What Makes a Good University?

Universities have long been central to the success of the national higher education enterprise, pursuing distinctive missions while responding to changing societal expectations to expand and diversify their functions. In recent years, however, a number of decision-makers and opinion-shapers—federal and provincials, educational officials, citizens’ groups, and others—have generated external pressures particularly on public universities, demanding reductions in cost, increased accountability, reconstitute University Act, greater attention to graduate and postgraduate education, and wider scrutiny of faculty productivity. The cumulative pressure on universities has increased to search for new revenue sources and redesigned delivery systems. Within this political and economic climate, it is essential to consider how the challenges facing universities today may fundamentally affect the lives of faculty within them.

Contemporary discourse on the problems plaguing higher education reaffirms the concerns, as academic organizations are criticized for their inherent inefficiency, unluckily. Faculty members are increasingly cast either as the problem—characterized as unproductive and self-interested—or as an obstacle to the solution, participation at best ineffective, at worst, obstructionist. The degree to which such unfavorable conceptions of faculty have become widespread is striking; so, too, is the extent to which a new style of academic management has simultaneously become more legitimate. The locus of control for decision-making is shifting away from departments and their faculties and toward various, non academicians but educational managers, who continually assert the need for even greater managerial flexibility to make a wide range of difficult strategic decisions, including those with educational implications. This trend is significant because, among other reasons, it runs counter to the traditional expectations that faculty bring to their workplaces.

Faculty have not always been active participants in steering macro-level changes in the mission, finance, and governance of universities. Against this background, it seems inevitable that today’s universities will disappoint and that tomorrow’s will ultimately disillusion both the faculty and those holding in view society’s long-range investment in our universities. I share these concerns to reflect on possible futures. These reflections are offered in the spirit of considering how our universities may be sustained as economically, organizationally, and intellectually viable and attractive places for academic work.

Contemporary Challenges and University Responses

Public universities are today beset by persistent vulnerability, as their legitimacy and even their means of operation still depend upon political and economic resources from the wider environment. Responding to an array of challenges, university teachers and the governing bodies have not attempted to respond to shifting demands in ways that have tangible consequences for the context and conduct of faculty work. For nearly three decades, public universities have faced a mix of financial concerns, including unpredictable funding fluctuations from major revenue sources, unfavorable economic conditions (e.g., inflation, recession), operating costs increasing faster than inflation, to control costs. In today’s climate, our institutes of higher learning must prove themselves entities worthy of continued investment according to new measures of effectiveness, and good workplaces to serve.

Indeed, universities are seeking a plurality of funding sources now more than ever. At the same time, acknowledging the financial impossibility of pursuing all things equally well, they have had to question whether they can afford to try to be all things to all people. For example, it is a formidable challenge to lower costs while simultaneously improving access to and the quality of graduate and postgraduate education. Working together with their governing bodies, university teachers have to cope with this mix of institutional pressures by devising cost-cutting initiatives alongside a series of revenue-generating strategies. These strategies maybe about early-retirement incentive programs; consolidating and closing unproductive academic programs; initiating aggressive campaigns for private fund-raising; restating the institution’s record of public service, administrative and academic restructuring, rewriting University Act and collaboration with industry. Given this expectation, or many more, faculty work comes to be viewed as an institutional resource that can be assessed in terms of the extent to which it contributes to improved institutional performance along such dimensions. At a deeper level, of course, initiatives to outsource selected academic programs illuminate changing beliefs about what a university ought to look like, calling into question the appropriateness of private sector models of adaptation for higher education.

Expectations for Faculty Work

As universities to respond to contemporary economic and socio-political challenges, changes in institutional practices directly alter the expectations of faculty work. The revised expectations which come from a mix of initiatives by government (federal/provincials) statewide University Grants Commissions (federally located / provincial chapters) governing bodies (Governors as Chancellors / Vice Chancellors / Pro-Vice Chancellors / University Senate) and academic leaders (faculty heads / head of the departments) are required not only to raise revenue but, at a deeper level to rethink the purpose of universities. Seeing public higher education in this way brings following themes to the fore.

