LECTURE

The future of universities: WILL UNIVERSITIES SURVIVE THE ERA OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT?

Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick, on 25 Feb. 2004.

Academics are too easily flattered by talk of "knowledge management." They often think it points to the central role of universities in society. Yet, the phrase signals quite the opposite -- that society is a veritable hotbed of knowledge production, over which universities do not enjoy any special privilege or advantage. Academics have been caught off-guard because they have traditionally treated knowledge as something pursued for its own sake, regardless of cost or consequences. However, there is increasing global pressure to open universities to the wider public, typically for reasons unrelated to the pure pursuit of knowledge. Today’s universities are expected to function as dispensers of credentials and engines of economic growth. Consequently, academics are no longer in full control of their performance standards.

In this context, knowledge managers have their work cut out. Former Fortune editor Tom Stewart calls universities "dumb organisations" that have too much "human capital" but not enough "structural capital". Behind these buzzwords is the view that a fast food chain like McDonalds’ is a "smart organisation" because it makes the most of its relatively ill-trained staff through the alchemy of good management. In contrast, business as usual in academia proceeds almost exactly in reverse, as department heads and deans struggle to keep track of the activities of its overeducated staff. If a McDonalds’ is much more than the sum of its parts, a university appears to be much less.

Academics remain largely in denial about the impact of knowledge management. Nevertheless, the sheer increase in the number of university heads drawn from business and industry concedes that McDonalds’ and MIT may be, at least in principle, judged by the same performance standards. Moreover, it is unreasonable to expect the increasing number of academics on short-term contracts to defend the integrity of an institution that cannot promise them job security. Indeed, many academics – and not just professional knowledge managers – have endorsed recent steps taken to disaggregate the "unity of teaching and research" that has defined the university since its modern reinvention in early 19^th century Germany.

These steps occur daily with the establishment of each new on-line degree program and science park -- the one reducing the university to a diploma mill, the other to a patent factory. Though they pull in opposing directions, these two "post-academic" organisations share an overriding interest in benefiting those who can pay at the point of delivery. In this context, universities appear quite vulnerable, as they have always been hard-pressed to justify their existence in such immediate cost-benefit terms. But it would be a mistake to place all the blame for this "service provider" view of universities on knowledge managers, or even the recent wave of neo-liberal ideology.

Academics who nostalgically recall the flush funding for universities in the heyday of the welfare state often forget that service provision was precisely what lay behind the appeal of academia to policymakers. The public was willing to pay higher taxes because either they (or, more likely, their children) might qualify for a course of study that would enable them to improve their job prospects or academics might come up with a cure or a technique that would improve the quality of life in society. The same mentality operates today, only in an increasingly privatised funding environment.

However, universities can be managed as other than multifaceted service providers. What originally entitled a university to corporate status under Roman law was its pursuit of aims that transcend the personal interests of any of its current members. This enabled universities to raise their own institutionally earmarked funds, which were bestowed on individuals who were "incorporated" on a non-hereditary basis. This typically required renegotiating one’s identity through examination or election, as well as being willing to become something other than one already is. Along with universities, the original corporations included churches, religious orders, guilds, and cities. Commercial ventures came to be regularly treated as corporations only in the 19^th century.

The corporate origin of universities is of more than historical interest. The oldest and most successful US universities were founded by British religious dissidents for whom the corporate form was very vivid. From the 17^th century onward, American graduates were cultivated as "alumni" who regard their time in university as a life-defining process that they would wish to share with every worthy candidate. The resulting alumni endowments have provided a fund for allowing successive generations to enjoy the same opportunity for enrichment. The Ivy League may officially charge the world’s highest tuition fees, but these are paid by only a third of the students, as the rest are subsidised from university endowments.

To overcome the knowledge manager's jibe that they are dumb organisations, universities must endeavour to be wholes much greater than the sum of their parts. At the very least, this means that a university's value must be measured beyond the short-term benefits it provides for immediate clients. The ideal of uniting teaching and research promised just such a breadth of organisational vision, one worth updating today. After all, universities are unique in producing new knowledge (through research) that is then consolidated and distributed (through teaching). In the former phase, academia generates new forms of social advantage and privilege, while in the latter phase, it eliminates them. It is this creative destruction of social capital that entitles universities to be called the original entrepreneurial organisations.

Coda: Life after State Funding: Strategies for Reinventing the University’s Autonomy

Suppose we assume that state-funded university systems are a thing of the past. They reflected a unique conjuncture of factors: nation-building (and sometimes empire-building), a stratified general education system that ensured only a small fraction of the population would attend university and a widespread belief in the trickle-down effects of academic knowledge production, which in turn justified substantial public finance schemes. That conjuncture of factors no longer exists: a decline in state authority has perversely corresponded to a rise in university attendance and greater expectations for the benefits of academic knowledge production. The overall effect has been to ‘privatise’ the university in a very specific sense, namely, to render its activities competitive with service providers whose quality is judged ‘at the point of delivery’ (e.g. does the degree get me a job?). This is what I referred to as ‘our era of knowledge management’.

