OPINION:
Large research universities have evolved into amalgamations of housing complexes, food service industries, semiprofessional sports franchises, health systems, research enterprises, and vocational training and education systems. Their administrative design makes them nearly incapable of being managed efficiently.
Running a modern research university is like running a small city. Both jobs are growing more complex, with layers of Byzantine regulations often overwhelming their leaders. Both organizations are inherently political, increasing polarization and conflict. Political systems distribute resources and services not by market means but by power-based mechanisms. As the administrative burden in our universities has increased, they have, like most large cities, become single-party systems.
These two challenges, single-party rule and unmanageable complexity, lead our leading universities down an unfortunate road. Administrative bloat is a direct consequence of excessive administrative complexity. Ideological intolerance and the stifling of free speech and thought result from universities’ emergent political monoculture. The combination of these two factors has created tremendous risks for the future of the American research university and, in turn, American democracy.
The two factors are intertwined. Excessive complexity is the primary factor that has enabled the ideological puritans to take over the university. In the hyper-complex university, the left hand often does not know what the right hand is doing. Facing little local competition, exclusionary and sectarian ideas flourish and spread.
The ideological puritans arrived first in the humanities, which historically lean to the left of the political spectrum. They branched out into the social sciences under the guise of identity politics and postmodernism. They are now taking aim at the STEM fields. They have taken over the management of student-life administration and services.
The poststructuralist academic movement is an identity-based restoration of a Marxist agenda that threatens to infect the entire university ecosystem.
There is well-developed literature on the effects of increasing concentrations of power on the quality of city and state management. What we know about single-party political systems also applies in good measure to universities. In single-party systems, corruption tends to be endemic.
Bad ideas are rarely filtered out. Logrolling rather than merit tends to determine resource allocation. Ideologues of the leading party routinely crush innovative ideas advanced by political minorities.
As universities have evolved from systems characterized by balances of power between competing groups to single-party bureaucracies, their leaders and interests have grown increasingly distant from the constituencies they were designed to serve. Compounding the problem is the extraordinary administrative complexity of the modern research university.
Why do universities matter so much? Put another way, why should we care? As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, education is the essential ingredient in the foundation of a well-functioning democratic system. If the Democratic populace loses faith in their education system, they are losing faith in democracy itself. President Abraham Lincoln advanced this vision with the Morrill Act of 1862, which set aside federal land to create colleges that would “benefit the agricultural and mechanical arts.”
Vannevar Bush, the preeminent and visionary science administrator during World War II and the Cold War, was instrumental in developing the federally funded, public-private partnership that ties basic university science research to the advancement and success of American technology and business. Astute political leaders throughout American history have recognized that higher education resides at the core of American democracy. The happy trend for the past 200 years has been toward rather than away from a dual commitment to open and free inquiry protected by tenure. This trend, along with an increasingly open and meritocratic admission process, has ably contributed to the bedrock of American democracy.
American higher education has served as the world’s gold standard for the past 100 years. No other country has made a commitment in terms of breadth, scale and excellence to research-based higher education similar to that of the United States. So, too, can the U.S. claim a commitment to democracy in breadth, depth and duration like no other country. Today, however, as higher education risks its future by embracing a single-party, ideologically driven monoculture, American democracy is also at risk.
The two most significant changes in universities since the 1960s are ideological homogeneity, where previously there had never been such, and the rise of unbelievable administrative and functional complexity. Bureaucratically sclerotic, single-party institutions, which American universities are becoming, cannot support and sustain multiparty democracy in the states and country in which they are embedded.
The free and open debate that multiparty democracy requires is at risk of disappearing from many top American universities and colleges. If it does so, universities will lose their ability to both foster and sustain the highest aspirations of American democracy.
• Allan Stam is a distinguished university professor of politics and policy at the University of Virginia.
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