Academia in Anarchy

One of our readers asked about the "privatize" the department remark.  This was in fact a remark attributable to Walter Williams and Walter's goal was to insulate the department as much as possible from the inefficiencies of public university life as possible.  Clearly, he could not eliminate the inefficiencies, but he could try to minimize them and that is what he did as the chairman of the economics department at GMU.

I once asked Peter Berger what the secret was to a long and distinguished career as a scholar.  He said bluntly, look the modern university is a dysfunctional workplace, the best you can do is try to insulate yourself from the craziness with your own research center and with private donors.  And Berger taught for much of his career (though not exclusively) at private universities, not large public universities.

The best diagnosis of the dysfunctions of large public universities can be found in James M. Buchanan's Academia in Anarchy (Basic Books, 1970).  Unfortunately, this is the one book left out of Buchanan's Collected Works.

The basic analysis is straightforward --- if the customers don't pay, the managers do not have control, the workers get to manage, etc., etc., don't be surprised when the organization is screwed up.  Williams's remark (and governing strategy) was meant to shift the incentives that one confronts in the modern public university, and to align those incentives in a way that would reward individuals for quality teaching and relevant research.

Comments

[Rafe Champion]

For an early call on the result of massive expansion of the US universities at a time of confusion about the desirable house rules for "the house of intellect" see "The American Unversity" by Jacques Barzun. Better still, see the four books that Barzun wrote on this topic "Teacher in America" (1946, 1983), "The House of Intellect" (1959), "Science, the Glorious Entertainment" (1963) and "The American University" (1968).

http://www.the-rathouse.com/JBarzun_essRC.html

[Barkley Rosser]

Peter,

Your call for managers being able to manage, do you really mean that? Do you really want to see more power in the hands of university administrators than in the hands of faculty? Really?

[Rafe Champion]

The complaint about consumers who don't buy, producers who don't sell and owners (Boards and trustees) who don't control probably arose from memories of the time before the explosion of numbers when universites had a skeleton staff of administrators and management was in the hands of the faculty. Or at least they got to make the decisions on things that they really cared about.

Barzun saw all this happening (he is 101 years old) and he even became involved in admin at a very high level, which adds some street cred to his commentary. He didn't just write 20 or 30 books and teach.

[TGGP]

How is it that incentives are aligned? You say you want to insulate the department, but isn't the problem that academics are insulated in the first place? I don't know if university management would do a better or worse job, but insulating a department from them in addition to the market wouldn't give managers more control relative to employees.

[king mises]

Peter,

I agree with Barkley Rosser. I, for one, do NOT want to see the power in the hands of the university administrators.

[Current]

This is one of the situations Jeffrey Friedman is talking about in his article in Society.

It's short, read it

http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/jf/society.pdf