This post is about the ousting of popular University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan, who has been forced to resign by the UVA Board of Visitors (trustees) after just two years on the job for no reason other than that the Board is dissatisfied with her lack of, as they put it, 'strategic dynamism.'
Putting aside what would be a very satisfying rant about this kind of vacuous business jargon, the earnest utterance of which is as sure a sign as any of idiocy on the part of its speaker, what seems at this point like a calculated overthrow of a perfectly well functioning university president strikes at the core of one of the most important debates in higher education and, indeed, civil society itself. The Board's knock on Sullivan is that she isn't business-minded enough, and has refused to take the lemming-like plunge of following MIT, Harvard, and Stanford into the uncharted waters of online classes. As David Karpf has shown, it was actually a wise business move by President Sullivan to ignore the poor business sense of the board members, yet the fact that the board members were obviously dissatisfied with anyone but a puppet for a president at UVA is even more telling. This scandal--and yes, it is a scandal when you force out a sitting president of a flagship state university for no reason--speaks to the ongoing conflict between those who think universities are best run like businesses by businesspeople, and those who think businesspeople should stick to business and leave the educating to educators (to put it crudely).
Though it may not seem like it at first, this important question is also a question of higher education funding and revenue streams. In a simplified way, universities that operate primarily on public or state funding are primarily accountable to governments (and the voting public by extension); universities that operate primarily on private funding and tuition money are primarily accountable to major donors (and by extension trustee boards comprised of major donors); and any university hoping to shift its revenue source from one to the other can expect that new strings will be attached to the funding.
Though UVA is a state university, it nevertheless follows a US higher education funding model, primarily geared toward appeasing private donors, tuition-paying parents, and market/private sector forces. Virtually every US university, public or private, operates like this. If the state of Virginia decides to slash higher education spending, for example, UVA can respond by raising large amounts of funds and, more likely, by raising tuition. The US higher education market can easily absorb and support tuition increases, because tuition in the US is generally very high compared to other tuition markets in the world. The University of California system is perhaps a prime example of a stellar state-funded system that has since been de-funded by the state, so has been forced to make major cuts in resources and provisions while dramatically increasing tuition on its students. At US universities in the twenty-first century, percent annual tuition increases are regularly in the double-digits.
On the other side of the spectrum would be the European model of free or almost free higher education. Education budgets effectively subsidize all or part of the costs of higher education, such that students pay significantly less than US students, if they pay anything at all. For the most part, all of the universities in a given country cost about the same, so there is no question of shelling out 25% more tuition money for a German or French equivalent of Harvard or Amherst instead of going to another state university, because there simply isn't a German or French equivalent of Harvard or Amherst. Tuition increases, at least without further subsidies for students, are generally not tolerated in the European model. In the UK, for example, the recent government push to increase tuition from around 3000 pounds per year to up to 9000 pounds per year (in a country in which higher education used to be free for students) has been met with severe backlash.
There are major problems with both of these extremes, and what's going on in the US at UVA and the UK with higher education in general are good examples of the pitfalls of such ideological approaches to university funding.
Let's put it this way: if I were to ask you whether you'd feel more comfortable placing the balance of control over higher education in the hands of a small group of extremely wealthy, private individuals, or in the hands of a small group of politicians, would you be satisfied with your choices? Are you confident that the immense task of educating people both for the workforce (and economic reasons) and for the civilization is one that can be adequately steered and dictated by the whims of either wealthy donors or demagoguing politicians?
As you might expect, I'm not satisfied with either of these options, which, after all, are not our only options.
