Comment on University Governance-BECKER

I discussed earlier the factors determining why far fewer women than men are highly successful in science and other fields. At that time, Larry Summers’ controversial statement on this topic was not yet publicly available. It is now, and it is an excellent and balanced statement that should not cause offense to any thinking person, even though some might legitimately disagree. As in my blog discussion, he gives greatest priority to the time commitments necessary to be highly successful. Since women with children have much less time available to concentrate intensely and for prolonged stretches on their work, a disproportionate number of highly successful women do not have children. He also notes that universities and companies have a competitive advantage if they do not discriminate against able women. As Harvard’s president, Summers has shown vision, enormous ability, and strength, qualities typically lacking in university presidents, with the exceptions of Edward Levi at Chicago, Gerhard Casper at Stanford, and a few others. If allowed to persist in his endeavors, he will go down as one of the great university presidents of recent decades. Although I wanted to get these comments off my chest, they are also relevant to university governance, our topic this week. Posner argues against the view that faculties should be running universities. He points out several problems with such a system, including that professors pursue their own narrow interests instead of the universities long-term goals, that professors are not selected for interpersonal skills, and that universities have become too complex to be run by a faculty collective. Strangely, he comes down in favor of university trustees as having interests that are better aligned with those of universities. Yet my experience is that trustees typically know little about, and generally do not have much interest in, the universities they oversee, they are intimidated by professors, are not very brave in their trustees’ role, generally go along with whatever is presented to them by university administrations, and very seldom force a university president to quit. Still, I believe the only satisfactory way to evaluate how universities (or businesses) are run is by their success or lack of it in the long run. Although there is no simple way, like profitability, to judge universities, there is an effective way to judge a university system. The American college and university system is widely accepted as the strongest in the world. This is why American universities are filled with students from abroad, including those from rich nations with a long history of higher education, like Germany and France. I conclude from this that the American university system must be doing many things right, at least relative to the other systems. And what is right about this system is rather obvious: several thousand public and private colleges and universities compete hard for faculty, students, and funds. That the American system of higher education is the most competitive anywhere is the crucial ingredient in its success. Competition tends to weed out the inefficient and the ineffective, regardless of whether competing enterprises are private profit –maximizers, as are most business firms, private non-profits, as are many American universities, or public non-profits, as are the majority of universities. In any industry, including the education industry, many different approaches are tried, as in the Robert Hutchins great books approach to undergraduate education at the University of Chicago. Many of these approaches fail, as the great books approach failed because it turned out to be a poor way to teach science, economics, and many other subjects. The basic effect of competition is that only the successes tend to survive in the long run. What survives in a competitive environment is not perfect evidence, but it is much better evidence on what is effective than attempts to evaluate the internal structure of organizations. This is true whether the competition applies to steel, education, or even the market for ideas. In particular, this is the main reason why I favor education vouchers, for it is one significant way to bring greater competition into the k-12 education system. Posner rightly notes that professors typically run American universities. I may have told the story in an earlier comment about Dwight Eisenhower, then the newly installed president of Columbia University, who gathered its faculty together. He indicated that he wanted to meet the employees of Columbia. Isaac Rabi, the great Columbia University physicist, is said to have corrected Eisenhower: ”Mr. President, we are not the employees of this university, we are Columbia University”. Given the effectiveness of the American higher education system, its governance, including the role of faculty, is probably on the whole along the right lines. Some literature has even shown that an industry composed of workers cooperatives, Posner’s analogy to faculty-run universities, in a competitive environment tends toward efficiency because these cooperatives have to bid against each other, and against other industries, for labor and capital. Much of that literature would apply to universities run by professors, and to other aspects of the structure of American universities. Yet enterprises in even the most competitive industry often appear to be inefficient when looked at under a microscope. This is why the many best sellers every year on how to improve the management of American companies before long pass into the market for shredded paper. Similarly, the reaction of some faculty at Harvard to Summers’ remarks at the labor conference on women is foolish, but that should not be used to judge the efficiency of the system of American higher education. I am dubious about proposals to improve a competitive system that is working. The American university system is competitive and it is working well, at least judged by its ability to continue to attract the best students from abroad, that few Americans go abroad for advanced degrees, and by the current efforts to imitate the American system of higher education in many other countries. We should not be complacent, but that is pretty effective evidence in its favor, including the approach to governance.

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