Among the many criticisms of our colleges is that they are wasteful because they aren’t run on business principles. No bottom line, so administrators squander resources on lots of non-educational nonsense.
There’s some truth in that, but in today’s Martin Center article, George Perry counters that colleges can become too much like businesses.
He writes:
Since at least the early twentieth century, universities have flirted with America’s penchant for “running things like a business.” But like government, non-profits, and other non-businesses that try to be something they are not, universities’ scattershot copycatting of business practices creates new harms to the institutions and the people within them.
How so? Perry turns to Professor Kenneth Westhues author of The Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High-Achieving Professors:
He described how university life used to be guided by covenants rather than contracts. On the few occasions when faculty members had to sign something official, it was “too brief, too open-ended, too demanding of trust, to be worth much as a contract.” Covenants relied on a “relationship of trust, governed mostly by unwritten rules [and] reciprocal loyalties.” Yet it all held together for decades, if not longer: “a modus vivendi was achieved, sufficient to let the college’s work proceed.”
That sense of camaraderie has dissipated in the push to become more “businesslike.”