Knowledge of the Business of Higher Education ... And Our Lack Thereof
Justin Bathon on Monday, August 8, 2011 at 1:09AM Why do we not teach future faculty members anything about the business of higher education before we put them into the teaching jobs? It is an enormous deficiency in our knowledge base and I think it has real, negative effects on the institutions that hire us.
I just wish I knew a lot more about running a higher education business than I do. I feel I basically have to learn all of that on the fly, and (honestly) sometimes I am making mistakes.
For instance, recruiting and marketing. Increasingly, departments (especially mine) are having to do most of our own recruiting and marketing. I know little to nothing about these things, but they are vital to the health and prosperity of our department. To be honest, I wish I knew a little less about John Dewey and a little more about this.
And, I think the implications are that many departments and programs are struggling with the actual business of running these places - leading to institutional weakness. I think this is particularly acute in the Research Universities that tend to hire folks like me ... relatively young, newly hooded, naive, inexperienced greenhorns. Don't get me wrong, some of these greenhorns have remarkable ideas -- and, perhaps, some of us will cure cancer or something (or help lead a technology revolution in our education systems ;). But, to do that, we need functional and economically healthy departments within which to work. Regional and private universities tend to hire a greater percentage of second-career professors. Presumably, these folks learned the business of something in their first career, and are capable of adapting some of these ideas. There is still a tremendous knowledge gap for these folks, and an ever greater knowledge gap on the research front, but purely from a business standpoint, they seem to have a bit of a leg-up.
Across te board though, it seems at least to me, that more and more of that "economically healthy" work is falling to new professors. So, perhaps we should think about some formal attempt to prep them for these roles?
I don't know. Just a thought on a late Sunday night to interrupt my grading.
