What Happens When Public Universities Are Run by Robber Barons
By Siva Vaidhyanathan, AlterNet
Posted on June 20, 2012, Printed on June 22, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/155954/what_happens_when_public_universities_are_run_by_robber_barons
In the 19th century, robber barons started their own private
universities when they were not satisfied with those already available.
But Leland Stanford never assumed his university should be run like his
railroad empire. Andrew Carnegie did not design his institute in
Pittsburgh to resemble his steel company. The University of Chicago,
John D. Rockefeller’s dream come true, assumed neither his stern Baptist
values nor his monopolistic strategies. That’s because for all their
faults, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller knew what they didn’t know.
In the 21st century, robber barons try to usurp control of established
public universities to impose their will via comical management jargon
and massive application of ego and hubris. At least that’s what’s been
happening at one of the oldest public universities in the United
States—Thomas Jefferson’s dream come true, the University of Virginia.
On Thursday night, a hedge fund billionaire, self-styled intellectual,
“radical moderate,” philanthropist, former Goldman Sachs partner, and
general bon vivant named Peter Kiernan resigned abruptly from the
foundation board of the Darden School of Business at the University of
Virginia. He had embarrassed himself by writing an email claiming to
have engineered the dismissal of the university president, Teresa
Sullivan, ousted by a surprise vote a few days earlier.
The events at UVA raise important questions about the future of higher
education, the soul of the academic project, and the way we fund
important public services.
Kiernan, who earned his MBA at Darden and sent his children to the
university, has been a longtime and generous supporter of both the
business school and the College of Arts and Sciences, where I work as a
professor. Earlier this year he published a book called—I am not making
this up—Becoming China’s Bitch.
It purports to guide America through its thorniest problems, from
incarceration to education to foreign policy. The spectacle of a rich
man telling us how to fix our country was irresistible to the New York
Times, which ran a glowing profile of Kiernan and his book on Feb. 29.
At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if
people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things. That’s why
we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid
the world of malaria. Expertise is so 20th century.
Kiernan played a strange and as-yet-unclear role in the ousting of
Sullivan over last weekend. Here is the story of how it unfolded and how
we came to know of Kiernan’s role in the matter.
Sunday morning my phones started ringing and my email box started
swelling. The rector (what we in Virginia call the chairperson) of the
University of Virginia Board of Visitors (what most states call a Board
of Regents) had written an email to the entire university community
announcing that Sullivan had resigned.
I can’t begin to describe the level of shock this generated among
alumni, students, and faculty. Suffice it to say that everyone—every
dean, every professor, every student, and every staff member at the
university—was surprised. Even Sullivan did not have a clue that this
was coming down until the Friday before the Sunday announcement. I can
describe two things: the affection and respect that the university
community had for president Sullivan in her two short years in office;
and the bizarre turn of events that led to her forced resignation.
Sullivan is an esteemed sociologist who specialized in class dynamics
and the role of debt in society. The author or co-author of six books,
she spent most of her career rising through the ranks at the University
of Texas, where she served as dean of the graduate school while I was
working toward my Ph.D. in the late 1990s. She was known around Texas as
a straightforward, competent, and gregarious leader. She carried that
reputation from Texas to the University of Michigan, the premier public
research university in the world, where she served as the chief academic
officer, or provost, for four years.
When the University of Virginia sought a president to lift it from the
ranks of an outstanding undergraduate school to a research powerhouse,
while retaining its commitment to students and the enlightenment
Jeffersonian traditions on which it was founded, the board selected
Sullivan in 2010. She became the first woman to serve as president of
UVA, a place she could not have attended as an undergraduate in the
1960s because it was all-male at the time.
The first year of Sullivan’s tenure involved hiring her own staff,
provost, and administrative vice president. In her second year she had
her team and set about reforming and streamlining the budget system, a
process that promised to save money and clarify how money flows from one
part of the university to another. This was her top priority. It was
also the Board of Visitor’s top priority—at least at the time she was
hired. Sullivan was rare among university presidents in that she managed
to get every segment of the diverse community and varied stakeholders
to buy in to her vision and plan. Everyone bought in, that is, except
for a handful of very, very rich people, some of whom happen to be
political appointees to the Board of Visitors.
