Before hallowe'en last, Alec Baldwin was in Toronto to promote the film Lymelife, and he ended up discussing with the Globe and Mail's Johanna Schneller his television program. "The obvious trick of 30 Rock is the non-creative people have taken over the creative jobs," he explained. "Because of companies like GE buying NBC, you have men and women who have no background in literature or drama or anything artistic, and they view making art the same as making refrigerators."
The resulting crisis of conscience is not unlike that felt in universities where, with all that teaching and researching ongoing, bureaucrats are left to handle many of the administrative tasks essential to schools' well-being. For as long as I can remember, the public has clamored for more so-called professionals in the ivory tower. When, twenty years ago, Memorial University was looking for a President, call-in radio shows were awash with people who wanted them to hire the very best businessperson in Newfoundland, whomever that might have been at the time. The idea was to make the place more efficient: the impression was that the more a university is a like just another business, the better it is.
You can imagine, as we sink further into recession, there will be more and more pressure for the "professionalization" of university bureaucracies. But is there any evidence that universities are so administratively impractical? Is there any evidence that short, sharp shocks of the so-called real world make universities better? I am not so sure.
I am not, in any way, suggesting that we pass over trained accountants to track money or trained engineers to design and maintain infrastructure. I am sure that these professionals were taught by professors at universities, and we need not insist that only their professors take up those practical functions here. After all, why are we teaching people if not to do this kind of work? But what I am talking about are those jobs that define and redefine the identity of an institution. These functions, most commonly the ones that involve students most directly, should be led by academics. A university, indeed any place of higher learning, is only ever somewhat like a business. We pay our shareholders always by reinvesting in education, not by paying dividends. And it is folly to pretend that people who are trained to design and market, track and improve consumables, like Alec Baldwin's refrigerators, should be directing education, either.
We read about the demand for able and experienced administrators as a generation of academics move into retirement. I believe that we should think twice before assuming that universities should always look to the corporate world to replace them.
