Unprofitable Schooling: Examining the Causes of, and Fixes for, America's Broken Ivory Tower by Todd J. Zywicki

Author:Todd J. Zywicki [Zywicki, Todd J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

STARING AT THE SENSELESS MONSTROSITY

Critics mostly let the defects of modern university governance speak for themselves without displaying much interest in how such a purportedly inefficient system arose and persisted. When the origins of shared governance are considered, detractors tend to blame a combination of rent seeking, market power, and, occasionally, chance or idiosyncratic events. In Henry Manne’s account, for instance, faculty came to control universities by default, the result of “an accident of history that caused our higher educational industry to be not-for-profit or government-owned in its structure.”36 In such organizations, Manne claimed, control tends to be “somewhat arbitrary or political in nature,” going “to whatever group just happens to be best positioned to capture the benefits, regardless of whether they are the best qualified or the most efficient ones or the most deserving ones. In this case, where there was really no one else contending for quasi-ownership of physical assets, the faculties were almost guaranteed to emerge in charge of the institution. No one else really wanted it.”37 Happenstance is similarly implicated in historical accounts that portray faculty demands for greater control at particular institutions as a backlash against especially autocratic presidents or other “local conditions.”38

As with the prevalence of nonprofits in higher education, faculty governance has been too pervasive and durable to be explained by chance events and path dependence alone.39 Among more systematic explanations proffered by critics, growing faculty market power has been a favored culprit. Noting the correlation between growth in demand for professors and “the timing of grants of authority to faculty,” Bowen and Tobin, for example, argue that “the strong expansion in demand for professors in the late 1890s and early 1900s . . . had a pronounced impact on their role in governance—and especially . . . their role in the faculty appointment/advancement process.”40 The accelerating demand for professors after World War II similarly produced “gains in income, power, and prestige”41 and “increased leverage,”42 which enabled faculty “to negotiate gains in shared governance with presidents and boards.”43

Faculty governance and the demand for faculty definitely rose together over time. The number of instructional staff (regular faculty, junior faculty, and research assistants) grew tenfold—from roughly 60,000 to more than 650,000—between 1921 and 1973, a period during which the U.S. population approximately doubled (from 106 million to 203 million between 1920 and 1970).44 Higher demand for professors implies higher rents accruing to faculty (assuming less than perfectly elastic supply). It does not by itself, however, explain why faculty would have chosen to take those rents in the form of greater authority or more security rather than in higher compensation, even if increased demand somehow conferred monopoly power on tens of thousands of professors. More broadly, insinuations that faculty governance and tenure were manifestations of monopoly power on either side of the academic marketplace are hard to reconcile with the competitive nature of the industry. The number of postsecondary institutions grew rapidly in the decades following the Civil War through the end of the century, rising from 563 in 1870 to 977 in 1900 and 1,041 in 1920, with continued increases thereafter.

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