The managed university

Some of the kvetching is silly. American universities are corporations, and big ones. They employ thousands, they build and maintain enormous buildings, and, except in the hardest times, they grow. Urban universities have often done more than other civic entities to transform their neighborhoods — a process that always inflicts some damage, but also one that has had striking positive results in Philadelphia, New Haven, and elsewhere. In the suburbs from Route 128 in Massachusetts to Palo Alto, Calif., protean forms of corporate life have taken shape in close collaboration with universities.

In an ideal world, it might be possible for lynx-eyed, efficient faculty to run universities of the contemporary kind. In the world we inhabit, professors like that are in short supply. To plan and build on this scale, you need people who can make long- and middle- and short-term plans, who know how to round up resources and make and modify budgets, who have an eye for talent of many different kinds and a sense of how an organization works: people who would be gifted managers, and whose styles would be effective in a wide range of corporate settings.

Yet worries remain. Administrators don’t just construct or renovate the spaces where we work: They also allot rewards, in the form of promotions, raises and support for new enterprises. The universities they manage exist in a fiercely competitive environment, one in which university rankings matter more than they should (given the pathetically weak data they rest on) and every management team wants either to stay or to become king of the hill. At the top end of the university system, accordingly, rewards go to research: to measurable productivity and to prominence in disciplines, usually as demonstrated by the fact that a sister institution tries to hire someone away.

Teaching is a particularly hard area to compete in: How do you show that a university’s teaching has special qualities? It’s genuinely harder than research to assess — and some existing methods of evaluation seem better designed to alienate professors and students than to sustain passion and commitment to the classroom and provide detailed, useful feedback. Paradoxically, teaching has become the area in which universities find it easiest to save money, by means that range from substituting adjunct and contingent faculty and graduate students for tenure-track faculty in the classroom to suppressing courses and fields in which student demand has decreased.

In many ways, Princeton’s administration has been as unconventional in its commitment to teaching as it has been conventional (and effective) in fostering research. The University invests massive resources in freshman seminars and upperclass independent work, has recently supported the creation of a new integrated science curriculum and makes most tenure-track and tenured faculty spend time in the classroom. But when research priority and teaching needs conflict, teaching often loses — as when brilliant scholar/teachers are rewarded for their accomplishments by time away from teaching. And research achievement rules in the academic counterpart to March Madness.

The University has also come, in recent years, to set more store by efficiency and economy than in the past. Retrenchment after the crash required departments to revise normal precept sizes upwards and to rethink some small courses. Big lectures are great — but some of the most intense teaching I’ve seen or heard of has taken place in the small precepts and seminars that we traditionally fielded. As the endowment pumps up again, will precept sizes sink and small courses bloom again? In a far poorer world, my father took a life-changing course at Penn in which he was the only registered student — and his professor received full credit for teaching. Could anything like that happen now? Or has efficiency now become the rule, regardless of economic conditions?

Above all, I wonder how the University plans, over the years to come, to foster engaged and creative teaching at all levels and in all areas of the curriculum. I would love to see Princeton show leadership in finding serious ways to identify and reward good teaching (as serious as the way we did it 30 years ago, when three or four senior faculty members precepted for each assistant professor in my department, and judgments of teaching ability rested on their semester-long direct experience). I’d be even happier to see the University find creative ways to engage faculty, older and younger, in thinking about the curriculum as a whole and finding ways to make it more intense, in all the senses of that word. Or have we become too efficient — too corporate — to try?

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.