Higher Education

April 2, 2019 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

KPI – Part VIII: European Roots of American Higher Education

This illustration is the photograph of a colored lithograph by J. Wolf. The photograph is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Image courtesy of J. Wolf and Wikimedia Commons.

Higher education has been around in some form for over two millennia. American higher education is not quite 400 years old. Why does American higher education get all of the hype and publicity instead of our older European, Middle Eastern, and Asian brothers and sisters? How did the younger sibling grow up to be the 800-pound gorilla?

First aside: Q – “Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?” A – “Anywhere he wants.” The problem with this joke is that most gorillas are less than 6 feet tall and weigh less than 600 pounds. Phil, an Eastern Lowland Gorilla raised in the St. Louis Zoo, is the only recorded gorilla in captivity weighing in at more than 800 pounds.

The courtyard and fountain of the Qarawiyyin Mosque and Fountain. The photograph was taken by Mike Prince and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Image courtesy of Mike Prince and Wikimedia Commons.

Second Aside: I must apologize for a mistake I made in my previous post KPI – Part VII: Historical Development of Higher Education, Condensed View. I fell into a trap I was attempting to battle: the myopic view of the world centered on Western Civilization. My error was listing the University of Bologna, founded in 1088, as the oldest, continuous existing, degree-granting university in the world. That title rightly belongs to the University of Al-Karaouine, also written as al-Quaraouiyine and al-Qarawiyyin (in Arabic: جامعة القرويين), located in the Moroccan city of Fes el-Bali. It was founded in 859 by the young Arab heiress, Fatima al-Fihri, to honor the city of her birth and to serve and educate the community that welcomed her and her family as emigrants.

Aside three: Surprise! Surprise! As I wrote this post, I found that I couldn’t condense the history of American higher education into 1,000 words. Thus I will deal only with its European foundations in this post. I will use my next post to pick up the story on American shores with the founding of the “Colonial Colleges.” That story will start with Harvard College in 1636. I may be able to use that post to get us to the 19th Century. From there I will need at least one more subsequent post to carry us to the higher education scene in America today.

One of the drumbeats of proponents of modern American higher education is the constant encouragement for students to attend a university to obtain a broader vision of the whole world. Students are bombarded with advertisements urging them to spend a semester or year abroad to break down the insular barriers isolating them from other cultures.

View over Trinity College, Gonville and Caius and Clare College towards King’s College Chapel, seen from St Johns College Chapel, Cambridge (UK). On the left, just in front of King’s College Chapel, is the Cambridge University Senate House. Photo by Bob Tubbs, 1997, the copyright holder of this work. Tubbs has released this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. Image courtesy of Bob Tubbs and Wikimedia Commons.

It may be ironic that American institutions of higher learning trace their education model and form of organization to a single archetype. In doing this, they are ignoring the traditions of most of the world that they are commending to their students.

The sole archetype is a system epitomized by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the European form embodied by the University of Bologna and the Sorbonne (or University of Paris). In this system, faculty with similar interests gather themselves into colleges in order to stimulate each other to create new knowledge, organize existing knowledge into understandable formats, and disseminate that knowledge as widely as possible.

These colleges recruit and admit students to their ranks based upon students’ identity with the interests of the faculty. The colleges provide academic facilities for the faculty, such as classrooms and offices. They are also responsible for providing housing and boarding facilities for the students, and some faculty.

In their earliest years, the British colleges required students to commit themselves fully to their education. This meant that students had to “live” in the residence halls and be available on a 24/7 basis. Everyone, students and faculty, ate formal meals together. This permitted extended academic discussions to take place over the course of the meals. Many faculty lived on campus which meant that education could occur around the clock.

Photo of Keble, College Dining Hall, Oxford University. The Hall was built in 1878 to resemble the dining halls of the 13th Century. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0. Image courtesy of David Iliff and Wikimedia Commons.

The separate colleges established a collective, called a university. Whereas colleges set their own curriculum and courses, the university set some minimal standards for degrees and conferred those degrees. Students could take courses in other colleges to complete their education. Most likely, only one college within the university offered music courses and programs. It was also likely that religion and philosophy courses were consolidated within one college. The disciplines of science, mathematics, humanities, literature, social sciences, law, and medicine would have had their own specialty colleges.

