George Keller: Intellectual Whirlwind

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By WILFRED M. MCCLAY

I knew George well and visited him on several occasions at his home in Dickeyville, in Maryland. Strewn across his coffee table were the latest books, often dog-eared and marked up, and all the most important journals of opinion. None of it was for show.

The last time I visited him was almost a year ago, and my son, Mark (who is a junior at St. John's College, in Annapolis), was with me. Mark was very taken with George's vivacity and curiosity, and I could tell from his reactions that he was thinking, "That's the way an intellectual should be." He also could not believe that George was dying of leukemia. It was hard for me to believe too. George was absolutely straightforward about the fact that he was going to die, there was no cure possible, and then ... it was on to more interesting things; there was conversation to be had and ideas to be wrestled over. The last thing he wrote me, a letter about an article I had written on the state of American conservatism, rebuked me for getting some part of it wrong (in his view).

There is an image that we in the professoriate have of people who do the kind of work George Keller did, not unlike Thorstein Veblen's brutal comment about administrators, when he declared that "the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate." The cliché has some truth, but not as much as we faculty members would like to think, and in George's case, it was completely false. He was an intellectual whirlwind and always remained true to his old-Columbia sense of what intellectual life was about.

Higher education lost one of its most humane and farsighted analysts with George's death earlier this year at a very youthful 78. His résumé was lengthy and diverse, including a term of service as a professor and chairman of the program in higher-education studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and as editor of Planning for Higher Education, the journal of the Society for College and University Planning. After retiring from Penn in 1994, he worked as a consultant and writer, producing several notable books, including Higher Education and the New Society, to be published next year by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

But his most-lasting achievement was Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Higher Education, published in 1983, also by Johns Hopkins. Crisp and luminous, it was the right book at the right time, and few involved in higher-education administration during the 80s did not find their thinking influenced by it. The book sold out in 10 weeks, has gone through six more printings, and continues to move steadily. It was recently translated into Chinese.

It is easy to forget, in our relatively flush times, when announcements of multimillion-dollar capital campaigns are as common as fireflies on a summer night, what a sense of impending doom was hovering in the air in the late 70s and 80s. "A spectre is haunting higher education," George declared, voicing the sentiments of many; "the spectre of decline and bankruptcy." After years of rampaging growth, colleges were gripped by declining enrollments, increased competition, inflating costs, diminishing government support, and shifting priorities among those increasingly regarded as higher education's "consumers." The future of many traditional institutions — especially the venerable but chronically underendowed liberal-arts colleges — was in jeopardy.

The only enduring solution, George argued, was to take a more vigorous and focused approach to management, using tactics and objectives that had to be developed on an institution-by-institution basis. We could not expect all colleges to accomplish the same things and meet the same standards in the same ways. Nor did it make sense anymore to treat the large, expensive, complex modern university as if it were a genteel ramshackle operation to be governed casually and inattentively, if at all.

Instead, the flourishing of vulnerable colleges would depend upon their ability to identify their particular areas of comparative advantage and then seek, in a methodical way, to recast their institutional life to emphasize those strengths. Such reorientation would inevitably mean making an institution more responsive to the marketplace. But, George argued, far from being a sellout, that was a good thing when done properly — not only because it helped struggling institutions survive, but because their survival would directly result from their ability to meet the needs of the people they served. Like the social scientist David Riesman, whom he resembled in many ways, George always insisted that institutional diversity was one of higher education's greatest strengths.

Such business-oriented concepts understandably rubbed many faculty members the wrong way. Clearly colleges could no longer afford to be grandly insouciant about their performance, but how were they to introduce modern marketing strategies without undermining intellectual life and turning higher education into just another commodity for sale?

George urged his colleagues to look past their ingrained resistance and consider how the new management methods, used properly and judiciously, could actually preserve learning and inquiry and support the scholars and students who have always formed the core of the university. For him, the concept of strategic planning was a middle ground between the idea of the university as a timeless repository, grandly indifferent to everything but its own internal imperatives, and the idea of it as a crass commercial operator, seeking above all else to increase its market share. Neither approach did justice to the complex mixture of the ideal and the practical inherent in American higher education.

Properly understood, George said, strategic planning meant finding the strength to say no to many things, even those that had formerly been a part of its identity. To adopt a "strategy" was not merely a question of determining what the institution would do, but deciding what it would not do, since others could do it better.

Moreover, even though George stressed the need for constant institutionwide consultation in strategic planning, such processes had to lead to action. It was not enough for planning to be participatory; it also had to be decisive. And the decision-making buck would have to stop in some executive office, preferably that of the president. The notion that serious and sustained institutionwide reform could ever be led by the faculty was not merely challenging, but entirely fanciful. Such reform would either be pushed forward by strong executive leaders or it would not occur at all.