In the UK, where the government is and has been applying devastating cuts and absurd 'outcomes' regulations to higher education funding, a sizable portion of UK voters are arguing for 'free' higher education. The problem with this argument should be obvious: if UK universities are hurting now because the government, their primary revenue stream, is comprised of people who want to de-fund universities, what would it be like if the government were the ONLY revenue stream for UK universities (i.e. 'free' higher education)? In other words, if the politicians control university funding, and, by virtue of that, control universities, deciding which subjects are worth studying, which research should be considered valuable, what criteria to impose upon peer review, what teaching practices are best, how many staff are needed and for how long, and so on, then empowering these same people even more by forcing universities to rely entirely on government funds is only likely to amplify the problem in the future. UK higher ed. activists react with violent disdain to the idea of a market for higher education, as though anything but 'free' higher education signifies crude 'market' dominance of the education sector, but neglect the fact that they're effectively lobbying to hand greater control of universities over to the people who they're protesting against for cutting university funding.
As exemplified by the UVA scandal, there exists in the US the same problem, just a different formulation. The lack of state involvement in higher education in Virginia (relative to the UK) means that their flagship STATE university can be run by a small group of people with their own, private interests. The UVA Board wants to get rid of Classics and German departments, both of which make a profit at UVA. They want to dictate higher education curricula even though, like the UK politicians doing the same in their country, they don't know the first thing about higher education. They can get away with it, despite the fact that the people who actually teach in, research in, and run the university--the faculty--don't think cutting Classics and German, turning UVA into an online distance learning institution, and ousting the president of the university are very good ideas. They can get away with it because, tuition aside, the US university really is run by donors with disproportionate influence and inversely disproportionate stakes in the actual practice of higher education. That such boards are accorded such power over even sitting university presidents and faculty is a disgrace.
What makes this disgrace possible is the fact that while UK universities starve at the government's table, US universities live like monarchs off of the bribes of rich donors and the tithes of paying students and their families, consuming luxury sports stadiums, plush accommodations and designer gyms, unlimited executive travel funds, corporate university bookstores and shopping centers, dining halls sponsored by Subway, Quiznos, and Taco Bell, then throwing the scraps to faculty and students, the very purpose and core components of a university, for the purpose of (gasp) education!
That the US tuition and student loan model is a bubble and in crisis is a bigger argument for another time; but when we talk about the encroachment of market forces in higher education, we usually forget about these other kinds of harmful market forces, the ones that tamper with higher education itself. If US universities took more seriously their educational mission, and took serious steps toward cutting out all the fat that trustee boards like UVA's feed off of and replenish, the foundation of their counterproductive and wholly ancillary existence at the moment, we could begin to untangle the actual costs of US higher education, as well as what is needed to maintain them. For now, we should resist being held hostage to high tuition and private donations that finance excess, which encumbers universities like a bloated fat suit, and put the wrong people in charge of universities.
Addendum:
In full disclosure, I advocate a higher ed. funding model somewhere between the US and the UK (let's call it the Atlantic Approach). The quick version is this: an optimal higher education is more expensive than it costs in the UK, and less expensive than it costs in the US. A market (in terms of a range of universities, research-oriented, public, private, liberal arts, vocational, etc.) is a good thing, because different people with different aspirations require different kinds of education. This would mean choice and competition in the tuition market as well, which would mean that individuals would be charged different tuitions, and universities would have different provisions and operating costs, dependent on the university. But universities must be run by educators (faculty boards), not administrators, donors, and trustees. Which means university expenditures should be controlled by people who are actually invested in higher education. Governments should provide tuition vouchers (grants, not loans) to students in need (not so good for high school education, which must necessarily be more standardized; good for university education, which is more of a choice), and extremely wealthy universities (Harvard, etc.) should endow full scholarships for admitted students whose fall under a certain income threshold (as places like Harvard already do to address access issues, quite successfully it would seem). In short, there is a role for the individual and a role for the state in funding higher education, and this should be by design. Because we need checks and balances, so that neither elite private interests nor elite government interests can contort and diminish the mission of higher education. As Keynes understood, markets are not an end, but means to ends that are of higher value and virtue than money. Education is one such thing, a thing that markets should be used to support and realize, but not to define.
