Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education

11: Building Blocks

182 Building Blocks 11 The Wharton School’s Greg Shea has an uncanny ability to get experienced—and sometimes notso -experienced—executives to understand the perils of misdirected management. In the 1990s he was a mainstay in an executive leadership program for senior higher education leaders and managers offered by the Wharton School and Penn’s Institute for Research on Higher Education. With ill-disguised envy, I suspect, I would sit in the back of Shea’s classroom and watch him take what should have been a skeptical class of presidents, provosts, deans, and vice presidents and march them through routines whose intent was to “re-wire” how they went about the business of making decisions and allocating resources. One thing these students remembered most about the experience was confronting what Shea called the “necessity of the don’t-do list.” Shea’s point was simple. Too often, inexperienced managers construct endless lists of things that need to be done, though many eventually prove to be only tangential concerns. This problem could be solved, he would get each group to understand, if managers would spend as much time deciding what not to do as they spend deciding what to do. It was a lesson he meant literally; he drove home the point by having the students construct don’t-do lists to accompany their to-do lists. For the students–who remember were, in real life, senior college and university leaders–deciding what not to do and why became an essential first step in the building of a focused strategic plan. 183 BUILDING BLOCKS Extending Shea’s Dictum Although offered as a lesson in the practical management of an enterprise, Shea’s dictum can be applied equally to the task of specifying a reform agenda for higher education. Too often, calls for change begin with a nearly exhaustive list of the problems and challenges facing the enterprise, followed by an even longer list of the steps that need to be taken in response to those ills so carefully catalogued . The report of the Spellings Commission is as good an example as any of what happens when no problem or challenge is considered too small or too tangential to be included in the list of things that must be done. The result is an agenda that overwhelms precisely because it has failed to discriminate. I am now ready—no doubt more than one reader will say, It’s about time!—to specify the issues and challenges I think American higher education needs to address during the next decade. But remembering what Greg Shea taught me, I need to begin with a don’t-do list. All the items on this list are, in one sense or another, important. Two have been included because, for the moment at least, no practical solution is at hand and to pretend otherwise would be to waste time and energy. One represents a kind of third rail that trying to change becomes not just quixotic but outright dangerous. The last item, for all its importance to the nation, belongs on a different to-do list, one more focused on higher education’s research as opposed to its educational mission. Here, then, is my don’t-do list. Don’t Try to Reform the NCAA’s Big Money Sports In the realm of higher education reform, intercollegiate athletics is the one that got away—permanently. Derek Bok is right when he laments that it’s already too late to reverse the tide of athletic commercialism. The sums are too large, the constituencies too powerful, the absence of agreed-upon purposes all too readily apparent. Is reform necessary?—yes. Is it possible—no, just ask the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Ten years after their initial report, the distinguished panel that composed the commission was painfully blunt in assessing the Commission’s lack of success. The bad news is hard to miss. The truth is manifested regularly in a cascade of scandalous acts that, against a backdrop of institutional complicity and capitulation, threaten the health of 184 MAKING REFORM WORK American higher education. The good name of the nation’s academic enterprise is even more threatened today than it was when the Knight Commission published its first report a decade ago. Despite progress in some areas, new problems have arisen, and the condition of big-time college sports has deteriorated.1 Big-time football and basketball...