incentive to change things, for perfectly understandable and human reasons, are the tenured faculty. So absolutely. For the purposes of writing a book, you divide them into chapters. But for the purposes of thinking about them, I do think you have to think about them as interwoven.

AU: Given that they’re interwoven, for the purposes of a radio of a podcast interview, if you could make wave a magic wand and get rid of just one of them, which would it be and why?

BR: I would focus on things that are within the control of higher education. So, I think that things like reputation and incentives are much harder to control. The one that I would really focus on is shared governance. That is a governance structure that prioritizes participation over outcomes. I really think that virtually all the research on organizational change suggests that smaller groups of people are more likely to make good decisions and innovative decisions than are very large groups of people that, as one of the people I quote in the book says, “Consensus is the enemy of innovation.” So I would look at a governance structure that was not autocratic, but that allowed for the creation of small groups of people to act in effect as laboratories of experimentation and innovation within an institution. Every college and university in the country has smart people, some of whom understand the need for change and are really interested in working at change. They tend to run smack into the wall of shared governance. Creating some space for those people to think and design and test, whether it’s within a department or on an interdepartmental level, creating more space outside the shared governance system would be the most important change that I would try to make.

AU: I was going to ask you a question about what would your advice be to a new president? And I think you’ve answered that but let me ask you a question. Who has it easier in terms trying to change that decision making culture? Is that something that a new president could do without necessarily being accused of being presumptuous in their first months in office? Or do you have to be in office for a long time in order to gain the street cred with faculty in order to suggest changes like that?

BR: My sense is that many people have it backward. If you look at the job descriptions for most presidents during presidential searches, they talk about things like change agent and innovator. I think expecting a new president to come in and be an immediate driver of change is both unrealistic and unfair to that individual. I actually think, to your point, the people who should be the ones who are willing to take the risk of pushing for more substantial change, are presidents who have been at institutions for a longer period of time. As you said, they have simply by virtue of their survival, even if they are not universally beloved, have built up a certain amount of credibility. They have much less to risk. If you’ve been a president for 15 years you’re probably at a point in your career where if. for one reason or another, it didn’t work out, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Whereas to expect someone to come in to be viewed with the natural, perhaps suspicion, and at least questioning that a new president is viewed with and right off the bat, start to try to push for change is the wrong way to do it. I would like to see more presidents in the last years of their presidency be willing to take the risks of pushing for change than we’re seeing. I think part of the reason we’re not seeing it is that people by that point just get tired. It takes a lot of energy to push for change.

AU: That’s an interesting point. You make about the role of hiring committees. My friend, David Turpin, who was a President of a couple of universities here in Canada, he always said the problem with hiring presidential hiring committees is that they never have enough presidents on them who actually know what the job is. That can be a real hindrance.

BR: My observation from the outside of presidential searches is that neither the committees nor the search firms often have a really clear sense of what they’re looking for or what they need. Every job ad looks the same. You have a very diverse group of people on these committees, in most cases, as you say, none of whom has actually been a college president. I just think they often do not understand the requirements of the job. As a result they make bad matches. They bring in people who probably shouldn’t be brought in, and it’s not fair to the institution, and it’s not fair to the person.

AU: Last question, Brian, if I asked you back on the show 20 years from now, how much do you think will have changed in American higher education? Will universities find change to be any easier in 2044 than they do now?

BR: Actually, I think they will have changed considerably in a few ways. First of all, I think demographics might not be destiny, but they’re darn important. If you look at the United States right now, there is a mismatch between supply and demand. That is, there are too many colleges given the demographic trends in the country. So, I do think 20 years from now, one of the changes will be simply that there will be fewer institutions so that the market is right size. I think that technology will play a dramatically greater role. That does not say that I am necessarily sanguine about those changes, because we don’t have a great history as human beings of using technology wisely. But it will play a larger role and it will probably ultimately be the thing that begins to bend the cost curve of higher education. I like to think that we’ll see more differentiation among institutions so that virtually every college and university doesn’t appear to offer more or less the same curriculum and that more colleges will try to distinguish themselves by appealing to a particular market or doing things in a distinctive way. About that, I’m less sure. But constraint drives innovation and I think that the constraint that higher education is facing is going to be bound to, in one way or another, force more of these places to innovate.

AU: Brian, thanks so much for joining us today.

BR: My pleasure.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Roger Smyth — higher education consultant and former director at New Zealand’s Ministry of Education — and we’ll be talking about that country’s new government and its somewhat baffling set of changes to the previous Labour government’s free fees policy. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.