The latest in the now rather long series of articles in the Times on the New School tries to describe the clash of values between the academic and the administrative within the university. I'm not sure it does a very good job. That may be because academic values are hard to describe in relation with anything else: they're qualitative rather than quantitative, and make our institutions fundamentally different from businesses. We don't just meet consumer demand, we reshape demand (or let consumers reshape their demands, or however you'd translate the development of character, maturity and becoming an informed citizen into businessese) - and to do this we need to be trusted not to be run by market concerns.
From our perspective as faculty, administrative consideration are and should only be secondary - the school has its vision, recruits faculty to design and teach programs in accordance with it, and students to learn from them; the administrative end makes sure that this is done effectively within our means (something we could admittedly use help with). From their perspective, well, I can't even really imagine what it is. I guess it's that we're an enterprise and it's their job to make sure it thrives and grows, building the brand; the brand has something to do with academics (we're in the ed biz), but not with any particular academic vision. In times like these especially, the customer is king, and the key is to offer what students will pay for (and not necessarily the students now enrolled).
Perhaps an analogy - no, an analog - can make the contrast clear. At the new JetBlue terminal at JFK this morning, I bumped into a friend who works at the vaunted New York Public Library. She told me the NYPL is struggling with business models too. Specifically, they're being told to focus on circulation - how many things get checked out - as opposed to what circulates. DVD and pulp fiction novels circulate, so get more of them. Non-fiction is read by few, so get less. Of course, if you have less non-fiction, even fewer readers will have the chance to discover its value.The idea that each branch library should offer its patrons a calibrated spread of offerings, classic and current, becomes unintelligible from a circulation perspective (which has renamed the position of director of collections to director of Collection Strategy), and with it the idea that one of the purposes of a library is to teach people what to be interested in, to expose them to what is worth reading and knowing about, to the information that makes them informed agents and citizens.
The parallel seems clear enough. If it doesn't matter what people do there so long as they make use of your institution, then the business model is fine. That's how a hotel, restaurant or supermarket can thrive and grow, offering more and better versions of the products the consumer wants. But if your institution is concerned with education - if you think certain things are worth studying and teaching, whether people know it or not - the business model has to be secondary, and everyone, especially the consumer, needs to know this. People pay for their educations in time and treasure because they trust the institutions to confront them what's worth knowing - including (by definition!) things whose value they do not yet know. They won't (and shouldn't) trust us if we see them only as customers.
