Rethinking Choices (After the Financial Crisis Has Hit)

Former GWU president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is blogging for The Chronicle Review in its "Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind" blog. His latest post is about the financial situation "forcing campus constituencies to rethink their choices." From his perspective, "[a]ssumptions are being thrown out the door" (or will be soon).

The administration. Strategic plans traditionally look ahead five to ten years, carefully laying out institutional goals and mission, putting building blocks in place, charting the course for the future. Every sound administrator expects to make mid-course adjustments, to tweak the strategic model, to respond to small bumps in the road. Very few, however, could have predicted the perfect storm: horrendous loses in endowments; the tightening of credit for capital projects; lack of liquidity available for short-term loans; possible reduction of personal and foundation philanthropic gifts; and the potential loss of student applicants.

This is the time for reinvention. As the president of the University of Arizona recently said, “We cannot achieve our aspirations with either our current funding or operational models.” How this is accomplished will depend on how quickly colleges and universities (and the rest of the world) sense that a stable floor has returned to the economy. If the markets continue to tumble, some decisions — and possible draconian ones — will need to be made quickly, and if the markets take a deep breath and appear to return to a calm, then decisions can be made with greater deliberation. To paraphrase the old education expression — here are the new 3-Rs for these troubled times: Reorganizing, Restructuring, and Reformatting how the business of higher education is accomplished.