Book Review: "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It": Resistance to Change in Higher Education by Brian Rosenberg
Trying to define what works by examining what doesn't
The quote in the title comes from Groucho Marx. Despite it being coined as a parody of professorial intransigence, it strikes a chord. The work of this book is examining why that quote seems resonant.
That quote sets the tone for this 2023 book from the former president of Macalester College. Rosenberg’s purpose is to examine organizational change in the university by focusing on details of practice and culture that make it distinct from other fields.
The book examines phenomena like college rankings, disciplinary identity, risk aversion, shared governance, and tenure. Despite having lived his whole career in higher education, he hopes to kill a sacred cow or two.
Setting the Scene
I am not going to try to summarize the whole book. Instead, I want to reflect on a few ideas from the book which stand out to me.
Rosenberg highlights the issue of isomorphism, the fact that organizations tend to mimic their most successful peers. The question is how higher education institutions define “success.”
Around the turn of the 20th century, a group of American colleges adapted the German university model and pushed their institutions to orient their faculty around the production of novel research material. The goal was to shift the best faculty toward innovation in their disciplines and away from teaching undergraduates. This carried with it an emphasis on graduate education, a form of professorial self-replication, and the granting of the PhD, a German-designed degree imported to the American context.
The shift to this German-inspired model connoted prestige as well. Yale University was the first institution to grant an American PhD, and the oldest and richest universities were the first to make this shift. Defining themselves in contrast to the huddled masses of denominational colleges and vocational schools, the elite universities set norms for a new era of American higher education, just as it became an increasingly desirable commodity for an newly wealthy, industrializing country.
The point of my historical byroad is that with a shift toward research emphases at the university came a bifurcation of its traditional mission. It was now interested in teaching and research, though faculty were increasingly expected to earn their place at the table through research production.
A bifurcation of mission, then, meant a multiplication of resources. The most prestigious institutions added faculty in diverse fields both to allow for a breadth of research output and to allow for students to enroll in the range of subjects which would convince them to attend.
I’m skipping many historical steps here, but the consequence of the increasing unintelligibility of institutional missions is the complexity of the organization. As the university has fewer unifying values, each unit acts independently in defense of its own prerogatives.
Rosenberg keys in on much of this. Now, every kind of organization has a wide array of stakeholders. Many organizations are complex. Those things don’t make higher education unique. What is unique about higher education is how the relative power of each stakeholder makes organizational change so difficult.
A Balancing Act
Two of the most striking chapters focus on shared governance and tenure.
Rosenberg says, speaking generally, that both are tools for tenure-track faculty to assert control over the academic life of the institution. Shared governance allows for input (or intransigence) on shifts in the curriculum. Tenure allows for control on who makes up the professoriate at the institution, upholding the standards and priorities that the faculty sets for itself.
Because tenure prioritizes research over teaching, faculty prioritize research over teaching. The fact that this is imposed on early-career faculty tends to set the standards for the rest of their careers. Rosenberg alludes to the importance of training faculty in teaching, but it’s unclear what that would actually entail. What he does note is the old bifurcation again: students consistently report that preferred being taught by graduate students and full-time, non-tenure track faculty. These are the teachers who have more incentive to focus on teaching.
This is a conflict between the priorities of the research-oriented faculty’s mission and the teaching mission of the institution. Rosenberg insists that refocusing on college’s teaching mission is essential to finding itself again.
This does make me pause though. Prestige and perceptions of quality are not accidental, and universities are clearly interested in maintaining them. Setting aside external rankings for a moment, what would happen if an institution decided to eliminate tenure, eliminate research, and eliminate complementary activities, focusing wholly on its teaching mission?
Would student flock to this lean, mean teaching machine? Or would they say that the place sounds a lot like high school?
Even if students don’t like being taught by the best researchers, does the fact that a university employs them make the experience more desirable?
We tend to consider education as an experience. After all, you have lots of experiences while pursuing it. But the product of formal education is a commodity: a degree. This means that consumers are often interested in the prestige factor of that degree. In legal terms, all bachelor’s degrees are created equal, so they’ll look for other factors to make it stand out. Rosenberg’s whole second chapter is about this phenomenon.
