A Gaping Communication Gap in a Crisis?

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new survey that reveals that 60 percent of business officers at private non-profit colleges agree that their industry is in crisis.  No less than 70% of CFOs of public universities agree with this.  Somewhat more than 50% of the thousands of respondents from hundreds of institutions believe their schools will come through and be OK a decade from now.  Apparently the other half are not so sure.

"But several experts said the survey indicates business officers are not broadly engaged in the deep, strategic work necessary to deal with the broad financial crisis they report. They see business officers as trying to buy their way out of the situation instead of taking a deep look at costs."

Among the many strategies identified for dealing with the perceived crisis, less than one-third of respondents manifested an interest in increased teaching loads for faculty. 

Furthermore, "Chief business officers varied more widely in their opinions when it came to the question of involving faculty members in budgeting. Just 33 percent of business officers agreed that faculty members have been supportive of efforts to address budget problems at their institutions. The portion who said faculty members had not been supportive was only slightly different, 27 percent. That left 40 percent neutral on the question.

"Meanwhile, 43 percent of chief business officers said faculty members played a meaningful role in collegewide budget decisions at their institutions. The remaining majority, 57 percent, said the faculty did not play a meaningful role in such decisions."

What does this say about the communication gap between the faculty and "the other side of the house"?

To me this data reflects a much larger and longstanding issue:  the failure of higher education leadership to understand how to maximize that long-term capital investment we refer to as the tenured faculty.

More than a half century ago, Dr. Clark Kerr, forger of the California state university system,  remarked, “I have sometimes thought of the modern [U.S.] university as a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”

During my decades in higher ed, I have heard several apologias for tenure:

• Outstanding professionals won't stay in higher ed, when they can make more in the for-profit arena, unless they have tenure.
• Academic freedom requires tenure.
• Contra the first bullet point, and probably more candidly, aging faculty would wind up unemployed and unemployable, absent the job security of tenure.

Regardless, the faculty, including the tenured faculty, must be managed more efficiently in the current crisis.  It's just that simple.  And in order to enlist the full engagement of these players, administrators must begin by communicating the crisis in a transparent way.

Then they must get more work out them.  Primarily this means delivering more instruction... being on campus and available to students and administrators and colleagues more of the time... focusing on research that has cash-flow potential, whether via grants or tech transfer... taking ownership with administrators of recruitment and retention activities... buying into and owning assessment of learning outcomes and career success for students and alumni.