Harvard as GM

I have posted before about Professor William Stuntz of Harvard and his articles in The New Republic. He is on fire again. In What Summers's fall says about the future of higher education he takes the educational establishment square on with a prescient metaphor about Harvard as GM: on top, yet unable to see the problems on the horizon.

Harvard is the General Motors of American universities: rich, bureaucratic, and confident--a deadly combination. Fifty years from now, Larry Summers's resignation will be known as the moment when Harvard embraced GM's fate. From now on, the decline will likely be steep. And not only at Harvard: Among research universities as in the car market of generations past, other American institutions will follow the market leaders, straight to the bottom. The only question is who gets to play the role of Toyota in this metaphor.

At the end he suggests that Chinese or Indian Universities might take over, or that Bill Gates might start a University from scratch. Of course, he admits the current universities might wisen up, but it does not seem likely.

Problem is, university faculty don't want to talk back to their bosses; they don't want to have bosses. And their preferences matter. The past 40 years have seen faculty take near-total control of leading universities. These institutions are democracies of a peculiar sort: Only a part of one constituency gets to vote. Two kinds of people teach in universities: those who invest in some combination of teaching students and writing scholarship (the best people invest in both), and those who go through the motions. Which group do you suppose is more likely to attend the meetings and write the memos and vote on the motions of no confidence? The correlation isn't perfect: There are great teachers and scholars who do invest in institutional governance, and thank God for them. Over time, though, general tendencies swamp individual variations, and the general tendency here is disastrous. It is as if you took the bottom half of GM's factory workers a half-century ago and told them to run the corporation, promising that whatever they did, their jobs were guaranteed and their pay could only rise. It's a great gig while it lasts.

In between, he makes a serious defense of Summers as a man of ideas and a true reformer. This has exposed the seriousness of the problem to a few more people. A competitor for traditional higher education would have a great opportunity; sadly, none exist now.

Education Posted by jk at February 27, 2006 12:47 PM