For good or ill, we are stuck in a situation where missional complexity has established itself as normative and excellence within that complex system is prestigious. When families are buying a college education, then, they are buying the perceived output of that education, not the educative process required to achieve it.
Keeping Up
Unfortunately, the thought process I just engaged in is precisely what Rosenberg calls out in his book.
There are lots of colleges. Most of them don’t have the financial insurance to take big risks. Even if they are shrinking and scrimping and stressing, they are afraid that a rapid shift away from the prestige-coded norms they’re accustomed to will mean a rapid demise.
The question is whether they’re dooming themselves to a slow demise and precluding the potential for a rapid rise.
Rosenberg sees universities as primarily being risk-averse. They use the checks available to them in the unique higher education ecosystem to limit innovation. This is not due to a resentment toward progress but due to a fear of catastrophe. Every party in higher education has a conception of what “college” is, and any threat to that conception is itself catastrophic.
What Rosenberg asks, though, is why students should be impressed by thousands of institutions mimicking one another, each chasing the same version of prestige with varying levels of success. Why, he asks, does every college need to have dozens of majors and minors, scads of sports teams, hosts of activities, and a research-focused tenured faculty? The model may be sustainable for Stanford, but is it so for Chicago State and Knox College?
Risk aversion, in the author’s mind, will doom colleges to insolvency, starting with the least prestigious and moving up from there.
So, then, what do you do?
The Middle Way
Rosenberg is very aware that he provides more critiques than solutions in his book. In the final chapter, he tries to tie it together and point to a way forward.
In an era where Vice Presidents call professors “the enemy,” it’s understandable that higher education would be resistant to change. Under attack, defensiveness is a reasonable impulse. Rosenberg insists that higher education adapt before it is forced to in ways it cannot control or predict. He critiques tenure and shared governance out of a love for higher education; he fears that it will be attacked out of hate.
Pointing, then, to the main mass of universities and colleges, he sees two common destinations.
Most continue to try to replicate the comprehensive model associated with prestige. On this path, they will continue to offer as many degrees as they can for as long as they can, putting off any contractions until the last minute. Some will succeed and grow, but many will fail. Failure may not mean closure, but it will mean falling well short of their educational and reputational goals.
The other path is online. Institutions can try to educate at maximum scale, building a mostly pre-packaged online product and selling the degree to as many as possible with no more human intervention than necessary. This approach flees from prestige, but likely also flees from what people find most meaningful in an education. It accepts completely the model of education as commodity, where the first path is at least still in denial.
Rosenberg concludes that the way forward is… not… those things.
He gives several examples of institutions which defy the norms he’s spent his book describing. He gives a good profile of Sterling College in Vermont, a work college wholly focused on environmental education. He highlights their missional focus, their affordability, and their lack of institutional impediments to change.
He also discusses Olin College of Engineering and Soka University. One is focused on experiential learning, the other on interdisciplinary study. What all of them have in common is that they picked a lane. Instead of trying to do a passable job at everything, they committed to doing something well.
Rosenberg is basically describing uncommon colleges, so I am very on board. We’ll need to work on our definition though because both of us still basically define them as “I know it when I see it.” There are gradations of missional commitment and organizational complexity. Is there a way to define these “future-proof” colleges except in the negative? Or can we only say the things they don’t do in order to know what they are? I am asking myself as much as I’m asking this author.
The last issue here is that Rosenberg notes the only institutions likely to defy this way industry norms are those who are newly founded or who are about to go out of business. Those are the two kinds of colleges with the least money and the least room to absorb losses. So, unless you can find stacks of seed money for your intentionally non-prestigious education startup, the risks are high.
What incentive does a mid-tier university have to become uncommon? Neither of us know yet.
Should you read this book?
The book does not have all the answers. In fact, it has almost no answers. What it has is problems.
For those of us invested in higher education, the book is useful for allowing you to ask questions about its structure that are so ingrained as to seem inevitable. It doesn’t mean that Rosenberg is right in his every assertion, but he at least models a way to do some asserting about these complex issues.
That, to me, is worth the price of admission.
-Matt