The interior of Christ Church Cathedral, on the campus of Christ Church College of Oxford University. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0. Image courtesy of David Iliff and Wikimedia Commons.

Right from their earliest days, religion was an integral part of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. All faculty had to be communicant members of the Catholic Church. Students were required to attend religious services and receive instruction in religious matters.

Somewhat surprisingly in their formative years, the continental universities were not tied formally to the church. They also did not have housing for students. Students lived in the community, which resulted in many conflicts with the “townies.”

In both the British and European universities the faculty were the formal masters of the organizations. Every major decision was decided either by consensual agreement or a vote of the faculty. From this arrangement, American higher education derived its ideal of faculty governance.

A photograph of the 14th Century fresco by Spinello Arefino of Frederick I Barbarossa submitting to Pope Alexander III. The fresno is displayed at Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. The photograph was transferred to Wikimedia Commons by Naudefj. Image courtesy of Naudefj and Wikimedia Commons.

When the University of Bologna was founded, it was established as a school that was free from ecclesiastic control. In 1158, Frederick I Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, issued a writ which became known as the Privilegium Scholasticum. Among its provisions, this law declared that every school should be a group of students overseen by a master (dominus). This master teacher was to be paid through monies collected from the students. These payments were the first tuition charges.

The submission of Frederick I Barbarossa, protector of the University of Bologna, to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, in order to secure his position as the Holy Roman Emperor, began two centuries of political wrangling among the faculty of the University of Bologna. It only subsided with the establishment of the School of Theology in 1358. For the next five centuries, Roman Catholicism was an integral part and a significant player in the life of the University.

Another provision of the Privilegium protected faculty and students in their pursuit of knowledge from the intrusion of all political authorities. This was a fundamental event in the history of the European university. The University has legally declared a place where research and new knowledge could develop independently from any other power. This was the beginning of the concept of academic freedom.

Finishing off this post, I will take leave of the palaces, halls, cathedrals, colleges, and universities of Europe and migrate to shores of the New World in North America. In my next post, scheduled to be published on Friday, April 5, I will look at the early development of American higher education

March 30, 2019 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

KPI – Part VII: Historical Development of Higher Education, Condensed View

So many books; so little time. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

There have been many books written about the historical development of American higher education, particularly its colleges and universities. Much less has been written about higher education in the rest of the world, especially prior to the fourteenth century. This brief 1,000-word synopsis can’t touch on everything. It is meant only to highlight what I believe to be the most pertinent phases in the evolutionary process which has given us today’s higher education enterprise in America and our modern universities and colleges.

I begin with a definition of education: Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, habits, and culture. From that starting point, what are the various levels of education? In particular, what is higher education?

Throughout most of today’s world, education is associated with schools and the process of schooling. Since 1945 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has attempted to standardize the definitions of educational levels in order to collect, organize, and analyze education statistics on a worldwide basis.

In pursuit of this goal, UNESCO issued its first classification system in 1970 and has revised it several times. The most recent revision of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) was published in 2011.

In the United States the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), a subdivision of the Institute of Education Science (IES), is charged by the federal Department of Education with keeping tabs on educational statistics in the United States and reporting that data to UNESCO.

NCES uses a slightly different format for reporting U.S. data than ISCED recommends. However, the two formats can be reconciled using the following crosswalk equivalencies:

ISCED/IES Educational Level Crosswalk Table of Equivalencies. Information gathered from the ISCED and IES websites by the author of this website.

Conceptual display of ancient family unit in Hong Kong Museum. The photograph was by Musestress and posted on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Musestress and Wikimedia Commons.

From the above chart, it is obvious that education is clearly being tied to organized schools and the formal process of schooling. This has not always been the case. From historical legends, archeological records and anthropological observations of primitive peoples and tribes, it is believed that the earliest education of young children was the responsibility of family units as illustrated in the picture to the left. This education consisted primarily of simple survival skills. Young children were also taught the rudimentary communication skills of gesturing and the oral language of the parents.

The next phase of education coincided with the coalescence of families into communities and tribes. As families joined together with other family units, education evolved into a communal activity involving the whole community. In addition to more intricate survival and communication skills, social integration skills on how to live in groups were necessarily included in the education of the young.

