Current faculty and administrators of universities have been given a special challenge and, in a way, a gift. They are living their careers at a time when there is great certainty that change will come to how universities do their work, and they as faculty will be given the opportunity to lead that change. Georgetown has a great advantage at this moment in history. Its faculty are unusually devoted to effective teaching to maximize deep and rich learning among students. Hence, evaluating how best to achieve this is natural to the way many Georgetown faculty think.
There are unprecedented forces acting on research universities at this time. Many feel that Georgetown must be at the forefront of using those forces to its advantage.
A quick review of the major forces affecting universities:
- Tuition costs have risen steadily during a time when median incomes of American families have stagnated; national student debt totals are accelerating during a time of low job growth, leading to threatened and actual state and national government interventions.
- Fertility rates among new immigrant groups vastly exceed that of the native population; the US will become a population dominated by minority groups; the country is headed for potential large social mobility driven by higher education.
- While the traditional liberal arts education continues to be valued, there are increasing demands to add to it a set of cross-cutting knowledge domains (e.g., quantitative literacy, financial literacy, entrepreneurship) necessary for future leaders of societies.
- Human knowledge is expanding at an unprecedented rate, and is increasingly not organized into traditional disciplines; the future world is likely to demand new interdisciplinary programs that will themselves change over time.
- Georgetown, like most research universities, has global ambitions; working with partners in other countries should be seamless and synergistic with on-campus activities of the university.
- Web-based software platforms have permitted massive open online courses with the capability of offering Georgetown courses to a world-wide audience, exclusively to partner organizations or to the world’s public.
- Similar software can be used to reduce original course preparation overhead for faculty and free up their face to face interactions with students. This software could be used by faculty to increase their offerings to greater numbers of students.
- Universities are creating new collaborations, with one university giving credit for courses partially taught by a faculty member in another, using online technologies.
- Without changes in the fundamental processes of creating and delivering courses, not all universities are likely to succeed in this future world; there will be new opportunities for those that do survive.
- Georgetown has strengths in rich faculty-student interactions in the context of a Jesuit and Catholic mission; this attribute can become even more distinctive in the future of higher education.
There are questions that need Georgetown-specific answers, ones that enhance the unique role that Georgetown plays in higher education in the world.
- How should the traditional 4 year liberal arts bachelor’s degree change to assure that we remain competitive both in attracting the best students and in assuring their preparation for leadership in the world?
- Should Georgetown form partnerships with other universities to offer courses at multiple universities simultaneously?
- Under what conditions will partnerships with private sector firms or nonprofit organizations advance the mission of the University?
- How can Georgetown exploit further its unique advantage of being located in Washington?
- What type of global opportunities will assist Georgetown in maximizing its success given the likely changes ahead?
- How can Georgetown maintain its distinctive “student-centered” attributes throughout the changes that it will implement?
These questions above are diverse and complicated. Answering these questions will call for an assessment of strengths and weaknesses of Georgetown in the global higher education sector A first task is to prioritize them, perhaps focusing on a subset that are more time-sensitive, more amenable to action, or offering highest payoff.
The faculty, administrators, alumni advisory committees, deans, executive vice presidents, President’s Office, and Board of Directors all have roles in addressing these issues. Collectively, they have been given the responsibility of stewardship of the institution during these times of unprecedented change.
With regard to the faculty role in addressing the issues above, I’ll appoint a faculty Visioning Task Force to work over the summer of 2013 to shape a campus-wide discussion starting in fall 2013 to mobilize input from all faculty and students. This will lead to a set of initiatives to explore new ways of shaping the education and research future of the university.
The visioning task force should have representation from all schools, calling on the most creative faculty to help enrich the discussion. The members should be a mix of different faculty ranks, disciplines, program focus (undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, research). The Provost’s Office will supply staff support for the task force.
The task force will work in parallel with the school deans, who will be meeting throughout the summer concerning the questions above as well as others. From time to time during the summer, the deans’ group will meet jointly with the task force.
In August, the two groups will jointly propose a plan to make progress on the above questions and issues over the 2013-2014 year.
I am a member of the Task Force that the Provost appointed and this is my second year
as a faculty member at Georgetown, so I am still learning about how this institution operates.
The task force has not met yet and I do not have any strong opinions about Georgetown’s future and plan to listen and learn from others. But I do have some thoughts from my past 30 years in academia.
First, I think it is great that the Provost is thinking strategically and with a long term vision, as it is clear that there are many challenges facing universities and colleges in general, and Georgetown in particular. i would expect elite institutions like Georgetown to fare well regardless of overall trends because its reputation and location in the DC area is a huge advantage that many other universities and colleges cannot benefit from. Georgetown has been able to draw on luminaries from the US government to teach its students, and this is also a huge advantage. But relative to the Harvard’s and Yale’s, the endowment at Georgetown is relatively small, and external overhead funding to the university may be relatively small too.
