All in the Game

The End of Innocence

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who is a dean at a private university. He had recently returned from visits to two public universities where he was being considered for a yet higher administrative post. In both instances he withdrew, in large part, he told me, because he had concluded that this was not a good time to be an administrator at a state-supported university.

The question he was asked most often was, "Are you prepared to make the transition from a private to a public institution?"

That was the question put to me in 1998 when I was contemplating a move from Duke University to my current position at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But I completely misunderstood the question, taking it to mean something like, "Are you ready to give up the pleasures of an elite university in a garden-like college town for the rigors of an urban school populated not by the sons and daughters of lawyers and doctors but by the sons and daughters of immigrants?"

I was in fact ready (and even eager) for that, but I might not have answered in the affirmative had I understood the real import of the question, which was not about academic status and prestige but, quite simply, about money. That is, I didn't have a clue about the difference between what I can now glibly call "the revenue stream" in private and public universities, and I certainly had no understanding of the extraordinary difference in the decision-making process that I would find when I left one milieu for another.

My friend the dean, however, understood what he was being asked quite well, for when he got back home he remembered that a) even as college dean he had some control over the endowment and could at least think of dipping into it in difficult times, and b) it was within his power to raise tuition in his college. I could only listen with envy and mediated desire.

I came by my misunderstanding honestly. In the spring of 1999 when I first became a dean in Chicago, budgetary procedures seemed no different from those I had known at Duke. The rhetoric of scarcity was common to both the public and private universities; and one understood that while "talking poor" was what administrators were expected to do, the real game was to fight for your share of the dollars you knew to be available in some account labeled "reserve," or "emergency," or "special circumstance."

Every administrative conversation with a higher-up would begin with someone saying, "Well we'd like to do all of this, and in better times we perhaps could, but in these times there is a need to prioritize." So you set about prioritizing, which meant scaling back your requests to those things you wanted to ask for in the first place and could now achieve under the fiction of having given up several other things you didn't really need anyway.

Calculations were quite precise, all parties knew their roles, and everyone could go away more or less satisfied: A dean or chair could feel that the needs of the college or department had been met; a provost or vice president could feel that he or she had displayed the appropriate firmness by saying yes to some things but not to everything.

What the process assumed, however, was a relative stability in the financial situation that enabled actors to perform with reasonable expectations about what the success of the performance might yield. It is that stability that has disappeared, at least in my shop, in the past year and a half, that is, since the double whammy of 9/11 and the Enron-WorldCom debacle.

The problem was not so much that a decline in state revenues translated into fewer dollars for the university -- this has been true too of private institutions where a loss of endowment value has produced the same result -- but that the precise amount of the cut was a matter of public negotiation between several constituencies, not one of which could be said to represent the university's interests or even to know what they are.

The first constituency to weigh in here in Illinois was the press. In one of those accidents of convergence that have far-reaching effects, the Chicago Tribune had just named a new higher-education reporter who knew nothing whatsoever about higher education. What he did know was that he was the public's watchdog and that in the tradition of muckraking it was his job to rake some muck.

Before he could rake it he had to find it, and he set about doing so by requesting the paperwork on thousands of transactions. Over a period of months and after many false starts, he came up with perhaps a few hundred-thousand dollars of questionable items (mostly flights chartered by trustees to take them to meetings) out of a four-year budget of $12-billion. (We're talking thousandths of a percentage point here.) This "scandal" was duly reported in a front-page exposé, and immediately the profligacy and irresponsibility of the university, at least with respect to financial matters, became a matter of recorded fact and, as such, available to anyone who found it useful to his purposes.

Enter the politicians, especially the Democratic candidate for governor (now the governor) who promptly added to his standard stump speech the promise that he would curb the excesses of the universities and hold higher education to standards of fiscal prudence. This development was then reported by the same guy who had set the ball rolling in the first place and who now had the solipsistic pleasure of attributing the candidate's position to his own earlier efforts, although he didn't identify himself as their author. (They call that journalistic objectivity.)

So now, when the state revenue picture grew ever darker and the university was faced with the challenge of dealing with the crisis, it could not respond by asking itself the appropriate question: What will our resources now be and how best can we live within them and still protect the core of the enterprise? That's because that question had been replaced by the question manufactured by the collusion between press and politicians: How are you going to demonstrate to us (and by the way, you won't be able to) that you're not the feckless crew we know you to be?

Because the press and the politicians got there first and were met by a largely defensive response (sorry, we won't do it again), a bunch of so-called facts, all of them false -- professors work only six hours a week, administrative salaries are 20 percent of overall costs, student welfare is being sacrificed to high faculty salaries -- were already firmly in place, at least in the public's mind, and the time and energy expended in an effort to correct errors and expose exaggerations left little room for the positive task (which should have been undertaken at the outset) of explaining what a university is, what it does for the state, and what long-term effects large cuts would have on the children of the very citizens who had already swallowed the anti-intellectualism of the only message they were hearing.

What has been absent from this distressing scenario, ironically enough, is education. The press forsook education (both the entity and the obligation) for the quick rewards of "gotcha" journalism. The politicians refused either to be educated or to educate the public.

University officials, the guardians of education, allowed themselves to be maneuvered into no-win situations and didn't take the offensive until very late in the game. Now they are saying the right things -- that the university is on the brink of losing its quality, that a great asset is in jeopardy, that cuts of the magnitude proposed could only be carried out at the expense of students who would receive fewer services, experience ever larger classes and an impoverished curriculum taught in ever shabbier classrooms, that federal research dollars are awarded to distinguished researchers who will not remain at an institution that fails to support them.

But as welcome (and true) as these words are, the context they enter -- a context fashioned by those whose concern for (or knowledge of) educational values is at best minimal -- will not allow their full force to be registered. Witness the reaction of the governor's budget director: "Administrators whose first response is a 'doomsday scenario' are simply not doing what they're paid to do, and that is manage the tax and tuition dollars entrusted to them."

Only in the late stages of a dialogue gone terribly wrong could someone say something like that and sound plausible, even reasonable. Managing tax and tuition dollars (an ever-decreasing percentage of university revenues) is not what administrators are paid to do. Administrators are paid to tend and protect an educational enterprise, and they do that by hiring highly qualified teachers and researchers, by equipping them with state-of-the-art classrooms and laboratories, by designing curricula that introduce students to the best that is being thought and said across a broad range of disciplines, by mandating and implementing procedures that ensure the integrity of every university operation, and above all, by resisting the efforts of outside forces to substitute for these academic purposes the purposes imposed by nonacademic constituencies -- political, commercial, whatever.

To be sure, while they are doing these things, administrators are also managing money; but they must always remember that the money is the means to an end -- the delivery of education -- that cannot be identified with it. Those administrators who remind reporters, budget directors, and even governors that education is the true bottom line, and point out what will be lost in the long term by short-term measures are not defaulting on their jobs; they are doing their jobs and not a moment too soon.