Coordination: Dealing with the Consequences of Increased Scale and Structural Change
The impact of all the above structural processes, considered together, is to produce not only larger but also more complex structures with many more moving parts. We owe it to Durkheim ([1893] 1997) who insisted that increases in social complexity (division of labor) inevitably occasion the need for new kinds of integration in society. That principle has been discovered and rediscovered in organizational studies, politics and administration, and in studies of whole societies (see Simon 2001), to say nothing of the administration of campuses and the coordination of multicampus systems. Coordination encompasses new demands for routine management, for ensuring that the many hands of complex organizations know what the others are doing, and for anticipating, containing, and handling conflicts among differentiated units and groups. This final principle constitutes an important modification of any simple theory of economies of scale, because increases in scale of all types demand new structures, mechanisms, knowledge, and accompanying financial resources to deal with size and complexity.
I submit this classification of structural changes—increase in unit size, segmentation, differentiation, proliferation, and coordination—both as a set of tools for analyzing the kinds of changes experienced by higher education and as a key to understanding phenomena in those institutions that may be otherwise baffling. Two points will emerge: (a) the “choice” of directions of structural change is constrained by external restrictions and opportunities, and (b) the different kinds of social change ramify in different directions, and express themselves in distinctive anomalies and contradictions, status hierarchies, strategic adaptations, and patterns of competition and conflict. We simply cannot unravel these ramifications without understanding institutions’ structural situations.
A PECULIAR CASE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: STRUCTURAL ACCRETION
As the illustrations in the last section reveal, the history of higher education has revealed all the forms of structural change associated with growth. I would like to spend some time on a special form that involves growth, specialization, and proliferation, and applies mainly but not exclusively to universities. In search for a descriptive term, I have settled on the concept of “structural accretion,” a composite form of growth.* Its simple definition is incorporation of new functions over time without, however, shedding existing ones (deletion) or splitting into separate organizations. It is a complex process reflecting, in the main, the following driving forces:
Expanding as a result of new opportunities for activities, usually but not always relevant to the main missions of the university. Rosenzweig put the culture of growth simply: “The institutional impulse is not to restrain growth but to support it . . . Standing still . . . is contrary to the nature of the beast, and contraction is simply an abomination” (1998: 156).
The fact that most growth has been a matter of mutual opportunism—the belief on the part of external agencies that universities are an appropriate or effective place to invest resources in line with their own interests and purposes, and the dependence of universities mainly on external subsidization.
The power of academic competition and emulation in a highly stratified prestige hierarchy of institutions. Stadtman enunciated this as a principle: “the tendency for institutions to emulate the most prestigious, largest, and most secure colleges and universities” (1980: 95).
Organizational inertia, university politics, and the shortage of mechanisms to ensure the shedding of adopted activities.
The ingredients of accretion have been noted by observers of higher education. The accumulation of functions was captured fifty years ago by Clark Kerr’s (1963) invention of the term “multiversity,” connoting that accumulation. He also identified the inertial side by noting cryptically that “[c]hange comes through spawning the new than reforming the old” (Kerr 1963: 102). More recently Altbach observed that “[w]hen faced with new situations, the traditional institutions either adjust by adding functions without changing their basic character or create new divisions or institutes” (2001: 30). Diffusion through competitive copycatting has also been noted as a principle; “[institutions] build prestige by mimicking institutions that already have prestige” (Brewer, Gates, and Goldman 2002: 66). And faculty conservatism has been frequently identified as one of the most powerful forces in the academy (Kerr 1963); one critic speaks of “four hundred years of resistance to change in modes of instruction” (Marcus 2011: 41). Antagonism to change is a perhaps the most well-worn theme in academic humor. (Riddle: “What is more difficult to change than the course of history?” Answer: “A history course.” Riddle: “How many Oxford dons does it take to change a light bulb?” Answer: “Change?”). Over the years, moreover, faculties appear to have cultivated the art of resistance commensurate with their levels of intelligence and ingenuity. After a long season of entrepreneurial efforts of running his proposal to establish the Said Business School through faculty committees at Oxford, John Kay concluded that the committee system had elevated the avoidance of decision making into a high art form. He identified “eight oars of indecision”: deferral, referral, procedural objection, “the wider picture,” evasion, ambiguity, precedent, and denial (Kay 2000). Perhaps he could have discovered even more than eight had he not been constrained by the metaphor of the rowing shell.
Despite these observations, I know of no general statement that integrates all these ingredients, much less traces out the ramifications of the process into almost every aspect of university life. I undertake both those tasks in these lectures.
A Historical Sketch of the Process
Here is a very brief, idealized history of the cumulative accretion in universities:
In the colonial period and through the early nineteenth century, institutions taught and trained elite classes through the baccalaureate degree or its equivalents.
Dramatized by Yale’s introduction of the Ph.D. in 1860, universities consolidated postgraduate training during the last half of the nineteenth century, without, however, surrendering undergraduate studies.
Also in the same period, professional schools of law and medicine were introduced as adjuncts to universities (Kimball 2009), and the list of professions served increased over time to include the long list with which we are now familiar. With respect to schools of education, universities came to supplement the work of the normal schools and teachers’ colleges. This contrasted with the continued vitality of professional apprenticeship systems outside the universities in many other countries. Addition of professional education, however, did not result in the desertion of existing activities. They added to them and extended and intensified the “service to society and community” functions.
Concomitant with the growth of postgraduate education, universities aggressively introduced and gave high priority and prestige to Humboldt’s visions of research and created the academic department as the long-standing organizational venue for its execution. Over time, the number of departments has increased (e.g., the addition of the social sciences in the very late nineteenth century, and the addition of computer studies and communication studies in recent decades). So fundamental were these additions that by 1905 Abraham Flexner could declare that “the university has sacrificed the college at the altar of research” (quoted in Scarlett 2004: 39).More was to come. The philanthropic efforts of foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the federal government in the Vannevar Bush and post-Sputnik eras, expanded scientific research in universities to unprecedented heights. This spilled over in lesser degree to the social sciences and more negligibly into the humanities. As structural manifestations of expansion, we find campuses honeycombed with centers and