One prominent theme is to improve graduate education (bachelor to doctoral levels), which is to be translated to spend more time on graduate teaching. A national emphasis on “putting students first”. Faculty to be told to recommit their time and attention to graduates while simultaneously faculty should urge to pursue national and international research grants and university-industry collaboration. The emphasis on graduate education raises the question of whether merit pay criteria or promotion and tenure criteria will be revised correspondingly. Moreover, while this orientation is part of an organizational approach to “redeploy faculty re-sources,” there are significant and at times painful tradeoffs in making this shift.

A second and related theme is the expectation that some means of assessing faculty performance and productivity be established. Such procedures have been developed in the context of demonstrating institutional performance and productivity, with new means to document teaching (e.g., feedback by the students, portfolios, peer review, employers’ rating of graduates) for annual reviews. Numerous additional mechanisms are used to assess contributions to both graduate education and research, students’ engagement for study, faculty-students publication activity and re-search grant awards. Everything has already been cooked for us by others. Things are available on hundred and thousands websites about systems foreign universities have developed. But we lack sensitivity of human engineering for which ‘teacher as mason’ bestowed the responsibility. To-date, several types of performance rating scales are available, have not been utilized for assessment of teachers’ productivity.

A third theme shaping the new expectations of faculty work is the ability to justify academic programs on the basis of their contributions to the state’s economic development, a function that is increasingly regarded as falling within the university’s service mission. Academic program review is now a regular exercise in ranked foreign universities, even if a unit is not undergoing program review at a given moment, evidence demonstrating how the program or the faculty member contributes to the state’s economy is encouraged, if not expected. When the time comes for selective reinvestment among academic programs, the close-to-the-market programs appear to be thriving, while those programs that appear less relevant are weakened. At the same time, universities maybe asked to search out and serve a new clientele: adult learners, those in the workplace (NVQs – National Vocational Qualifications Model, I may refer), and those at a distance. A re-stratification of academic programs is emerging in this light, laden with implications for intensifying differential status within the faculty.

The cumulative effect on faculty of these shifts in the academic workplace is substantial. A strong case could be made that the absence of faculty input into these revised expectations is appropriate. It is entirely possible that faculty may not want to deal with such issues. By preferring the administration to act as a buffer while faculty engage in their core academic functions and students study, leaving educational managers (Vice Chancellors / Faculty Deans) to respond to the challenges rather than mobilizing the entire campus community for input. However, as university Chancellors and governing bodies are at the forefront of responding to contemporary challenges and repositioning their institutions, these non-faculty actors have also to take on the role of speaking for the institution in discussions of how much time faculty should teach, what and how faculty should teach, and how administrators can enhance faculty teaching. Whether by design or by default, traditional faculty governance structures have been bypassed in formulating these expectations, prompting us to consider how faculty have come to be characterized in the academic workplace. I have gathered such experiences while serving the private institute of higher learning. The CEO plays a pivotal role for excellence of his/her organization, I believe.

Conceptions of Faculty at Work

The overall impact of these challenges is a substantial re-conceptualization of faculty work. Seen in quite new ways, faculty are employees, potential revenue sources, resources to be redeployed, and competitors rather than colleagues. As universities have been pressured to become more like businesses, university Rectors have become the major reshapers of the academic workplace. If administrators have become educational managers and spokespersons for the institution, faculty have become more like employees in a setting that emphasizes the need to meet performance expectations. Faculty are not exempt from being given revised or additional workloads, or from being told how to spend their time (teaching or research, teaching graduates, postgraduates, doctoral students) and which programs to devote their energy to. Annual performance reviews for all ranks of faculty document how faculty spend time and what they produce. The new style of academic management regards the notion of a professionally self-regulating and autonomous faculty. In addition to the evaluation of teaching performance, there is a more comprehensive surveillance of academic work, including requests from campus administration to report office hours, consulting activities, and time spent out of town. If faculty are employees, an interesting question is raised—for whom do they work? The administration, the state, their students, the public? In any case, this approach treats faculty as workers who need to be monitored rather than as professionals who are trusted to work according to internalized standards.

