US News & World Report Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Gertler, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, accidentally exposed a significant part of the problem in higher academia management and that management’s failure to provide for an open learning environment for the students (and too many pupils) attending their institutions.
Most college presidents have résumés that stand out in the academic world of scholarship, theory, and ceremony. That background isn’t always suited for a role that requires one to juggle the competing interests of students, donors, alumni, faculty, trustees, and community members.
This is a basic misunderstanding of what the job of a college president is.
The interest of students is to learn how to think critically and how to debate positions—including, as an important pedagogic tool, in favor of those with which they disagree—learn their course material, and learn how to get along with fellow students who have different beliefs. They have no other legitimate interest while attending the college or university.
Faculty members have no interest other than to teach those things to their students and those pupils who deign attend a class. They have no legitimate school governance interest and they have no legitimate political interest once on the school campus. That they’ve gained so much influence in school governance is a failure amply demonstrated by the disruptions and riots at their institutions over the last few years.
“Community members” have no interest in the school’s operation other than that they are paid on time and fully by the school and the students and pupils for services rendered.
The only interests to which a college president need be responsive are the following. Donors, who have an interest in their money being used as they’ve designated. Alternatively, the school’s management team is free to reject a donor’s money if the designated use is antithetical to the school’s education mission.
Alumni, to the extent they recognize that their role is to support the school’s mission and not to try to impose their personal political agenda on the school.
Trustees, who are the senior managers of the institution.
The mission of a college or university to provide an environment conducive to educating all of its students, regardless of their religious belief, and then to provide that education as outlined above.
A president who cannot do those things, or who disagrees with the narrowness of those things has no business being a president of that institution.
Separately, but closely related, Gertler identified an additional major impediment to a college’s/university’s ability to satisfy its mission.
Harvard now charges incoming students $85,000 in tuition and living expenses. It has more than 25,000 students and almost 20,000 employees, including some 2,500 faculty members.
Leave aside the enormous charge to students for tuition and living expenses by an institution with an endowment of nearly $51 billion and growing. That endowment, by the way, would pay for 596,470 student-years, or more than 23 years for class cycles of those 20,000 students, longer if we’re doing dynamic scoring on that growing endowment.
The larger problem embodied by Gertler’s statistic are those 20,000 “employees” compared with those 2,500 actual teachers. That’s badly out of whack.