Mathieu Stern, Unsplash Why do public university officials do the things they do? What drives their decisions to allocate scarce resources in some ways and not others?
In his recent book The University Unfettered, Ian F. McNeely offers a lot of insight into those questions. McNeely is a former (and current) faculty member and administrator, and he’s writing about his experiences at a state flagship university. He doesn’t say which one, although it’s easy to figure it out if you want to. But which state flagship doesn’t really matter, as there’s nothing unique about “The University” and those who run it.
It is clear from the outset that NcNeely is a “Progressive” who buys into most of the academic left’s beliefs and dislikes. He agrees with the idea that the country needs to get most students through college because failure to earn a BA “is a powerful predictor of diminished life chances, precarious employment, and even premature death.” And McNeely can’t hide his animosity toward non-progressives, for instance, when he writes that opposition to the left’s diversity agenda stems from “McCarthyite paranoia.” (For but one countervailing view, see this piece by Rick Hess.)
The University McNeely writes about is in a state where public funding has steadily declined to the point where only nine percent of its funds come from state appropriations. McNeely regards the “public disinvestment” from state colleges and universities as a great mistake that has heaped the costs on students and their families, but never considers whether they should bear the costs rather than the taxpayers. Nevertheless, schools such as the University have done quite well when they obtain their funds from willing donors, and McNeely says that “unfettered” universities do just fine when they are “emancipated to compete openly with their peers to achieve excellence.”
Whether the University achieved excellence is debatable, but it certainly spent a lot of money.
Donors love taking credit for new buildings, and administrators love the publicity, but do students actually learn more? The University went all in for “fundraising and friend-raising,” bringing in an unprecedented haul of money, including a gigantic gift from a donor for the construction of a new campus. And building that glittering new campus led to still more private donations and unlocked access to state bonds. Donors love taking credit for new buildings, and administrators love the publicity, but do students actually learn more? Or is the expenditure mainly to enhance the prestige of the institution?
The latter explanation was advanced by economics professor Robert Martin in his paper The Revenue to Cost Spiral. He argued that managers of non-profit entities have strong incentives to spend money in ways calculated to enhance their reputations, whether or not the projects accomplish anything else. Throughout McNeely’s book, we see many examples to prove Martin’s point.
To raise revenue, administrators sought to bring in more foreign students (who pay full tuition) and keep all students enrolled. Thus, a big new bureaucracy was created: Student Services and Enrollment Management with a 55-page strategic plan. Of course, it costs a lot of money to hire the professionals who do all the necessary work, including “an army of recruiters who fanned out to other states.”
Faculty spending is just a small percentage of the total cost of a college. The profusion of new administrators and lavish spending in pursuit of goals with dubious educational value belies McNeely’s argument that colleges and universities simply must increase tuition and revenue gathering due to what economist William Baumol called their “cost disease.” His insight was that faculty productivity cannot increase much, if at all, because of time limits. Just as a string quartet, for example, can’t play a piece faster to become more productive, professors can’t deliver classes on the laws of physics or Shakespeare plays faster.
Baumol’s claimed “cost disease” has often been used as the excuse for rising tuition and aggressive fundraising, but it overlooks the fact that faculty spending is just a small percentage of the total cost of a college, that due to adjunctification, schools have been economizing on faculty for decades, and that most of the additional funds are not spent on education per se.
Among the “crises” confronting the University during this time was the prospect of losing membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU). The AAU is very selective and had recently given another big university the boot because it wasn’t keeping up with its standards. Leaders at the University knew that the school was very low on the AAU’s rankings due to its low research output. To avoid the embarrassment of losing AAU status, the leadership embarked on a costly campaign to lure new researchers away from other universities.
This prestige move was important to the top brass, but did it improve the education of students? This prestige move was important to the top brass, but did it improve the education of students? McNeely recognizes that it did not, writing, “Research is a loss leader that universities tolerate for a complex blend of motivations ranging from serving their core academic mission to signaling robustness and quality to rankings-conscious consumers and policy makers.”
Furthermore, NcNeely sees that the obsession with research productivity entails a lot of waste. He writes, “Perverse outcomes result when, for example, faculty are incentivized to break up long articles into several publishable pieces, boost article citation impact by citing friends as a quid pro quo for being cited by them in turn, or to forego ambitious projects entirely for fear that they will not result in a quantifiably prestigious end product.” In short, the quest for a shining reputation for research costs a lot by crowding out other educational objectives.
But while McNeely is clear-eyed when it comes to the folly of some of the University’s quests, he is in a fog when it comes to others, particularly the need for “diversity.” He sees it as a “civic religion” and regales the reader with all the University did to recruit and retain minority students—a Black Cultural Center, a big DEI office, new diversity committees all across the school, a requirement that faculty members must describe their commitment to “diversity” in applications for tenure and promotion, and more. Gaining minority students is a step toward social justice, and McNeely assures us that the push for more minority faculty was accomplished without compromising academic standards.
Diversity is such a sacred cow with progressives that they can’t imagine any downsides. Diversity is such a sacred cow with progressives that they can’t imagine any downsides. It makes them feel good—but is it really a benefit? The pretty good minority students drawn into this flagship would have enrolled at other, perhaps less prestigious schools, but would probably have done as well or better there. (When California dropped racial preferences, that was the benign result.) And it’s very hard to imagine that the strong push for minority faculty and against any DEI skeptics did not affect quality. Undoubtedly, some excellent candidates were filtered out.
For all his support for the DEI agenda, McNeely admits that it is a “wishful notion” that higher education policies can solve the underlying “pipeline” problem, namely that so many minority students flounder in their K-12 schools. Alas, his solution for that is to spend more money on those schools, ignoring the fact that many of the school districts with the highest spending have the worst student outcomes. To really make a difference at the K-12 level, you have to champion school choice and go up against the entrenched education establishment. Nothing in the book suggests that course.
My takeaway from The University Unfettered is that it doesn’t much matter how our colleges and universities are funded—by tax dollars, tuition, or philanthropy. As long as they are non-profit entities run by administrators who can lavish money on prestige and their feel-good obsessions, we will spend too much for too little educational value.
George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
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George Leef
