Academic Libraries: 'Nothing More than Computer Labs with SOfas and Coffee?

Johann Neem posits that "across the country deans of libraries are giving up the fight and changing their mission rather than fighting to save an important academic institution. Rather than make clear why we need academic libraries, the library’s leaders are seeking instead to become vague learning environments which, when boiled down to their essence, are nothing more than computer labs with sofas and coffee." He sees a dual threat to academic libraries and other support areas: Declining funding and the campus professionals more tied to their "fields" - such as library science - than to the core purposes of the library. (He sees similar problems in student affairs and higher education administration in general.)

The Next Big Thing: Crisis and Transformation in American Higher Education

On Inside Higher Ed's "Blog U," the latest post is titled The Next Big Thing: Crisis and Transformation in American Higher Education, which concludes: "It is good to attend crisis conferences, seminars, and meetings on the next big thing. We all need to worry about the global transformation of higher education, but it is even more important for each institution to stay closely focused on the performance that produces high quality and high productivity measured against a clear and precise understanding of the marketplace for its mission. . . . When the moment passes, the publicity dies down, and the pundits turn to other crises, the college and university winners will be those who paid attention to the fundamentals all along." We might add that the winners will be the institutions which have used integrated, comprehensive planning to align the campus with its mission and vision.

What then is the optimal behavior of institutions suffering through the peaks and valleys of these serial crises? Some common sense guidelines may be helpful. The primary imperative surprises none of us: Pay attention to the fundamentals, all of which speak to the competitive performance of institutions within their sector and subsector of the higher education industry.

a. Enroll students.

b. Graduate students.

c. Focus on revenue.

d. Track expenses precisely.

e. Measure faculty, staff, and student performance.

f. Understand the difference between core activity and enhancements.

g. Do the core activities first and do them well.

Another Religious Institution Going For-Profit

Elizabeth Redden has written a very nice summary of the current changes at Crichton College, as well as the further-down-the-road experiences of Grand Canyon Education, Inc. What happens when a faith-based institution decides to seek financial salvation by going commercial?

“They don’t want to go out of business, they want to find a way to be able to continue consistent with their mission…. I’m working with a number of institutions, some of which have a religious affiliation, some of which have a strong religious affiliation, some have none at all, but they all have missions. And a piece of the issue is how do they preserve them."

Read more here:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/03/christian

Cornell Experts Discuss Colleges' Responsibilities During Hard Times

One doesn't think of Cornell University as being as subject to to the financial winds as, say, an HBCU. But that doesn't stop Cornell from convening experts to discuss the impact of the financial crisis on higher education in the United States, and Cornell in particular:

He said colleges should try to figure out ways to improve their productivity, but without cutting employees' salaries or increasing their workload. Technology might be one way to do that.

He also said colleges should do what they can to protect and preserve jobs. Cornell, he noted, is the biggest employer between Albany and Buffalo. "We have to try to manage the university to blunt the effect on the work force," he said. "It is important to look forward to what our state economy should look like when it emerges from the financial mess."

Colleges should also take a more active role in trying to help the country emerge from this quagmire, he said. First, colleges should pursue research that will bring tangible benefits to the economy, through technology transfer and marketable inventions.

Second, more academics should take prominent roles in helping to form public policy. "Universities have abdicated their role to think tanks in the past 20 years," he said. "The leaders at the universities have been relatively silent."

The ‘Business Model’ Is the Wrong Model

Does this fall into the "never waste a crisis" mode? As we focus on cutting budgets, are we inevitably falling into what Peter Katopes thinks is the wrong model for our campuses, the "Business Model?"

College ought not to be merely a place where someone learns “skills” and racks up credentials, but rather an environment and an experience in which students learn, in addition to history and literature and mathematics, also how to begin to navigate the adult civilized world in an adult, civilized, and responsible manner. Their naïve assumptions about life and nature should be tempered by the rigors of discourse, debate, and discussion. Higher education should be training for life as it is — not as it is imagined by the child’s mind.

When colleges adhere to the “business model” they create dangerous expectations for their students and do no service to the larger community.

Currently the nation faces an economic crisis the likes of which most of us have only had nightmares about. We as a nation have the lowest savings rate and highest personal debt of any industrialized nation. We have been taught for more than 30 years that we are entitled to get what we want when we want it. The sub-prime horror has been a result of a sense of this entitlement which pervades society at all levels: the top, the middle, the bottom.

It is time that our colleges return to their traditional mission of educating the populace for the long haul. And that means teaching them to live and serve within a context of responsibility, prudence, and care.