Georgetown may have overhead that is “much too high” as the response to the post by William Kuncik claims, but I am not sure that we really have good data that could enable us to definitively answer this question, either in absolute or even in relative terms. I think an important first step is data gathering to see how Georgetown compares in a variety of dimensions relative to its peers.
I would avoid overly quick judgments that there are ‘too many administrators’ until we have more data. I have found a number of University level administrative services at Georgetown to be quite good relative to those at other places I have taught at (Wisconsin, Yale and Maryland). In particular, I have found the University Information Services to be very cost-effective in providing me with 4 “virtual machines” that are critical for the research and teaching I do, and which I provide to my colleagues in economics as a general resource. I think it is particularly important to have the IT administrators and experts as this IS critical to Georgetown’s future mission.
There are and will be affiliates and administrators helping to run non-teaching programs that could be bringing in substantial funding and resources to Georgetown and it will be important to understand how these activities complement (or compete) with other resources and the main mission of the University which is teaching and research. But when Georgetown can take leadership in private sector/public sector partnerships these can not only be substantial sources of funding, but they offer huge potential for research and teaching.
Also the assumption that faculty are the “productive assets” and administrators are just
“non revenue producing personnel” is not a conclusion I would immediately leap to, along with the conclusion that there are necessarily “too many adminstrators”. I think there is just as much potential for redundancy in faculty as for administrators, and remember that many/most faculty are “non revenue producing” also.
Already I have seen some reaction of Georgetown faculty in town halls the Provost has held
and in other events I have attended at Georgetown (e.g. the GQUADS group the Provost helped to form this last spring). In the latter case, it turns out there is a huge amount of redundancy and overlap in the teaching of statistics at Georgetown. It was apparently not until the formation of the GQUADS groups that data was collected to help really assess the amount of redundancy and overlap there is. Yet at the same time I sense a degree of insularity of faculty and a lack of concern for the overall goals of the University: faculty like their own little fiefdoms to be preserved and some resist attempts to consolidate and cooperate to achieve efficiencies. If the University cannot fire or compel faculty to adapt to changing circumstances, this certainly presents a major constraint that it may not have relative to administrators or adjunct/visiting faculty.
Thus, cooperation of the faculty is really essential for a University to be able to adapt
and be excellent. While I think most faculty have good intentions and seek their own
personal excellence, some faculty to not have their own personal objectives sufficiently
aligned with their employers’, the University.
I do not think the insularity of faculty is unique to Georgetown: I have seen it at each of the
Universities I have been at in my 30 year academic career. Many faculty are very conscientious and team-oriented, but some are not and some are very resistant to change.
But with with the burgeoning knowledge and technological change, Universities will have to be more adaptable and flexible in the future. Faculty will have to adapt too, and will have to be prepared to “reinvent themselves” every bit as much as the University as a whole needs to continually examine its role and adapt to changing circumstances.
I am an economist and in economics research is paramount and teaching is not something
most economists are very good at, or at least they don’t want to admit to preferring teaching over research in public. Many of the best researchers in economics are not very good teachers, and many adjunct/visitors often get higher teaching evaluations than the star researchers, at least in my experience. However it would be a mistake for a teaching oriented elite undergrad institution like Yale or Georgetown to conclude that the star researchers who are not very good teachers are a problem and are “overpaid”. It is often that the star researchers are the “draw” for the visitors and adjuncts and also for hiring top assistant professors. So there is a question of how many and how much to pay for the
“superstars” relative to the less famous “rank and file” faculty including assistant professors,
and visitors/adjuncts. Even if the superstar faculty are not particularly stellar teachers, if they are dedicated to the institution they can help create the critical public goods and attract others that together help make a great department, following the Adam Smith insight of specialization and division of labor. Not every faculty can be equally good at everything, and so maintaining a great university depends on having the right mix of faculty and administrators with different comparative advantages, but who can work as a team and adapt and change and innovate to provide the highest value to the university relative to their cost.
So we need to know more about how individual departments can maximize their success
in the overall mission of teaching, research and service by hiring the right mix of faculty
and administrators. Given the burgeoning amount of information and knowledge that the Provost noted, departments may not be able to be good at everything in their domain and may not be able to cover every topic or teach every possible course. So we also have to think about “selective excellence” and see how external resources (e.g. MOOCs or partnerships with other universities, exchange programs, etc) can complement the areas where individual departments do not have the faculty coverage.
