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Monday, September 15, 2014

The Former CEO as College President? Not So Fast

Are America's colleges and universities increasingly run by former CEOs? The answer is: honestly, we don't know. We don't have the data. However, that hasn't stopped a number of observers from suggesting that higher education has gone to hell in a handbasket chiefly because its leaders are introducing norms and practices derived from time spent at corporations.

For example, in her recent piece for the National Post, Rebecca Schuman included the following as one reason that, since the late 1990s, higher education has been in a precipitous decline:

...universities — especially public institutions, ever-starved of tax revenue and ever-more-dependent upon corporate partnerships and tuition — started hiring CEOs as administrators, most of whom gleefully explained that they would start running these public, nonprofit entities like businesses.

She linked the rise of the CEO-as-administrator to treating students as customers and adjunctifying the academy. Consequently, luxury dorms have been built in response to customer demand and academic freedom has been dismantled as more and more work is completed by faculty outside tenure-trackdom. In other words, two of the most controversial developments in higher education in the last decade, namely the amenities arms race and the increasing reliance upon contingent academic labor, are products of the encroaching presence of former CEOs in leadership positions at colleges and universities. Schuman is not the first and probably won't be the last to make this claim.

Now, it's certainly possible that there has been an uptick in the number of institutions recruiting people with business acumen for leadership positions. In fact, it makes perfect sense. Given that institutions increasingly must consider marketing, branding, and making money to compete and meet rising costs, there are obvious advantages to hiring someone who was previously responsible for marketing, branding, and/or revenue generation at a large organization in a competitive marketplace. Many academics have never done these things. This has not stopped several institutions from demanding that their next president come from the ranks of the faculty. And it should be noted that, even if said president were a historian of the nineteenth century south, faculty members have made fantastic leaders for as long as higher education has existed. But I digress. 

While I agree that the employment backgrounds of college and university leaders can help us understand the nature of change in higher education, we should be wary of easy answers. Before we jump to conclusions about the CEO-as-administrator, we need to collect data. (*Dibs* I'm planning to do this in the near future.) Even armed with this data, however, we can't claim, as so many do, that former CEOs are the cause of corporatization and its attendant maladies. In the short term, we might be able to assess the degree to which a certain employment background (academic v. private sector) among administrators relates to variables like the proportion of part-time faculty. All of this is a long preface to this key point: corporatization is absolutely an issue in higher education, but I'm not certain we should look to the employment history of administrators as an explanation.

I would, rather directly, look to strings attached to money coming from corporations. For example, the Center for Public Integrity has been reporting about large sums of money that the Koch brothers have donated to various colleges and universities nationwide through their charitable foundation. The money has often gone to fund research centers or faculty positions that promote free-market ideology and the shortcomings of government intervention. I would look to the political economy of education policy-making, which has subverted the notion that higher education is a public good that demands investment of public funds. And I would look to the pervasiveness of market rationality in virtually every facet of the academy. 

This last point merits reiteration. Although presidents are easy targets, the reality is that all of us are complicit in the corporatization of higher education. It is, by now, a deeply ingrained mindset. Which is to say that change is going to require a great deal more than ensuring that college leaders are not corporate big shots. It is going to require a long, hard look in the mirror. 

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