Today that kind of presidential leadership has been increasingly hard to find, as the combined force of external pressures and internal intransigence has significantly reduced presidents' ability to maneuver, and greatly increased their vulnerability. Changing such a dynamic is easier said than done. It is not only that so many presidents do not try to lead boldly and imaginatively, but that they so often are not permitted to. One need only consider the fact that some of the best-known university presidents of our day are those who have been thwarted and rebuked by their own faculties. Small wonder that so many presidents choose to stay low and keep moving.

George roundly disagreed with those who charged that the use of strategic planning was in effect treating the college strictly as a business. No, he insisted, it treated the college as an organization. A properly functioning college, he believed, is better regarded as an organic unity, animated by a sense of common purpose — one that is qualitatively different from the aggregate ambitions of individuals and the imperatives of their disciplines. To be sure, a good college seeks to provide all its employees with the fullest range of opportunities for their own advancement. In higher education, self-realization and institutional goals are seen as complementary, not opposing, forces. But something else is required: a strong sense of the college as a collegium, as the organization to which one's most primary loyalty is owed.

A strategic plan cannot succeed when institutional loyalty is not cultivated, rewarded, and exemplified from the top down. It certainly cannot succeed in an atmosphere in which careerist executive leaders are no sooner hired for one job than they are laying the groundwork for their next jump.

In fact, despite the popularity of Academic Strategy, the lessons George sought to teach have not been entirely learned, as even a casual glance at higher education today confirms. Many institutions survived the structural challenges of the 80s not by strategic concentration but by indiscriminate diversification — finding new constituencies of nontraditional students and inventing programs to attract them, thereby keeping enrollments up. They also began to rely more heavily on less-expensive adjunct faculty members to carry the teaching load. Such adaptations exacted a price by eroding institutions' sense of their core mission and making them more bottom-line oriented, more like diversified corporations of any other kind. They moved in precisely the opposite direction from what George was advocating. Even among the institutions today that have embraced strategic planning in theory, far too many have merely gone through the motions, assembling an array of committees and study groups, soliciting reports, and projecting ambitious goals with much fanfare but without the leadership required to make any hard choices.

Still, a few notable institutions have followed the path that George recommended and have experienced an exhilarating rebirth. One of them, Elon University, was the subject of his recent book Transforming a College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), which details the steps by which the once-imperiled North Carolina liberal-arts college remade itself into a competitive and appealingly distinctive institution. Although the case of Elon is by no means a blueprint for all others, and even it has not been immune to a few diversifications that have diluted its core mission, the path it has taken closely follows the process put forward by Academic Strategy.

It may well be that strategic planning will work best at smaller institutions like Elon, which are more flexible than large state or private universities with the full plenitude of countervailing forces and "veto groups" firmly in place — faculties, students, graduate assistants, influential alumni, staffs, athletics programs, prospective donors, and so on. And it may take severe crises, even near-death experiences, to concentrate an institution's mind. That is a fact that generous donors with a genuine interest in the renewal of American higher education should bear in mind — that there is "comparative advantage" in putting their funds into an institution where those funds have some chance of being genuinely transformative.

In the end, George's analyses are more relevant today than ever. The need for institutions to clarify the ends toward which their work is directed is even greater, especially when tuitions are higher than anyone 20 years ago would have dreamed and are poised to go even higher. The educational aims and benefits of higher education are not always obvious to the public, and colleges that defer the work of making them clear may find it hard to do so when times are less flush.

Indeed, most institutions could hardly do better than to return to the work of George Keller. Whatever the barbarities committed in the name of "strategic planning," he cannot be blamed for them. Instead, as any reader of Academic Strategy can see, and as some of us were privileged to know firsthand, he was a great defender of all that is best about American higher education. An old-fashioned humanist, he managed to learn the language of management without being consumed by it. It is very likely something that all of us will need to do in the years ahead, far better than we have done to date.

One could find few better examples of the transformative potential of higher education than George himself. The son of a Latvian father and south-German mother, born in 1928 in working-class Union City, N.J., his life would be changed forever by his encounter with Columbia University and the likes of Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, first as a student and later as a colleague and assistant dean. That special milieu of mid-century Columbia, and the lofty vision of higher education it promoted, became his ladder to a wider and richer world, and George never ceased to be grateful for it. He wanted the same ladders, and also more various ones, to be available to coming generations.

Wilfred M. McClay is a professor of humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington.