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With smarts, colleges can survive downturn

The political pundits have now confirmed what nearly every university president knows for certain: Hard times are once more at hand. In the 1970s, and then again in the ’80s and early ’90s, American higher education faced similarly tough times.

OPINION By Robert Zemsky The Boston Globe

Then, as now, most institutions hunkered down, frozen in place. The unspoken message was that preserving jobs would be the top priority — people were more important than programs or things. As the financial crisis deepened, management teams turned inward assuring themselves that all the expertise they needed was already at hand — no outside perspective was required. Libraries stopped buying books and journals. Computers were not upgraded and new purchases were abandoned altogether. When cuts in people proved unavoidable, the first to be let go were part-timers.

Thereafter, the pain was spread evenly across the institution. Every unit was expected to absorb its fair share of the institution’s layoffs and job freezes. Cutting a perk here, cutting off the telephones there seldom saved much money but said to the campus community ”We’re all going to bleed — equally.”The sad truth is that most institutions were substantially weakened in the process. It takes a long time to rebuild an institution’s confidence in its ability to invest in its own future.

Even when state appropriations returned to their previous levels, it proved easier to go on saying no to new initiatives, choosing instead to allow everybody to add back the positions previously sacrificed to the necessity of a balanced budget. Among the many, however, there were a few institutions that emerged stronger.

These were institutions that not only made targeted as opposed to across-the-board cuts, but more important, chose to rethink how they operated while continuing to invest, albeit on a smaller scale, in new initiatives: the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, the University of Michigan in the 1980s, the University of Maryland Baltimore County in the 1990s. These were truly changed universities, having come to understand that the way to remain mission centered was in fact to be market smart.

Most of the institutions that hewed to the older, more conservative strategy of across-the-board cuts and postponed investments also survived, but in the process they actually made themselves more market dependent as they came to rely on tuition and enrollment increases as the principal, in many cases the only, means of offsetting declining state appropriations. Although these institutions did not choose to subordinate educational mission to market dynamics, in the end surviving meant doing just that.

But if most institutions did, in fact, survive, what’s the worry? The answer is that Americans, principally in the form of increased tuition, ended up paying more for less — less experimentation, less investment in new ideas, less recasting of institutional practices that preserved without strengthening higher education.

History is now in the process of repeating itself. Most states facing budget deficits are about to do what they have done so often in the past — reduce their appropriations to higher education while complaining about but tolerating the tuition increases their institutions will, as a last resort, make in order to survive intact. And there will be some institutions now, as in the past, that will use this opportunity to reposition themselves, making the painful choices to help secure a more robust future.

The only question that remains is whether a substantially larger proportion of higher education will now adopt this latter strategy. At the moment, alas, the smart money is betting that most of higher education is heading for ”more of the same.” We would all be better off, however, if institutions learned how to navigate this current downturn such that they emerged stronger, more nimble enterprises capable of investing in their own futures.

Robert Zemsky is chairman of the Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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