These additions brought about the need for more specialized instruction which was satisfied by the appearance of master teachers. These master teachers were excellent communicators who could help the uninitiated acquire new knowledge, skills, beliefs, and values. They developed reputations and became much in demand.

A photograph of the Rosetta Stone, which contained the same passage in three forms of writing. The top script is Egyptian hieroglyphs, 2nd is Demotic Egyptian commercial script, and the 3rd is Greek. Photograph is from the Christian Theological Image Library. All of such works are in the public domain. They were scanned from out of copyright books, or photographs by individuals who offer their work to the public.

About this time in history, communications took on a new twist. The oral transmission of knowledge and culture was susceptible to transmission errors. Mankind began to transform oral language and gestures into symbols which were carved or pressed into stone or clay tablets. These symbols morphed into a written language which was inscribed on animal skins, tablets, or papyrus scrolls. The teachings of the best of the master teachers were transcribed and preserved for posterity.

The most well-known master teachers became legends: Confucius (China); Buddha (India); Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, Pythagoras, and Thales (Greece); Muhammad, Hillel, and Gamaliel (Middle East). Potential disciples traveled many miles to sit at their feet and listen to them in order to soak in their wisdom. Their teachings were recorded by these disciples and are still studied today. This was the higher education of the ancient world.

Jesus teaching His disciples while traveling through Judea. Photograph of original 19th century art work in Brooklyn Museum. Image courtesy of James Tissot, photographer, and Wikimedia Commons

The master teacher who really changed the world lived in the Middle East and taught for only three years. Jesus began His ministry by selecting 12 unlikely individuals as his disciples. He spent three years traveling around Judea, healing the sick, raising the dead, doing other miracles, and teaching his disciples and many other followers. His death and resurrection formed the basis of Christianity. Eleven of His original disciples, along with a later convert, Saul of Taurus (also known as the Apostle Paul), spent 60 years after Christ’s ascension into heaven evangelizing the known world. The effects of their labors, some twenty centuries later, are still being felt.

For the first millennium after Jesus, it almost seemed that higher education went into hiding. Master teachers were harder to find. Those, who lived and taught, have been mostly forgotten in the passage of time. The period of time from the Fall of Rome to the Renaissance evidenced an apparent absence of serious intellectual activity in the Western World. This may be the reason that this era is known as the Dark Ages.

In Western Civilization, higher education was on life support during the Dark Ages. It was kept alive by nobles, the elites, and the wealthy, who hired tutors to teach their prodigies sufficient knowledge and culture so that they could maintain their family place in the ruling scheme of things.

An 1890 sepia depiction of the Library at Alexandria. This photograph is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In the remainder of the world, higher education was kept alive by the noble families, organized religion, and a few cities or states. Judaism had its yeshivas. Islam had its madaris. Hinduism had its mathas. Buddism had its schools for monks. In general, Eastern Civilization was more amenable to an open system of higher education than the West. A number of cities had schools which made education available to all worthy and deserving individuals, not just the wealthy, elite or connected few.

The Seal of the University of Bologna. Since the seal is hundreds of years old, it is not copyrighted. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

With the Rennaissance came the rebirth of higher education in the Western World and the founding of universities. The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is the oldest university in continuous operation. Unfortunately, I have reached my self-imposed 1,000-word limit, so I will pick up the story of American higher education this coming Tuesday. Until then, class dismissed.

March 26, 2019 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

KPI – Part VI: Difference Between Governance and Management

Many within higher ed think management theory is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, trying to sneak into the sheepfold and devour the sheep. Image courtesy of Dreamstime, ID 28175702 © Debspoons | Dreamstime.com

In this post, I return to looking at Key Performance Indicators in a higher ed setting. While this gentle approach may seem innocuous to most individuals outside of the insular world of higher education, it is sure to raise the hackles of many of my higher ed colleagues. They will accuse me of trying to sneak the wolf (management theory) dressed in sheep clothing into the sheepfold (the university) through a back door.

Welsh Corgi working as sheepdog with a flock of sheep. Image courtesy of Dreamstime and Natalia Yaumenenka. ID 104389610 © Natallia Yaumenenka | Dreamstime.com

I am going to be bold enough to take that next step and publicly declare that I do not see management theory as a wolf trying to devour the sheep. I believe it can be viewed more like a sheepdog, herding the sheep to safety through the one and only door of the sheepfold. The sheepdog then lies down at that entrance and guards the fold and the sheep against all predators.

Education is a process that can’t be measured in financial returns. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Many of the most familiar performance indicators are business-oriented outcome measurements. How many widgets were produced? How much did it cost to produce each widget? How much income did the firm make from the sale of those widgets? Higher education for years has claimed that since education is a process, we shouldn’t focus on or speak of educational outcomes, especially financial ones.

As I noted in my post K PI Part III, A University Should Be Managed as If It Were a Business Milton Greenberg in his seminal essay “The University Is Not a Business (and Other Fantasies)” published in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 2 (March/April 2004), argues forcefully and persuasively that a university should be managed as if it were a business.

Very early in his essay, Greenberg proclaims, “ Presumably, a ‘business’ involves the hierarchical and orderly management of people, property, productivity, and finance for profit.” The primary counterarguments of academicians to Greenberg’s position hinge on three concepts in this sentence.

We need to dig further into the idea of “Hierarchical Management” and the difference between governance and management. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In this post, I will begin to address the first of these counterarguments, the concept of “hierarchical management.” To understand the problems created by the use of the term hierarchical management we need to have some familiarity with the difference between the general concepts of governance and management. We also need to look at the typical governance structures of colleges and universities, and the usual management formats of colleges and universities. These two topics are too involved to address in depth in this one blog post. I will take each of them up in subsequent posts. This idea will require more in-depth excavation.

Governance refers to the relationships among people in an organization. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The origins of the two terms automatically set the stage for a huge battle in the academy over their applicability to higher education. The term governance historically came from the disciplines of social and political sciences. Without digging into the finer points of the definition, this ancestry would usually imply that it must primarily deal with relationships.

Governance has many definitions, but most center on two related ideas. The first idea concerns how decisions are made. What are the processes of decision making within the organization? Who has a voice in making decisions? The second changes the focus to how those decisions are implemented. How is power or control exercised within the organization? What is the locus of authority within the organization?

The typical view of the concept of management is to get employees to work harder to make more money for the company. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

On the other hand, the term management originated within the realm of the business world and was then fine-tuned within the disciplines of economics and business. This ancestry automatically makes it suspect to the academy, which believes that given its origin, it must naturally deal with productivity and finances. These concepts are antithetical to many citizens of the academy.

The four tasks of management. Image courtesy of the author, created by using ClickCharts.

Most modern definitions of management view it as a process of four interwoven tasks. The first of these tasks is Planning, the selection of appropriate organizational goals and the best array of actions to achieve those goals. The second task is Organizing, the establishment of assignments and an aura of authority that encourage and allow people to work together to achieve the organization’s goals.

The third task is Leading which involves motivating, coordinating, inspiring and energizing individuals and groups to work together to achieve the organization’s goals. The fourth task is Controlling which has two primary aspects. The first is assessing situations by establishing accurate systems of measuring and monitoring how well the organization has achieved its goals. The second is redirecting the course of operations when it is apparent that the organization is not achieving its goals.

Modern universities consist of four major groups of individuals. These groups are students, faculty, administration, and governing boards. In subsequent posts, we will examine the historical development of these groups, their relationships with each other, and their roles in governance and management.

From the definitions of governance and management, we see much common ground with one major difference. The major difference is their primary focus. Governance focuses on relationships, while management focuses on tasks. In subsequent posts, I will deal with the idea of shared governance and hierarchical management. I hope to convince you that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

To get to the point of being able to discuss these topics, my next post will be this Friday, March 29. It will be a short history of the development of the modern university and the four major groups of individuals that comprise the university.

March 15, 2019 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

KPI – Part V: Scoring Rubric for Guiding Principles Factor

Scoring Rubric for Baylis/Burwell VMI. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

This post is a continuation of my previous post [KPI – Part IV: Guiding Principles]. It will describe the scoring rubric we selected to use to assign points to institutions on the Guiding Principles Factor of the Baylis/Burwell Vitality/Morbidity Model.

Two different approaches to building our scoring rubric. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

There are two different directions which we could have taken to develop our scoring rubric. The first way was an ultra-quantitative, spreadsheet approach attempting to measure the quality of the statements of institutional Mission, Vision, and Core Values, and the institution’s efforts to live out those statements in their actions.

This type of approach is typically called the objective approach. However, if by objective you mean “not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts,” this direction is far from being truly objective. There are many points of subjectivity present in the quantitative scoring of the various components and in the weighting factors used in combining component scores to obtain a final score, where the raters’ biases and opinions enter into the equation.

A panel of higher education experts weigh the evidence and make judgments on each aspect of a particular factor. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

The second approach is a more holistic approach which is typically labeled as a subjective approach. It relies on the use of higher education experts, who have had years of training and experience in the field of higher education, to evaluate the institution in a number of ways.

The first thing these experts are asked to do is to read the institution’s published documents and judge whether they believe the institution has selected values and behaviors that represent those of a quality institution of higher education. The institutions are scored on the following three-point scale:

Is the institution a stellar citizen of the higher education community or a devil in disguise? Image courtesy of Presenter Media

-1 Totally inadequate for a quality institution of higher education

0 Barely adequate for a quality institution of higher education

+1 Describes a high performing institution of higher education

The higher education experts are then asked to judge whether the behavior of a given institution matches its stated beliefs using the following scale:

In the opinion of the higher education experts does the institution’s behavior match its stated values. They will weigh the evidence and make their decision on their training and experience in higher education. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

-1 Behavior doesn’t come close to its stated values. The institution fails to meet its own stated standards

0 Behavior barely meets its stated values or standards.

+1 Behavior exceeds the expectations set by its stated values.

A quality institution of higher education should be beyond reproach. In light of this, the panel of higher education experts is asked to make two more judgments. The first judgment involves the institution’s track record with those entities and agencies to which the institution is responsible. Does the institution meet all of its required reporting deadlines and fulfill all obligations to federal and accrediting agencies? Institutions will be scored on the following scale:

The institution has done everything it could to move it to the top of its class. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

-1 The institution has failed to meet more than one reporting obligation or legal requirements.

0 The institution has met all requirements and obligations but has occasionally been late or hesitant in making results public.

+1 The institution has gone of out its way in meeting requirements and obligations. It has made been completely transparent in all of its operations.

The final area of concern for the panel of experts deals with the reputation of the institution. The panel will judge whether the institution is held in high esteem by various entities such as higher education as a whole, the general public, students and prospective students, and employers of the institution’s graduates.

Is the institution a stellar citizen of the higher education community or a devil in disguise? Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The scoring scale for this area of concern is as follows:

-1 The reputation of the institution is tarnished in a number of areas with a number of groups.

0 The reputation of the institution is considered “run-of-the-mill.” It is not outstanding in any area.

+1 The reputation of the institution is stellar with all groups with which it deals.

To determine a factor score for Guiding Principles, the sub-factor scores are summed. Total scores are assigned as follows:

If the total sub-factor score is -3 or less, the assigned factor score is -1. Any institution in this area should be considered in trouble and possibly dying.

If the total sub-factor score is -2 to +2, the assigned factor score is 0. An institution with a score in this area is just hanging on and should be considered just surviving.

In institution in this category is considered a top-tier or elite institution. It is truly thriving. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

If the total sub-factor score is +3 or more, the assigned factor score is +1. An institution with a score in this area is doing well and should be considered to be thriving.

With the institutions we have examined we have found a predisposition away from the thriving side of the scale. It should not be surprising. Most observers will readily say that the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities are either in trouble or just surviving. There are few elite, or top tier institutions that are really thriving.

Next Tuesday, March 19, I will take a break from this series of post on Key Performance Indicators and publish a special post inspired by the scores of birthday wishes that I received this past week. It may be unusual to throw a big celebration for someone’s 73rd birthday. However, after a series of traumatic brain incidents more than a decade ago, scores of doctors wouldn’t have given you a plug nickel that I would make my 73rd birthday. Thus I will publish a post celebrating an unexpected decade of extra life. What would you do with an extra decade of life?

March 12, 2019 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

KPI – Part IV: Guiding Principles

We want our college built upon a rock solid foundation so that it will withstand all the storms that come its way. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In this post, the fourth in a series on Key Performance Indicators, I continue my consideration of the eight factors of the Baylis/Burwell Vitality/Morbidity Model. This post focuses on the factor Guiding Principles (GP). The Guiding Principles of any organization, particularly Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), form the foundation upon which that organization is built.

The Guiding Principles of an organization are the basis of the blueprint for its current and future success. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

However, Guiding Principles are not just the foundation. They also provide the basis for the plans and blueprints on which a thriving organization can be built. The current and future success of any organization is dependent on that organization staying committed to the foundational principles upon which it is built.

Typically, the foundational principles of an organization are bound together as a set of three statements which form the pillars which support the organization. The three pillars consist of a Mission Statement, a Vision Statement, and a list of Core Values. Although closely related, these three statements are distinctly different in their purpose, format, and point of view. In what follows, I will address these three pillars in a university setting.

Mission Statement

A Mission Statement articulates a university’s reason for being, or raison d’être. A mission statement looks outward and justifies the existence of the university based upon its external environment. A university can only survive and thrive if it has a reason to exist within its environment.

A good mission statement should be simple and concise but at the same time elegant. It must be well-publicized internally and externally. Everyone in the university should recognize and accept the mission. This includes the board, the administration, faculty, staff, and students. It should be easy for individuals outside the university, particularly prospective students, to find and understand the mission.

Vision Statement

A Vision Statement is an explicit announcement of what a university desires to be and what it wants to accomplish. It is a forward-looking proclamation of the university’s mid-term and long-term objectives. It is meant to serve as a guide or roadmap for internal decision-making. Strategic and tactical plans and initiatives should align with and adhere to the tenets of the vision statement. These include staffing, facility, programmatic, and budget decisions.

A good vision statement should be precise, concise, and most definitely memorable. All constituencies of the university should know and be able to recall the major points, if not the exact wording, of the vision statement.

A good vision statement should be aspirational. It should drive the university to reach beyond its current status. It should also be inspirational, pushing all constituencies to action on behalf of the university.

Core Values

The Core Values of a university are the fundamental beliefs that the university collectively holds. They are derived from the university’s mission statement and they dictate how the university behaves. Core Values look inward and describe the nature of the organization.

The expression of a core value should be a descriptive statement of a collective belief of the university. Core values serve as self-guiding principles that dictate how the university should act and behave as an organization. As collective values, it is expected that all constituencies individually give assent to and agree to conduct themselves accordingly.

It is important and imperative that individual and collective agreement with the beliefs and behaviors included in the core values be verifiable. The university should have the ability to demonstrate that, as an organization, it is upholding its core values. For all individuals who chose to align themselves with the university, the university is entitled to expect that they will abide by and exhibit the stated core values. This includes the board, administration, faculty, staff, and students.

Examples of common organizational core values include honesty (tell the truth), integrity (know and do what is right), respect of others (treat others as an individual would like to be treated), and accountability (willingness to take responsibility for one’s own actions). Examples of common academic core values include scholarship (commitment to the creation, organization, and dissemination of knowledge), student centeredness (commitment to student learning and serving students by meeting their needs and desires), and service (meeting the needs of the various communities associated with and around the university).

Scoring Rubric

As I noted in my previous post, KPI Part III, A University Should Be Managed as If It Were a Business, each of the eight factors in the Baylis/Burwell Institutional Vitality Model would be scored on a three-point scale of THRIVING (+1), SURVIVING (0), or DYING (-1).

Please take note that I will be publishing a special post on Friday, March 15. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Since I am fast approaching my self-imposed 1,000 word limit per post, I will postpone the explanation of my scoring rubric for this factor to my next post. Although I have been trying to stick to a Tuesday publication schedule, since the ideas are so closely tied to the content of this post, I will publish a post on the scoring rubric for the factor Guiding Principles this coming Friday, March 15.

I will return to the regular publishing schedule with a post on Tuesday, March 19 which focuses on the first of the three counterarguments, hierarchical management, raised by academics against Milton Greenberg’s argument that a university should be managed as if it were a business.

March 5, 2019 By B. Baylis Leave a Comment

KPI Part III, A University Should Be Managed as If It Were a Business

As noted in the previous post, Key Performance Indicators – Part II: Definition, the theme of this post was going to be A University Should Be Managed as If It Were a Business. In all of my previous roles, as a university administrator or the creator of this blog, I made no efforts to hide my sentiments concerning this proposition. It was always one of my operating premises.