In addition to treating faculty more like employees, such an approach holds that faculty contributions can be measured in terms of the revenue they generate, and quality education faculty impart in the academia. In an instrumentalist approach, faculty work can be divided into measurable components with demonstrable production. As data on individuals are aggregated to the departmental level, faculty members can be accounted for by such measures as number of courses taught, student credit hours per term or per annum, genuine-research brought in other than ghost or pirated research, and publications produced (of national and international repute). Within this performance paradigm, institutional service (such as committee work) and community service (such as promoting town-gown relationships) should also be valued. According to this set of criteria, it is possible that the domain of faculty work will expand to reflect new sources of revenue and better standard of Teaching Learning Process (TLP). On the horizon, in addition to the technology-transfer activities in which knowledge is applied for economic development in local, provincial, and national needs, new markets are emerging for intellectual property for teaching-learning (e.g., courseware, tutors’ manual, manuals of accreditation, software for electronic-schools, developing distance learning mechanism, educational software, computerized testing). Whether this arena of potential revenue will benefit the individual faculty member or the institution will likely be determined through negotiations between faculty and those administrators whose duties have come to include knowledge management.

Along with the performance-assessment approach, the new academic management paradigm regards faculty as competitors rather than colleagues. The organization and its workers are seen as atomistic—reduced to a set of discrete operating units that have expenditures and revenues as well as production, thus opening a unit’s performance to cost-benefit analyses. Departments are units that spend and raise funds within fiscal constraints and are thus liabilities or assets for the university’s balance sheet. Stratification among academic units is not new, and acceptable too. It is no surprise that the division of ‘academic labor’ among faculty reflects not only different types of work but also what has come to be differently valued and differently compensated work. Moreover, if faculty were characterized as unduly individualistic before this climate, such a climate will surely exacerbate a survival-of-the-fittest orientation.

A key consequence for faculty is that they are considered resources that need to be redeployed for the institution to improve its delivery of educational services. Facing competitive pressures, flexibility in organizational redesign is paramount. A well-known fact of academic organizations is that the bulk of resources is intractable, since it resides in faculty salaries. It is not surprising that there is now widespread discussion of eliminating and/or creating alternatives to tenure, preferably performance-led contract. Of course, scrutiny of tenure may not be explicitly stated as distrust (i.e., that tenure serves as a cloak for incompetence); instead, it is rooted in a managerial paradigm that seeks the flexibility to shift resources in response to short-term demands. The preferred approach to faculty hiring becomes one of filling vacancies with part-time faculty. Will part-time faculty have greater involvement as organizational members? Or, conversely, will the ranks of faculty who can participate in faculty governance over time be diminished—thereby leaving more decision-making power in the hands of full-time administrators? Although uncomfortable, it is nonetheless necessary to consider this as a change over time in the nature of faculty recruitment. Perhaps a different analogy can illuminate the shift: Formerly managed like a zoo, the organization sought to add new exhibits. When a lion died, the tendency was to replace it with another lion. In the past few decades, with reduced availability of resources with which to purchase distinctiveness, a vacancy signaled the opportunity to use those resources to obtain an exotic beast, a star who could enhance the organization’s reputation. The increased reliance on part-timers signals a shift: rather than establish permanent exhibits, the zoo becomes dominated by short-term appearances of various rare and not-so-rare animals that can capture the interest of zoo visitors and yet be quickly dismantled by zookeepers and owners when interest dwindles. In the name of flexibility, this use of resources is not inherently bad for business; whether it is appropriate for universities is another matter.

