The most recent phase (over the past thirty years) has seen the growth of sponsored and collaborative research with business organizations, sponsored research, collaborative research, and spin-off enterprises with faculty leadership. This also fits the pattern of accretion, and later we will treat the topic more fully, along with other “invasions” of commercial forces into campuses.
Over time colleges and universities have expanded into international education, beginning with standard “junior year abroad” programs but recently becoming more diversified and extended into postgraduate and research activities—all part of the rapid globalization of higher education.
As adjuncts to the standard baccalaureate programs, colleges and universities extended into the areas of correspondence courses, summer schools, workshops, and so on, to serve regular students who wanted to accelerate their progress or repeat flunked courses, professionals to improve their certification, and more mature students generally. Most colleges and universities tried to make these programs self-financing; they were also an important wedge for the practice of hiring temporary and part-time faculty.
The most recent line of accretion in this family (along with the differentiation of private teaching institutions separate from the residentially based institution) is “distance learning,” a huge and ill-understood series of changes, which Gregorian and Martin identified as the most important trend in higher education (2004). We only note this in the context of “accretion” at the moment and consider it separately later.
From time to time universities have embedded more traditional “intimate” collegiate programs into their larger, department-dominated programs of “majors.” I have in mind the Monteith College at the University of Michigan, and the Tussman and Muscatine experiments on the Berkeley campus in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as many less conspicuous interdisciplinary programs. Historically, these enterprises have proved to be vulnerable, largely because, unlike departments and other units, they are typically financed on a year-by-year basis and subject to discontinuation, and they rely on faculty who make requests for reduction of departmental teaching commitments in order to participate—requests that are not welcomed by department chairs.
Over time colleges and universities added public entertainment (mainly in the form of intercollegiate athletic contests) and cultural enlightenment (museums, public lectures, dramatic and musical performances). Intercollegiate athletics is regarded by many as a cancer rather than an accretion, out of control because of pressures from alumni, media, and public love of competitive sports (below, pp. 93-94). With these also came intramural athletics and departments and programs of physical education, which, while often drawing faculty ridicule for having no place in academic institutions, persisted and grew all the same. These ancillary activities were also added to the institutions’ other ongoing activities.
Universities added academic presses as an avenue both for faculty publication of scholarly research (increasingly salient for tenure-track faculty members requiring evidence of such research as the most important ingredient for their professional advancement) and as a further instrument for cultural enlightenment of the public.
Offices for Institutional Research have become common installations, providing the databases and analyses for the multiplicity of functions and complexity of decision making in complex organizations (Swing 2009) as well as public relations activities.
Typically, universities and some colleges fashion accretions that are designed to create, consolidate, or produce other accretions. I have in mind fund-raising and development offices, campaign committees, alumni-relations offices, sponsored research offices, and technology-transfer offices. I could only experience a sense of irony when I came across a number of “advisory points” in a handbook on fund-raising for presidents: Appoint an extraordinary vice president for development with “an impressive office near yours” and membership on your top advisory council. Appoint a fund-raising consultant. Also, start a personal fund-raising library, conduct a feasibility study, and develop a case statement. Finally, “approve a budgetary allocation that is more than you are initially inclined to grant” [!] (Fisher 1994: 16).
Social movements and other public pressures have added irregularly to the accretion process. The most notable examples are the spread of academic programs and departments of women’s studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies in the wake of external and internal pressures associated with corresponding social movements. Also opposed by some faculty for not having a proper academic basis, these have nevertheless become standard features on many university and college campuses. Combined internal and external forces have most recently produced a growth of programs and departments in environmental studies.
Among the great paradoxes of administrative accretion is that all kinds of fortunes—both good and bad—provide motives for increasing it. In good times the motives seem self-evident. They call for increases in administrative staffs for newly forming research institutes; augmentation of counseling; financial aid and other student services; establishing and expanding sponsored research offices to capitalize on expanding opportunities; and beefing up development and fund-raising staffs to exploit expanding opportunities. Bad times would seem to call for shrinkage of administration, but it does not shrink. In the “new depression” (Cheit 1971) of the 1970s and 1980s, which involved shrinking enrollments and shrinking sources of support, the rate of growth of administrative personnel between the decade from 1975 and 1985 was 60 percent, while the growth of faculty was only 6 percent (Zemsky, Wegner, and Massey 2005). Why should a period of relative poverty call for such expansion? The main causes are increased pressures to gain a competitive edge in seeking students, securing financial aid, private gifts, and state support—all diminishing but, as a result, calling for greater investment in staff simultaneously to squeeze out what can be squeezed under the circumstances. Administering organizational cuts also calls for staff time in determining what these might be and how to deal with resistances to them. As a result of this paradox, there seems to be no time in the history of colleges and universities that does not call for some kinds of new administrative staff, whether to maximize gains or minimize losses.
Such are the major lines of structural accretions that have in the long run created the multiversity, or the distinctive American “bundle” referred to by Parsons (1973). The process has been realized mainly in the universities, largely because they are less constrained by law and tradition from expanding, and because external sponsoring agencies choose universities on account of their relatively unconstrained ability to take on new activities and because they are, by knowledge and reputation, “the best.” Donors, foundations, governments, and businesses prefer to choose “the best” to maximize the success of their own funding.
The accretion principle has also affected other segments of higher education, though less so than the universities, by mechanisms, as follows.
State colleges, many of them having evolved from teachers’ colleges, have had a long history of competition with and emulation of the state’s universities. This has taken the form of changing their names to “state universities”; striving for equity in teaching loads, salaries, and sabbatical relief; building research into their programs; and adding advanced degree programs (though most are excluded legally from offering the doctorate and some professional degrees). Many of these efforts involve adding programs and units, and thus constitute accretions. Status striving is the main engine: universities compete with one another for external sources as a means of expanding their activities, programs, and standing; state universities compete with universities to approach status equality. The long-standing striving of the polytechnics to gain parity with the universities in the United Kingdom is a conspicuous example from abroad.
Accretion in the community colleges is still another variant. As mainly public institutions they have traditionally been restricted to two-year degree programs (and prohibited from offering others), though some have succeeded in converting to four-year colleges, and many states now permit granting of baccalaureate degrees