New Book: Turnaround: Leading Stressed Colleges and Universities to Excellence

University Business "Future Shock" writers James E. Samels and James Martin have published a new book which "outlines how board members, presidents, and administrators can identify their institutions’ weaknesses, implement plans for improvement, and mitigate existing damage."

Rather than jumping too quickly to a new, expensive degree program or an expanded marketing campaign, experienced campus leaders working to mitigate risks learn to gauge early on if mission has been considered in any substantive way. As Sandra Elman, president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, wrote, without a commonly understood vision across campus, “a weakened institution is likely to flounder and make arbitrary decisions that go unchallenged.” Placing mission first in a turnaround process focuses the leadership team on the institution’s core principles that should drive new program development, personnel hiring, and strategic marketing.

...

In reviewing summary recommendations from the book's core chapters on board leadership, the presidency, academic strategy, and the work of the cabinet, five areas emerge as central to turnaround success: clarity of mission, financial stability, infrastructure health, accreditation transparency, and engaged board, executive, and faculty leadership.

Each of these areas must be integrated into the overall turnaround plan for the institution finally to achieve and sustain stability, but we caution readers to realize that even in the face of a major enrollment decline or budget deficit, or the sudden defection of the president, there will remain multiple ways to address the institution’s most pressing problems. Thus we synthesize key strategies of approach and lessons learned with the understanding that they conclude a practitioner’s handbook designed to provide solutions for campus leaders who are contending with a broad scope of overlapping and ingrained weaknesses.

Michael Oakeshott and Educational Change

Twenty years downstream of Michael Oakeshott's publications of The Voice of Liberal Education, British-born conservative thinker Andrew Sullivan has published his 1989 dissertation, about Oakeshott, titled Intimations Pursued. In this blog post, Alan Contreras writes about some of Oakeshott's ideas, reflected upon in the realities of 2009:

The notion that students can ever again work their way through college at public colleges is entirely unmoored from the facts. At Oregon public universities, with which I am familiar, a student who could earn a year’s tuition by working 20 hours a week in 1965 would have to work 46 hours a week all year today to cover tuition. How, exactly, can students who spend all their time working or worrying about how and where to borrow more money be expected to focus on learning?

Yet there will be no more state subsidies sufficient to reduce the cost of public colleges. That era has been fading for fifteen years; in another fifteen it will be of interest only to academic historians. It is not that our elected officials lack good will: here in Oregon good will, and good decisions by elected officials, are easy to come by, even exemplary in recent years. Resources, however, are not easy to come by, and never will be again. The parents of today’s students are shocked at the cost of college, but the children of today’s students will live with it from birth and their parents, in school today, will have no illusions whatsoever.

We need more colleges of quality that are committed to offer their programs for very low fees, with an endowment that is designed to allow this forever and trustees who are committed to build and maintain such an endowment to that end. We need to recognize that government financial aid in meaningful amounts is over, as an effective large-scale policy. Governments are not going to have the money. That means that students will have to borrow increasingly onerous amounts or not go to college. Student loans in the amounts now required are not financial aid, they are financial oppression.

The Relevance of the Humanities

For some reason, this particular "issue" keeps turning up in many places recently, during our routine environmental scanning. In this article, Gabriel Paquette argues for strong action to maintain the relevance of the humanities, but notes that some of those measures may be controversial:

The active collaboration of scholars with government will be anathema to those who conceive of the university as a bulwark against the ever encroaching, nefarious influence of the state. The call for expanded university-government collaboration may provoke distasteful memories of the enlistment of academe in the service of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, a relationship which produced unedifying intellectual output and dreadfully compromised scholarship.

To some degree, then, skepticism toward the sort of government-university collaboration advocated here is fully warranted by the specter of the past. Moreover, the few recent efforts by the federal government to engage with researchers in the social sciences and humanities have not exactly inspired confidence.

The Pentagon’s newly launched Minerva Initiative, to say nothing of the Army’s much-criticized Human Terrain System, has generated a storm of controversy, mainly from those researchers who fear that scholarship will be placed in the service of war and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and produce ideologically distorted scholarship.

The Last Professors We'll Ever See?

No, it's not an Indiana Jones movie. It's Stanley Fish essaying about the potential end of higher education as we know it and lamenting that a young Stanley Fish today would not be able to have the career that he has had. He's reviewing The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” by Frank Donoghue.

Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.” Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”

Book Review: How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business

From the January–February–March 2009 issue of Planning for Higher Education, this "SCUP Links Blog" post provides an opportunity for you to share comments or additional resources/links about the review by John C. Adams of the book, Book Review: How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business. You can read the entire article here [LINK TO COME], in Planning for Higher Education.