Concern over the Locus of Control

It is a matter of serious concern about the drift of authority from academicians to academic administrators and the tension between managerial and academic temperaments. This fact can be witnessed through many contributions appearing in leading newspapers, the way the parties are alleged each other. In fact, the ideal of interdependence among faculty and administrator is historically rooted in the need for effective coordination of an increasing complexity of academic affairs in the universities. The rationale for mixing professional and bureaucratic authority grew out of major changes in the nature of academic work: the specialization of faculty and the rise of bureaucratic coordination. The growing ranks of faculty became increasingly unspecialized, unfortunately, such that their primary expertise as educators is supposed to be located in departmentally based domains of curriculum designing, instruction delivery, mentoring, students’ counseling, career guidance, students’ evaluation and research. Whereas, faculty assert their professional excellence and autonomy by controlling standards for entrance and promotion, as well as standards of work. Faculty participate in a variety of governing structures, such as Faculty Boards, Academic Council, Committees, and University Senate. But could not present and prove some viable plans of effective sharing. Although faculty tend to see students unions (true representative of political parties and saviors of the faculty) as appropriate to their situation and to look at students’ leaders for collective bargaining arrangements for their potential to safeguard job security and work the terms of academic work. Faculty pursue political decisions in academic affairs. Effective sharing authority between faculty and administrators rest on a key premise of shared goals and values, perhaps it is missing from our national character. These complex arrangements for sharing authority have been further complicated by the expanding managerial presence of nonacademic administrators. Thus decision-making effecting even the academic domain has moved out of departments, as all important resource allocation and restructuring decisions have come to be made by university administrators.

As institutional purposes have evolved alongside external demands, so have expectations for faculty work. In the contemporary era, faculty have come to be understood as a management challenge, rather than as professionals who are integral to the reshaping of the enterprise. Non-faculty actors are at the forefront of critical decisions about what will be eliminated and what will be protected, as well as the basis on which these decisions will be made. I suggest that faculty not only have a right to participate in this reshaping, they have a responsibility to do so. Failure to participate will not stop the process; it will only render them outside of the process.

When I reflect on my choice to become a faculty member, I hear a faint echo that faculty are the heart and soul of an institution. If this is still the case, I wonder what kind of heart and soul the institution of tomorrow will have. Who will the faculty be? Who will make the critical academic decisions? What contexts will foster academic work such that faculty can educate and nurture future generations of Pakistanis, workers, scholars, and ideas? Short-term adaptations may prove to be short-sighted, jeopardizing what is in the long-term interest. I worry that faculty are missing an opportunity to involve themselves in this crucial discussion among those who claim to speak for the national interest. In this climate, institutional autonomy and professional autonomy vis-à-vis self-governance have been recast as a luxury that universities cannot afford. This is a profound change in stance. Autonomy in the past was a professional obligation, one that was tied to high ideals—a trust in academic expertise, a commitment to noble cause, as well as a point of departure for fresh thinking about that which is not currently valued. Will those ideals simply be dismissed as mythical, nostalgic, or an entitlement for the few? Must faculty entirely abandon the notion of being buffered from the market? Will faculty internalize a conception of themselves as employees, competitors, revenue-generators, and redeployable resources? And what educational consequences will result? If faculty in universities want the privilege of mulling over their ideas for teaching, of reading writing and new research not replication, will they have to remove themselves from their workplaces to get it?

Faculty must realize that the contemporary arena of institutional repositioning is at least as much about political positioning between competing interest groups, both within and outside their workplaces. To speak of mutual trust and cooperation is pie-in-the-sky thinking. Perhaps faculty should be delighted that the public still views higher education as a key to the future prosperity, as a means of individual upward mobility, providing socialization and good citizenship as well as work force training and perpetual economic development. But given that public interest comes with scrutiny and demands for accountability, it is incumbent upon the faculty to insert themselves into the conversation and do a better job of explaining what they do.

Obviously, many questions remain to be answered about the future of the academic profession and the future of our universities. In examining the nexus of these two turbulent areas, I yearn for surer footing. Perhaps faculty themselves can provide some answer of that, what makes a good university. My hope is that faculty, together with their administrative spokespeople, can make the case that there is something worth preserving that is being rendered obsolete by today’s managerial paradigm and performance metric. I am not making a case to preserve academic ideals that now seem nostalgic, nor am I calling for faculty participation in a way that is tantamount to making a case for waste, which would be politically indefensible and imprudent in tough economic times. My call is simple and timely. I want faculty to listen to external pressures but to be ardent in their advocacy of intangible but essential values. The university has immeasurable societal values; it nurtures people and their ideas. Faculty, who have expertise in academic matters, must not be silenced. Otherwise they may one day soon find themselves in a very different institution, or perhaps even outside it altogether.