Irreconcilable Differences: Thorstein Veblen on Higher Learning as a Business Enterprise

Throughout its turbulent history, as it bounced from one bizarre crisis to another, the University of Bridgeport has always been careful to characterize its problems as typical of what most other universities were experiencing, whether the issue was budget deficits, declining enrollment, crime on campus, labor disputes, or even the final circus of disarray that led to its near-extinction and rescue by the Unification Church.

Certainly other schools experienced similar problems at any given moment, but “similar” would be as close as one could get to a useful comparison. Charts illustrating national trends in demographics and enrollment would tell you nothing about what happened at UB because the real story, of course, lies in the particular ways those issues applied to the university, and, most particularly, how the school chose to deal with them.

In fact, if one needed a measure of what the University of Bridgeport had most in common with other schools, and an insight into its patterns of decision-making, a useful primer can be found in Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men , 1918. The author of Theory of the Leisure Class witnessed an increasing trend toward the domination of boards of trustees by businessmen, men of “substance” whose sensibilities and experience were grounded in industrial and mercantile pursuits.

It is apparently believed, though on just what ground this sanguine belief rests does not appear, that in case of emergency the wealthy members of the boards may be counted on to spend their substance in behalf of the university.  In point of fact, at any rate, poor men and men without large experience in business affairs are felt to have no place in these bodies.

In our time such a scheme of things is so much a fact of life that it would seem absurd to question it, but Veblen finds the arrangement itself absurd.

“The higher learning is not a business proposition,” he writes–no scholar is an employee in respect to his scholarly work. “Business enterprise is …incompatible with the spirit of the higher learning. Indeed, these two lines of endeavor…are as widely out of touch as may be.”

And yet, corporate boards, who know little or nothing about what their professors do, control academic policy, and wield their control through the budget. Their spending priorities usually favor “tangible” values over books and similar working materials, says Veblen, while “the academic staff remains (notoriously) underpaid and so scantily filled as seriously to curtail their working capacity.”

What is withheld from current academic expenditure is felt to be saved, while that expenditure which leaves a tangible residue of (perhaps useless) real estate, is by force of ingrained habit, rated as new investment.

At UB, this point might be illustrated by the towering campus buildings constructed during the school’s brief boom period–an expansion of capacity that happened just as enrollment began a prolonged downturn–which saddled the school with debt, costly maintenance, underused facilities, and budget shortfalls that were always addressed by cutting the teaching or support staff. (When people refer to the school having a capacity for 10,000 students, this is what they mean–bricks and mortar enough to accommodate 10,000, though enrollment never came close to that number.) But dwindling enrollment had little effect on what the campus community used to refer to as UB’s “Edifice Complex.”  Whatever its financial difficulties, UB could always find money for new construction or renovation of what Veblen calls campus “stage properties”–”curious facades and perplexing feats of architecture”:

It is desirable that the university present an imposing front….These architectural vagaries… spread abroad the prestige     of the university as an ornate and spendthrift establishment; which is believed to bring increased enrollment of students     and, what is even more to the point, to conciliate the good-will of the opulent patrons of learning.

Businesslike boards hire managers who are like-minded, “hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of universities and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers that devolve on them.”

Trustees at UB, for example, who once tried to institute “productivity goals” for their faculty employees which demanded that professors be at their desks from 9 to 5 every day when they weren’t in the classroom, heard little objection from administrators who knew better; likewise, the trustees’ relentless pursuit of the “flexibility” to hire and fire professors at will (for insubordination or as the vagaries of the marketplace required); or to have the final say on teaching methods and materials, which they had no expertise in; or to balance a budget with arbitrary, across the board spending cuts, were always abetted by school “executives” ready to do their bidding.

Like any officer in a corporation, the university executive, says Veblen, “will first and always take care of those duties that are most jealously insisted on by the powers to whom he is accountable,” ahead of the needs of the academic community.

But the system and order that so govern the work [of scholars] …are the logical system and order of intellectual enterprise, not the mechanical or statistical intelligence that goes into effect in the management of an industrial plant or the financiering of a business corporation…Neither can that intellectual initiative and proclivity that goes in as the indispensable motive force in the pursuit of learning be reduced to any known terms of subordination, obedience, or authoritative direction.

Veblen concludes–fancifully, or naively, from our perspective–that such boards and administrations should be abolished:

They are needless, except to take care of needs and emergencies to which their own presence gratuitously gives rise….They are altogether such needs as arise out of an excessive size and a gratuitously complex administrative organization; both of which…are created by the governing boards and their executive officers, for no better purpose than a vainglorious self-complacency, and with no better justification than an uncritical prepossession to the effect that large size, complex organization, and authoritative control necessarily make for efficiency; whereas, in point of fact, in the affairs of learning these things unavoidably make for defeat.

The chart below compares the size of the UB administration in 1974 (during peak enrollment) with the size in 1989; during the same period, the size of the faculty declined by 42%.  (This chart originally appeared in the UB-AAUP Newsletter, August 21, 1989.)