Although universities were originally (both in medieval Europe and colonial America) ‘private’ in the sense of holding the legal status of independent corporations, they never faced the market so directly. Instead, one might say, universities have flourished as purveyors of long-term, second-order goods. There are significant historical precedents for this role that need to be taken more seriously today. The first has been already discussed briefly: The idea that one’s loyalty to a university is akin to church membership, the value of which is measured in terms of a lifelong commitment to the institution’s spiritual mission, which successful matriculants then wish to share with others. This mission transcends whatever, typically transient, job-related skills that students managed to pick up from their coursework. In the modern American university, the alumni association has functioned as the missionary arm. A key element in cultivating this sense of common mission is the provision of outlets for the alumni to demonstrate their continuing membership with the university. In this context, intercollegiate athletics has worked especially well in the US both in terms of raising money and reinforcing the university’s collective identity.

The second precedent for insulating universities from the direct pressure of market forces arose in the mid-19^th century as visionary Oxbridge dons like William Whewell realised that universities were not equipped to compete with the mechanics’ institutes that were training the front-line contributors to the Industrial Revolution. The academic solution was for the university to reinvent itself as a second-order institution for certifying credible instruction in the new techno-scientific arts. This in turn helped to standardise the knowledge needed for industrial growth. At a curricular level, it meant insinuating theoretical subjects at the core of practical training: engineering required physics, medicine required biology, etc. The universities effectively created a regulatory function for themselves that the state had yet to assume. This strategy was adopted in early 20^th century US, leading to the accreditation of professional schools. In many cases this resulted in the assimilation of professional schools within the normative structure of the university. If anything the worry now is that the capitalisation of professional schools – especially medicine and business – has come to dominate the university, potentially skewing the institution’s academic mission. Here the university’s integrity depends on a strong administrative commitment to the principle of ‘cross-subsidisation’, i.e. that a certain percentage of any department’s external income is redistributed across the entire university to enable all units to carry out their academic mission.

These two strategies, taken together, have the potential for reinventing the university’s most precious virtue – its autonomy – in the event of an increasingly privatised political economy for research and education. Ultimately the best indicator of institutional autonomy is the one that Immanuel Kant famously fashioned for the moral agent, namely, that she resists the path of least resistance dictated by the passions. In this respect, the market environment in which universities are increasingly forced to compete is nothing but a structured space for just such a play of passions.

In conclusion, let me list what I consider to be ‘opportunities’ opened up by the university’s autonomy in an era of declining state power. The word ‘opportunities’ is meant to capture both prospective benefits and risks:

1. Universities can enhance their autonomy by incorporating the welfare functions increasingly shed by local government. For example, the medical complex at UCLA is one of largest health providers in Southern California. Local patients are given state-of-the-art treatment, though they are typically asked to contribute the details of their cases to a larger database for further scientific study and perhaps even provide still more details as the scientific study progresses. Precedents for universities as all-purpose service providers can be found in the charters of medieval cities. Moreover, the establishment of land-grant universities in mid-19^th century US marked the official recognition of universities as potential sources of human capital development and resource management. These institutions, known for their ‘extension agencies’ in typically remote parts of rural states, have been in the forefront of modern developments in farming, mining, and forestry. Such intense involvement in the local region can serve to secure the university considerable good will that then enables it to pursue the full range of its academic mission in peace. At the same time, however, it can lead to conflict with elected officials and powerful local interests.
2. Suppose a university wants to expand the resource base that supports its research and education functions without becoming beholden either to the market or, as in (1), local politics. The obvious solution is to find one or a few major donors who attach few, if any, strings to their charitable contributions. Alumni are an obvious source of such donations. But another source increasingly used is the one big industrial donor who gives a vast sum to the university in return for setting up a science park on the edge of campus to conduct research relevant to its business. This then becomes the one pact with the Devil that enables the rest of the academics to do their work without regularly hustling for grants. As it turns out, this was the strategy used by James Duderstedt as President of the University of Michigan in the 1990s. He allowed Monsanto to set up a biotech facility in return for money that was then used to fund departments across the entire university. However, the agreement was forged without consulting the faculty, who were already known to be largely hostile to the prospect of Monsanto’s presence on campus. Duderstedt has explicitly argued that, in a competitive scaled-up world, academic self-governance may need to be sacrificed in order to pay for the day-to-day autonomy of research and teaching. If Duderstedt is correct, then more than ever we need to a course of training for academic administrators that stresses the uniqueness of universities in relation to other organisations of similar scale and scope.

Further Reading:

Steve Fuller (2000). The Governance of Science: Ideology and the Future of the Open Society. Open University Press.

Steve Fuller (2002). Knowledge Management Foundations. Butterworth-Heinemann.

Steve Fuller (2003). Can universities solve the problem of knowledge in society without succumbing to the knowledge society? Policy Futures in Education 1(1): 108-26.