Incentive misalignment drives the University spiral to the bottom

There was an interesting article in Honi Soit, the University of Sydney student magazine recently. Unfortunately, the reference currently eludes me. I do, however, recall that the point of the article was to discuss the incentive misalignment inherent in the structure of the University of Sydney Senate.

When I started in academia many moons ago, academic Senates primarily consisted of three types of scholars: academic scholars, student scholars and alumni scholars. This structure of university governing bodies reflected the nature of universities as self governing communities of scholars. From a more technical agency theory perspective, the structure of governing bodies guaranteed incentive alignment. Alumni scholars and academics scholars had a vested interest in maintaining the reputation of the institution. In the case of the former, the institutional reputation directly impacted the value of the indicator of intellectual capital which they had acquired as graduates. For academics, reputational capital enhanced their ability to speak with credibility and, if we are to be mercenary about it, also enhanced their value on the academic labour market.

Similarly, both alumni scholars and student scholars had alignment in being motivated to maintain the quality of the educational process. This is not to say that academic scholars did not have this incentive, but the potential did exist for trade offs being made by academics which might well impact quality. As holders and potential holders of signifiers accrediting educational attainment, both alumni scholars and student scholars had a vested interest in ensuring that their education was of the highest quality.

Having dug into this matter somewhat, it is now apparent to me that one of the Dawkins reforms involved bringing onto governing bodies people who had no vested interest in universities as academic communities, excepting of course as customers seeking to acquire university products in the form of graduate students.

The presence of these corporate types on governing bodies has been the chief driver of the endless dumbing down of university education. Suddenly these people want students to have “communication skills” or “people skills” or “work-readiness”. Motherhood statements, since who could possibly oppose these. But what do we cut to meet these new desires? Trade-offs?

Now we as academics have to address these needs. I should have said _perceived_ needs. To misquote Dr House, employers lie. Not being cognisant of the tradeoffs in the educational process, they demanded things that could not possibly be provided unless certain trade-offs were made. As a consequence, we as academics are left to bemoan the continual pressure on us to remove real content from our degree programmes in order that the released space can be taken up by slogan based concepts such as “graduate outcomes”, “work readiness”, etc.

The beauty of the old traditional university education, which focused on intellectual development, was that by focusing on seemingly abstract concepts and ideas which did not necessarily have any immediate practical application, student plasticity was enhanced; student brains were rendered flexible and adaptable, as well as imbibing the skills inherent to a particular knowledge domain. So, by sitting in our ivory tower and stretching the brain in a non real-world way, we were actually as a by-product generating students which had the characteristics prized by employers. We were doing this indirectly.

Imagine an archer who is trying to hit a target. The wind is blowing at 5 knots to the right. The experienced archer aims to the left to account for the effect of the wind. This what is what we as academics were doing up until Dawkins reforms. Suddenly, we were faced with these corporate people chastising us for not aiming directly at the target. We have no choice but to comply. No wonder we are missing.

Incentive misalignment is the problem. We know that micromanagement does not work, just like central planning does not work. Set up the pricing system, the utility function, and let incentives do their work. Until this happens the spiral to the bottom will continue.