We know from the email Kiernan inadvertently (stupid “reply all”
button!) sent to a large group of Darden School supporters that he had
plotted to convince many members of the board that Sullivan should go.
The Sunday we all found out Sullivan had been forced out, Kiernan wrote
in the email, “Several weeks ago I was contacted by two important
Virginia alums about working with [Board rector] Helen Dragas on this
project, particularly from the standpoint of the search process and the
strategic dynamism effort.” Kiernan assured his readers that Sullivan
was a very nice person whom he respected. And he reassured them that
sharp, trustworthy people were handling the transition process: “And you
should be comforted by the fact that both the Rector and Vice Rector,
Helen Dragas and Mark Kington are Darden alums,” Kiernan wrote. “Trust
me, Helen has things well in hand.”
In her initial letter to the university community and again in a
statement later that Sunday, Dragas declined to offer any reason for
dismissing Sullivan. One thing we have learned from watching
universities in the past year is this: When a university president fails
to report a pedophile football coach, it’s a good reason to fire him.
But no one, including Dragas has ever even suggested that Sullivan had
failed the university financially, ethically, or morally.
“The Board believes that in the rapidly changing and highly pressurized
external environment in both health care and in academia, the
University needs to remain at the forefront of change,” Dragas wrote in
her initial email announcement. I have no idea what that means or why it
pertains to Sullivan’s dismissal. I guess it means that stuff is
changing. So the university must change. Firing a president is change.
On Monday Dragas, sensing that the university community might want some
explanation for such a radical act, sent out a second message: “The
Board believes this environment calls for a much faster pace of change
in administrative structure, in governance, in financial resource
development and in resource prioritization and allocation. We do not
believe we can even maintain our current standard under a model of
incremental, marginal change. The world is simply moving too fast.”
OK, then. It’s all about pace. I suppose this means the board will
appoint a new president every two years. Or maybe more frequently,
because that’s the only way to keep up with the pace of change.
Earlier in the statement Dragas wrote that “the board feels strongly
and overwhelmingly that we need bold and proactive leadership on
tackling the difficult issues that we face.” So we can derive from
Dragas’ statements that Sullivan was not bold enough, fast enough, or
“proactive” enough to guide a bucolic 193-year-old institution founded
by a stocking-wearing guy who studied Greek and Latin for fun.
We were all baffled. So Sullivan did nothing wrong? The board would not
even hint at the reason she was fired. Conspiracy theories quickly
circulated to fill the vacuum. And they got worse after Kiernan’s letter
unleashed an unfounded fear that an MBA “cabal” was in cahoots with
Goldman Sachs to loot the university.
In a live appearance at the Rotunda, the central icon of the
university, Dragas did say, “We had a philosophical difference about the
vision of the future of the university.” So what were those
differences? She won’t say.
Fortunately, Kiernan’s email, leaked to newspapers on the following
Tuesday, contained some clues. “The decision of the Board Of Visitors to
move in another direction stems from their concern that the governance
of the University was not sufficiently tuned to the dramatic changes we
all face: funding, Internet, technology advances, the new economic
model. These are matters for strategic dynamism rather than strategic
planning.” Wait. What? “Strategic dynamism?” That struck many around the
university as “strategic neologism.” Kiernan used the phrase two more
times in his short email to supporters.
Laughter ensued. It’s the catch-phrase of the year at the University of Virginia.
I have spent the past five years immersed in corporate new-age management talk. For my recent book, The Googlization of Everything—and Why We Should Worry,
I immersed myself in the rhetoric of Silicon Valley and the finance
culture that supports it. I subjected myself to reading such
buzzword-dependent publications as Fast Company. So I had heard about
“strategic dynamism” before. I can’t say that I understand it fully. But
if my university is going to be governed by a mysterious buzzphrase, I
had better try.
