Governing Academia: Who Is Running the University? (review)

In Governing Academia, Ronald Ehrenberg assembles 10 essays dealing with the relationship between academic governance and university outcomes. The book's contributors are scholars and administrators from economics, education, law, political science, and public policy. Compared to several recent publications on the "future of higher education" that are speculating more or less intelligently about the direction of change in higher education, this book is more empirically grounded.

While the contributions are uneven and not as tightly focused as Ehrenberg's recent single-authored book Tuition Rising, most of the chapters are substantial additions to our knowledge about higher education governance and a few may even break new ground.

The first three chapters address the question of effective external governance structures, specifically boards of trustees and state oversight. In Chapter 1, James Freedman reflects on his experience as president of the University of Iowa and Dartmouth College and reviews the manifold design options available to presidents and boards concerning board size, board member selection, president-board relationships, etc. The chapter is rich in interesting detail about the interaction between boards and presidents that will be useful to the practitioner. It may also help researchers to ask better informed questions about board effectiveness.

Chapter 2 by Benjamin Hermalin is best read as an inquiry into the limits of board authority and influence. Using the literature on corporate boards as a backdrop, the author argues that higher education boards tend to exert relatively weak influence on the university. The reasons are the trustees' lack of expertise, lack of time, their inclination to free ride on the efforts of other members, and the considerable bargaining power of an effective president.

In Chapter 3, Donald Heller reviews the available evidence about the impact of state governance on university outcomes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the available studies do not point to an unambiguous causal relationship. Some studies have found no relationship between governance structure (or degree of regulation) and outcome indicators like faculty quality, student quality, or administrator satisfaction. At the same time Heller also cites a study finding that greater centralization of governance in public research universities was predictive of more "private university behavior," including less reliance on tuition revenues, higher pupil-teacher ratios, and a greater proportion of tenured faculty.

Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 all focus on issues of internal governance like defining the boundaries of departments, research centers, and schools, and the impact of such design decisions on executive decisions. Susanne Lohmann's provocative Chapter 4 ("Darwinian Medicine for the University") is an ambitious attempt to explain how universities can be engines of economic and social change, while remaining themselves deeply conservative organizations. Her thesis is that what looks like defects of university tenure, which protects unproductive faculty, or departmental hiring privileges, which tend to favor mediocre choices are really functional adaptations (defenses) against even greater inefficiencies which alternative arrangements (no tenure, central hiring) would entail.

The reason is that the societal role of universities is to enable "deep specialization" which requires the coexistence and cooperation of people who normally would have only very weak interests in belonging to the same organization. The university is able to keep its self-generated fragmenting forces in check by providing its members with high degrees of autonomy and self-government as well as strong insurances against risky career decisions. (Who would employ the burnt-out linguist who used to make important contributions to the understanding of a rare Inuit dialect?) Lohmann: "defenses look bad, but they are subtle [barriers] that evolved in interaction with a demanding environment; they need to be preserved, or at the very least it needs to be recognized that eliminating them comes at a cost" (pp. 71–72).

In Chapter 5, Thomas Hammond draws on what he calls a "political science of hierarchy" (p. 104) to make the point that "different formal structures can create different sets of information" and "different menus of choices" for administrators (p. 105). I found this...