My postings over the last several weeks were occasioned by a question my friend and colleague Bill Massy posed. Once a quintessential insider — vaunted marketing professor, vice-provost for research, acting provost, CFO and chief administrative office, all at Stanford — Bill was now what I had come to call an outside-insider, in his case an educational researcher and consultant who no longer dwelt full-time within the academy. He was also someone I thought had little direct opportunity to change higher education writ large and I had told him so. “What are we to do?” he then asked, “Just stand idly by even though we know that American colleges and universities are not all they are supposed to be, that is, they could both do more and do it better?”

I am not going to blink on this one, though Bill comes remarkably close to being an exception to the rule I am proposing. In fact, it is precisely because he comes so close to having a sustaining, system wide impact on higher education that his experiences are central to the case I am trying to make.

In the 1970s and 1980s Massy was a major figure both within Stanford and among economists and others interested in reforming how universities spent their monies. His budget models and analyses became standard reference points for all of us then working to adjust university finances to the whims of an increasingly competitive marketplace. Toward the end of his stint as Stanford’s CFO he was appointed to the Hong Kong University Grants Committee which serves as the Special Administrative Region’s higher education governing board. There he became interested in the quality movement and how quality processes, properly mounted and monitored, could be used to change higher education—in effect, to reform it, or, to use Bill’s words, to make it constantly better. Since retiring from Stanford much of Bill’s consulting and research has centered on establishing the kind of academic audits on which the quality movement has increasingly come to depend.

It is that activity that Bill wants me to take notice of and acknowledge its power, even in the hands of an outside-insider like himself, to change higher education. Two important principles, spelled out in his Academic Quality Work (2007), guided him. First, improvement is about making things better, not about fixing things that have gone wrong. Second, the key agents of change are necessarily the faculty. Changing a university or a college means working with faculty, taking them seriously, and yes, on occasion, even feeding their egos. In the two big experimental programs he helped mount in Missouri and Tennessee, Bill would begin his work with faculty by asking them “What do you do best?” and then get them to talk about the evidence to support their claims. Only then would he gingerly get them to talk about what they did less well and what was the evidence.

By all accounts the experiments in those two public systems of higher education were a resounding success — indeed successful enough that I am sure Bill hopes that they prove that an insightful outside-insider can change higher education for the better. Not so fast is my response. Such experiments are always add-ons, usually spurred by an administrative officer committed to improvement. But those administrative officers come and ago. Their projects are replaced by those of their successors. The challenge as everyone who has attempted what Bill regularly attempts knows is to institutionalize the change. On this score higher education has a very bad history.

One more problem. Suppose what Bill has achieved is actually institutionalized in Tennessee and Missouri. Even Bill Massy doesn’t have enough energy and leverage to extend his revolution to more than two or even three dozen additional institutions out of the more than 3000 that now constitute the American system of higher education. In short, change of the kind Bill has successfully promoted can’t scale — unless some agency within and across higher education pulls the reform in, embraces it for its own reasons and with its own resources. His budget reformation succeeded, not just because he was an insider, but because there was real demand.

Having the necessary innovations is a necessary condition for reform — the sufficient condition is a sustaining demand within the academy for the kind of change external reformers have sought from the academy. To date that is something that no amount of strong language or heartfelt lamentation or governmental jawboning has succeeded in producing.