Strategic dynamism, or, as it is more commonly called, “strategic
dynamics,” seems to be a method of continually altering one's short-term
targets and resource allocation depending on relative changes in
environment, the costs of inputs, and the price you can charge for
outputs. In management it means using dynamic graphs to track goals and
outcomes over time, and having the ways and the will to shift resources
to satisfy general goals via many consecutive short-term targets. Most
management textbooks offer equations one may use to dynamically chart
and execute strategy. And for all I know it makes a lot of sense.
Consider sailing, which one might do if one is a hedge fund billionaire
from Connecticut. In sailing one sets a general course to a distant
target but tacks and shifts depending on the particular environmental
changes. I understand why “dynamic” is better than “static.” Who wants a
static sailboat? But is a university, teeming with research, young
people, ideas, arguments, poems, preachers, and way too much Adderall
ever in danger of being static?
The inappropriateness of applying concepts designed for firms and
sailboats to a massive and contemplative institution as a university
should be clear to anyone who does not run a hedge fund or make too much
money. To execute anything like strategic dynamism, one must be able to
order people to do things, make quick decisions from the top down, and
have a constant view of a wide array of variables. It helps if you
understand what counts as an input and an output. Universities have
multiple inputs and uncountable and unpredictable outputs. And that’s
how we like them.
Still, this cultish diction seems to have swayed at least a few people
on the Board of Visitors. It helped convinced them that Sullivan was
either not strategic enough or dynamic enough or both. Almost a week
after the event and in the face of harsh and universal condemnation, the
board itself remains silent about its specific disagreements with
Sullivan. The Kiernan letter is the only text that guides us.
We on the faculty, joined by thousands of students and alumni, have
been asking the board for two simple things. Would it please tell us the
specific issues on which it disagreed with Sullivan? And would it
please tell us what sort of person it thinks should be president of the
university … and for how long?
Both the Kiernan letter and Dragas’ shallow statements discuss the
climate facing the university and all public universities in the United
States. The problem is, everyone seems to discuss the fact that
universities have too little money as if it actually were a matter of
climate.
It’s not. It’s a matter of politics. States have been making policy
decisions for 20 years, accelerating remarkably since the 2007
recession, to cut funding severely, shifting the costs to students and
the federal government. Adjusted for inflation, state support for each
full-time public-college student declined by 26.1 percent from 1990 to
2010. Meanwhile, faculty and staff salaries have been plummeting and
security evaporating. This is especially true at the University of
Virginia, where state support per student is far lower than at
comparable state universities such as North Carolina.
So as tuition peaks and federal support dries up, the only stream still
flowing is philanthropy. Our addiction to philanthropy carries great
costs as well as benefits to public higher education in America. We are
hooked on it because we have no choice. Either we beg people for favors
or our research grinds to a halt and we charge students even more. I am
complicit in this. I enthusiastically help raise money for the
university. And my salary is subsidized by a generous endowment from
board member Tim Robertson, son of the Rev. Pat Robertson.
The reason folks such as Dragas and Kiernan get to call the shots at
major universities is that they write huge, tax-deductable checks to
them. They buy influence and we subsidize their purchases. So too often
an institution that is supposed to set its priorities based on the needs
of a state or the needs of the planet instead alters its profile and
curriculum to reflect the whims of the wealthy. Fortunately this does
not happen often, and the vast majority of donors simply want to give
back to the institutions that gave them so much. They ask nothing in
return and admire the work we do. But it happens often enough to
significantly undermine any sense of democratic accountability for
public institutions.
The biggest challenge facing higher education is market-based myopia.
Wealthy board members, echoing the politicians who appointed them (after
massive campaign donations) too often believe that universities should
be run like businesses, despite the poor record of most actual
businesses in human history.
Universities do not have “business models.” They have complementary
missions of teaching, research, and public service. Yet such leaders
think of universities as a collection of market transactions, instead of
a dynamic (I said it) tapestry of creativity, experimentation, rigorous
thought, preservation, recreation, vision, critical debate,
contemplative spaces, powerful information sources, invention, and
immeasurable human capital.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the
University of Virginia. He also teaches in the School of Law, and is the
author of The Googlization of Everything and Why We Should Worry.
© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/155954/
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