How Universities Work

CHAPTER 16 People

187 Chapter 16 People Universities, like most of postsecondary education, are people enterprises. The strong structures of the American research university prototype, with its academic core and administrative shell, the critical requirements for money, the essential structure of budgets, and the careful management of guilds, serve one primary function: the acquisition, management, support , and retention of high-quality people. While beautiful grounds with their timeless buildings, large libraries, complex scientific facilities, great sports stadiums, and elegant student recreation centers impress all who visit these charmed places, the less easily viewed, but by far most important , university assets are its people. Universities employ a large number of nonacademic staff, who manage the administrative shell and fulfill the essential requirements of maintaining plant and equipment, fulfilling payroll, accounting, and other humanrelations tasks, operating foundations and alumni offices, and managing a wide array of student services from recruitment to academic advising to counseling and student activities programs . These services all create the context for the research 188 HOW UNIVERSITIES WORK university’s success in attracting and retaining students and faculty. The American university depends on quality people to operate and fuel the quality engine that drives the enterprise. Even though the physical plant of the institution stands as the symbol of its permanence and stability, it is the continuing personnel who actually define the university’s success. Rich universities can purchase quality people for all their functions, including quality students, more easily than less well-funded counterparts, but institutions can never assume that the best people will always come. Because the university is designed to be a stable enterprise, changing only slightly on the margin each year, it can sometimes be fooled into a false sense of security, believing that the quality people here today will be here tomorrow. Most of them will be, for the turnover rate at all levels of employment at most universities, especially research universities, is low by any standard. Students turn over the most, with perhaps a quarter graduating , dropping out, or transferring out or in every year. Student quality is easier to change over time than other groups of the university’s people because an effective recruitment and retention program can shift the student population’s characteristics substantially within a two- to three-year period. Staff, both those working in professional areas related to accounting, finance, and human resources and those serving in service areas such as physical plant, grounds, and food services , tend to stay in the university for long periods. Many public and some private institutions have excellent retirement packages requiring significant longevity to vest. Changes in the composition of this group of the university’s people come slowly, linked to a significant degree to the retirement cycle. Faculty also tend to be longstanding university citizens. While some mobility occurs in the early years of a career as faculty either fail to earn tenure or are lured away to another People 189 institution, by the time of tenure and especially by the time of promotion to full professor, the faculty, with some significant exceptions, tend to stay in place. Highly productive research faculty, however, are more mobile, and some number of these individuals will find alternative opportunities at other universities as their national and international reputations give them external value. The retention of these stars consumes some significant time on the part of department chairs, deans, provosts , and other university officers. Although the departure of a star is occasion for disappointment, it is often balanced by the acquisition of some other university’s star. Significant improvement or decline in faculty quality, given stable budgets, is the consequence of the retirement and replacement cycle more than of these high-profile departures or acquisitions of star faculty. This process (like the tenure process ) demonstrates the university’s continuing success. In much earlier times, the recruitment of new faculty was often an idiosyncratic affair with senior faculty, prominent administrators, and even university presidents seeking out the best and brightest through an informal network of colleagues at other institutions producing first-rate graduates with advanced degrees or identifying early to midlevel faculty who might be prepared to move. That system, often effective as a quality identifier, had some serious disadvantages. It tended to rely on old-boy networks of influence and relationship that frequently ignored high-quality women and minority candidates. Also, these networks tended to include much discussion of personal characteristics of candidates unrelated to their...