The University overall must also consider “selective excellence” and over time will add
new departments and programs to respond to new opportunities. But it may also have to pare back or eliminate others. Again, some faculty are often fiercely resistant to having their area, field or department pared back, but it is essential that the University be able to have this option if it wants to be excellent, since there simply are not enough resources to keep every department or field or area perpetually running, even when times have changed. The Provost is absolutely right that the University must evolve to survive and retain its excellence. This does not not mean abandoning the basic values of the liberal arts education or following the latest fads. But it does involve recognizing that there is some types of knowledge that are no longer as relevant or in demand as society evolves, and with limited resources, the University must re-evaluate its strengths and weaknesses and not just add new departments, schools, and institutes and research joint ventures, but it must also be prepared to shut down some others that are no longer deemed to be central to
its core mission and objectives.
Your post begins by saying, “Current faculty and administrators of universities have been given a special challenge…”
Yet it seems that you essentially sideline “administrators” when you describe the the steps to address the challenges ahead at Georgetown. Perhaps excluding administrators as you have perpetuates the notion that administrators, like your first commenter has written, are a major problem when it comes to the cost of higher education.
A cursory look at the activities of a major research university, however, clearly shows that faculty members cannot do everything themselves (nor do they want to, it seems). Faculty are clearly the most essential leaders of Georgetown University and should be given great responsibilities in steering the future direction of the University. But as students are being called upon to provide insight and feedback and help revise the nature of higher education at Georgetown, so should its administrators, many of whom have the experience, training, and interest to do so.
For those who think university administrators are too costly and should be downsized, tread carefully. Faculty members have heavy burdens as-is (or so they tell me) with research and publishing, teaching, mentoring, and service to the University and community. Do they really have time for managing the housing responsibilities of thousands of students; protecting and maintaining the university’s computer systems; handling the physical and emotional health of the student body; managing the grant applications that fund much of the research on campus; recruiting, selecting, and yielding qualified students to attend the institution; keeping connected with the alumni of the University; providing for the public safety of the entire University community; and raising money to support the institution in an era when higher education is being largely defunded by governments?
And if the first commenter would like to understand why tuition is so expensive, read “Why Does College Cost So Much?” by Archibald and Feldman. It’s labor economics.
This is an excellent analysis of the issues facing Georgetown and American universities generally. It is both admirable and important that Georgetown develop a strategy to address them.
Your “Major Force” No. 1, rising tuition costs, is in my view the most important. Speaking as one who has spent his career in the private sector (as a partner in a large law firm), I side with those who contend that the overhead of Georgetown and similar universities has become much too high, and is the major cause of the problem. In my experience, private sector entities execute the administrative function much more efficiently than you do. You appear to have far too many non-revenue producing personnel (administrators) in relation to revenue producers (faculty, researchers). I understand this is a problem with a very human face and would be very painful to address, but the tuition cost situation is reaching crisis proportions.
To this same point, having been a long-time alumni fundraiser for my own undergraduate institution, I frequently encounter the overhead issue as a donor objection. Larger donors, who have become very savvy in recent years, particularly raise it. They hold back out of a concern that much of their money will go toward administration and overhead, rather than the teaching and research they wish to support. They are also critical of increasing reliance on inexpensive adjunct professors, potentially diluting educational quality, while the number of administrators burgeons.
As a participant in my firm’s hiring process over the years, I would also like to comment on your “Major Force” No. 3, the liberal arts education. From our standpoint, a liberal arts education is exactly what we need legal job candidates to have had at the undergraduate level. The foundational skills of analysis, communication and argument it provides are vital to performance of the job we ask our lawyers to do, in some ways more important than the focused training of law school. A specific, vocational-type undergraduate education would not teach the needed skills, at least for my profession.
That said, it is time for a Liberal Arts 2.0. In my view, again speaking to the needs of large law firm practice, the ideal undergraduate education of today would be a combination of the traditional liberal arts (we still need the skills those teach) plus what might be though of as the modern additions to the liberal arts roster: quantitative, scientific, financial and information technology disciplines and non-English languages of broad communication (Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc.). I expect many in other businesses and professions would agree.
I do not advocate specific, vocational-type undergraduate training in these additional disciplines, but rather a general, fundamental skills approach in the liberal arts spirit. The lawyers and paralegals in our firm today need to be able to analyze, communicate and argue in both verbal terms and in the languages of statistics, science, accounting and information technology. And anyone fluent in Chinese, Spanish or Arabic has an advantage on the competition. These things have become part of the fundamental package people need to succeed, components of the modern liberal arts, as it were.
In my view, it would be a great thing for Georgetown to create something like a “Liberal Arts 2.0” or a “Liberal Arts for the 21st Century” that pulled all this together. If undergraduate majors have to be de-emphasized to make room, that would not necessarily be bad. I have never particularly noticed any correlation between specific undergraduate majors and career success in law or business. The two most successful persons in the financial industry from my college class were English and history majors.
As I am now a “lifelong learning” student at Georgetown through the Graduate Liberal Studies program, I thought I would weigh in. I hope this helps your deliberations.
William A. Kuncik MALS