Posts tagged with central.
Universities aren't the single entity people think they are
Almost everyone who doesn't work inside a university assumes, wrongly, that it's a single corporate entity. Governments deal with institutions' central administrations, which looks similar to corporate entities with their reassuring structures of presidents and vice-presidents. Parents read literature that talks in reassuring tones about the qualities of the entire institutions, and students pay their fees to a central university agency, which gives them the right to services and educational opportunities across the institution. In other words, most educational stakeholders seem to think that universities are like really big, complicated high schools.
But from inside the university, everything looks completely different. As Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, once said, "a university is a collection of departments tied together by a common steam plant". It's a lovely quote, and no less accurate for being delightfully bitchy.
Within the university itself, the basic unit of organization is the department. The reason for this is simple: most academics have a much greater loyalty to their field of study than they do to their institution. The local community they live and work in is not irrelevant, but it is less relevant than their membership in their global disciplinary community of scholars.
The best way to think of a university is as a collection of local branches of global scholarly communities. The University of Western Ontario, for instance, is simply the place where the London branches of the International Order of Historians, the Global Physics League, the World Union of Anthropologists, etc. all have their offices.
Each one of these local branches operates essentially on its own and builds up its own academic reputation quite separately from the other branches, which may happen to occupy the same set of buildings. When top-notch academics decide where to set up shop, they don't look at the research profile of the institution, they look at the research profile of the department with which they will be associated.
This is why it is can be somewhat tricky to describe entire universities through things like performance indicators, rankings and the like. A university is not a single reality but a collection of them. No university is excellent at everything it does - inevitably, even the best universities have some mediocre departments; conversely, even universities which are generally mediocre usually have a few pockets of excellence.
(Here at GlobeCampus, we try to get at this issue a little bit by presenting the data on the Campus Navigator on a field-of-study basis. It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction).
The question which nobody seems to ask is: If the departments are so important, what's the university for? Why bother to band together at all?
The cynical and too-often true answer is that they exist to run the steam plant. Universities and the central services they provide can, in this view, be seen as a form of limited pooled sovereignty for the departments. The local Physics Union agrees to become part of an institution in return for heat, light, payroll, student services, libraries and - most importantly - a conduit through which to receive money from governments and donors.
The more positive reason is that there are synergies that exist between related disciplines and it makes sense to find and exploit them. If you're going to teach German history, it's probably a good idea to have a Modern Languages department nearby that teaches German. Veterinary medicine can be done on its own, but it's probably better if there is a good medical school and immunology department nearby. A business school without a good department of economics associated with it probably isn't very good. And so on.
But there's a problem here. In order to really exploit synergies, you need to go well beyond simply having a bunch of related disciplines in the same place - you need to get down to the specialties within disciplines. Got a fantastic oriental languages department? That's great. But what use is it if you can't persuade the history, sociology and anthropology departments to start specializing in Asian studies? Got some legal scholars doing great work on water rights? Okay, but wouldn't it be better if you also has some hydrology experts in engineering and geography? And don't you think that medical school would be better if it teamed up with semioticians who could help decipher the hidden cues and missteps in doctor-patient interactions?
The potential implications of these kinds of synergies for furthering knowledge and attracting funding from governments and the private sector are enormous. Having these kind of spaces to look at "big ideas", and examining them from multiple disciplinary perspectives would be a huge benefit to universities, especially when they have to explain to the public the benefits of the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars being spent there. More broadly, it allows institutions to become much more strategic in their research spending and their positioning.
But here's the catch - it can only be done by changing and strengthening the role of central administrations within universities, and weakening that of the departments. Central administrations would identify the existing cross-departmental synergies and then strengthen them by ensuring that hiring is done accordingly; left to themselves it is extremely unlikely that departments would make hiring decisions based on cross-departmental synergies. In short, it requires a political shift within institutions; more specifically, it will require all those local branches of global academic fraternities to believe that they will see some benefit from losing some of their sovereignty.
I'm pretty sure that this type of strategic, cross-disciplinary approach to university positioning is the future of universities. The institutions that learn to do this early and well will be in the driver's seat for public and private dollars because they will be best able to demonstrate how they bring their collective talents to problems of real social and economic import.
But first we have to get institutions to function more the way outsiders have always believed they do - as a single corporate entity. We have to overcome the Common Steam Plant problem.
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ALEX USHER