When the wheels fall off an organization, it will fail to run. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In 2016, I started a series of posts on the theme The Business Model of All Higher Education Is Broken. Even in the title of the series, I attempted to make the point that institutions of higher education (IHEs) must view themselves as business enterprises. As an academician, I believe that institutions of higher education must be more than businesses. However, if they don’t operate using the best business and management techniques then they will surely fail, which is what we have seen with 2,000 American IHEs since 1950.

Too many universities live in a fantasy world chasing rainbows, leprechauns, and illusory pots of gold. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Milton Greenberg in his seminal essay “The University Is Not a Business (and Other Fantasies)” published in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 2 (March/April 2004), argues forcefully that a university should be managed as if it were a business.

Very early in his essay, Greenberg proclaims, “ Presumably, a “business” involves the hierarchical and orderly management of people, property, productivity, and finance for profit.” The primary counterarguments of academicians to Greenberg’s position hinge on three concepts he introduces in this sentence: hierarchical management, productivity, and profit. In three future posts in this series, I will separately tackle each of these counterarguments.

Eight Factor Model of Institutional Vitality developed by By Baylis and Ron Burwell. Image copyright by Higher Ed By Baylis, LLC. Image courtesy of By Baylis and Ron Burwell. Constructed using ClickCharts Software

But first I return to present my argument on why universities should be run more like businesses. In studying the 2,000 deceased IHEs, Ron Burwell and I noticed eight factors that we believe contributed negatively to their vitality and their eventual morbidity. The eight factors are shown in the diagram to the left.

Although the eight factors are obviously not completely independent of each other, they are sufficiently different to warrant separate consideration. Additionally, that consideration would take up too much space for one blog post. Thus, I will address each of the factors in upcoming posts.

Mind Map of the Guiding Principles Factor. Image courtesy of authors By Baylis and Ron Burwell. Constructed using ClickCharts Software.

To give you a taste of how I will be introducing and treating these factors, I present a Mind Map Diagram on the right illustrating the three components which define the Guiding Principles Factor.

Under each of the three components, the diagram presents the major ingredients that go into measuring the success of the organization in that component.

A reasonably informed person weighing the evidence should be able to make an informed judgment. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In order to simplify our study, without losing the crux of discovering the reasons why institutions failed, we have chosen to use the straight-forward three-point scale of Thriving, Surviving, and Dying. Instead of attempting to construct complicated, quantitative scales to measure each subfactor of our eight factors, we are going to use a subjective approach similar to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s take on defining pornography: “I may not be able to define it. But I know it when I see it.”

Vitality/Morbidity Index (VMI) Gauge indicating an institution is greatly struggling in the Guiding Principles Factor. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

With each component in our factors, most reasonable observers can easily determine whether: 1) an organization is extremely successful and thriving in terms of this component, 2) just barely getting by or only surviving, or 3) failing badly and falling far short of success or flat out dying. This approach permits us to use a simple gauge to illustrate the vitality/morbidity level of an institution.

We will also associate a three-point numerical scale with our three categories: Thriving (+1); Surviving (0); Dying (-1). We then added the scores across all eight factors. Repeating this process for each institution in our database of closed colleges and universities, we were not at all surprised to find that the total score of each closed institution was negative. No closed college had a total positive score. Some individual factor scores were positive but they were outweighed by a much larger share of factors with negative scores.

If this model is to have predictive capabilities it must also work with all types of institutions. We have tried our model out on a number of institutions that we identified as thriving, surviving, and outright struggling.

Is the wrecking ball set to knock down your institution? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In this process, we did find a number of colleges that were still operating which had negative VMIs. In each of these cases, the colleges involved could easily be classified as struggling or just barely surviving. They were definitely not thriving.

Although I believe that it is difficult to “kill a college” it is not impossible. Just ask the constituencies of Newbury College (MA), College of New Rochelle (NY), Green Mountain College (VT), and Hampshire College (VT).

For institutions that we identified as thriving, just as we expected each of them had a total VMI that was positive. What about the struggling institutions with positive VMIs? We believe that these institutions must address the factors that are negative or “zero” or they could be heading for more serious trouble.

In the post above I outline several different directions that I could go with my next post. At this point, I am working on a post that delves more deeply into the VMI Factor Guiding Principles which I introduced in this post. Watch for it next Tuesday, March 12, 2019.