How Universities Work

CHAPTER 1 Quality Engines

1 Chapter 1 Quality Engines The American Research University Prototype Even though research universities demonstrate a bewildering variety in the details of their organization, all of them express a common institutional prototype. This prototype models the behavior of research universities as organizations, even if, like all synthetic constructs, it does not represent the operations of any particular institution in detail. The research university , like most higher education institutions, pursues multiple missions that engage teaching and service. Even the most intensely competitive and successful research universities deliver full undergraduate instructional programs. While the American research universities have many distinctive features that differentiate them from colleges and universities that emphasize teaching and service, almost all institutions share a common undergraduate structure and purpose. Nonetheless, a clear understanding of the top American research universities serves to clarify the behavior of the larger number of colleges and universities that follow their lead. 2 HOW UNIVERSITIES WORK The model presented here views research universities as organizations with two related, closely linked, but operationally relatively independent structures. • The first is an academic core, composed of a group of faculty guilds that have primary responsibility for the academic content and quality of the enterprise. • The second is an administrative shell, responsible for the acquisition and distribution of resources and for the management of the enterprises that support the faculty guilds as well as the interaction with external governance of boards and political institutions. The Academic Core Faculty guilds are the most important part of the university because they define and create the university’s academic substance . The guilds enable the university’s many other functions related to teaching and research. Disciplinary considerations define guilds, such as chemistry, history, physics, psychology, philosophy, medicine, and law. Moreover, within the university, each faculty guild serves as the local branch of a national guild of the same specialty. For example, all professors in a university history department belong to the same national guild, even though the local university employs them. The national guild establishes the intellectual standards for their work; the local university deals with their employment and work assignments. The same holds true for chemists, psychologists, and the members of other guilds. Each guild defines itself in terms of the intellectual methodology that its members apply to their field of study. Historians, for example, have a methodology for the use of historical evidence in the development of explanations about past events. The guild’s definition of standards based on these methods and the evaluation of quality based on the standards are what Quality Engines 3 define the guild’s responsibility. Members of the guild must meet these academic and methodological standards, or the guild will not recognize the validity of their work. As has been the case for all guilds since medieval times, the methodological standards guarantee that the members’ products meet guild criteria. If a guild-certified historian writes a biography of Simón Bolívar, for example, we can have confidence that the interpretation presented uses documents and evidence in accord with the history guild’s standards of accuracy and reliability. The guild does not guarantee the correctness of the resulting interpretation, only that the guild-certified historian used appropriate methodology properly in ways that permit other expert members of the guild to review and validate that work. The same is true in science, which perhaps offers a better illustration . Scientists have precise methodologies, both for doing their work and for reporting and validating its results. When physicists present the results of their work, most people lack the expertise to evaluate the scientific validity of the process used to arrive at the announced result. Instead, the public relies on a validation by the physics guild before accepting any result as a reliable scientific finding. Each guild has its own process for validating the work done by its members and for reviewing results presented by aspirants for membership or advancement in the guild. All guilds, however , rely on a variation of the peer-review system that mobilizes the talents of expert guild members to assess the work of other guild members. This process often involves experts replicating the experiments and reexamining the results before presentation to the public through publication. Whatever the process, however, the guild sets and enforces the standards for the field to ensure the quality of guild-certified results. Analytical methodology, more than subject matter studied, distinguishes one guild from another. Although historians and...