Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:56:51 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] Fwd: A Modest proposal (colleges)
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

 From a close friend, who's a non-tenured professor of history at York U.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [WSFA] A Modest proposal [Fwd]
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:41:43 -0400
From: Donald G. Wileman

June 13, 2013
Forget MOOCs--Let's Use MOOA

By Benjamin Ginsberg
As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce
faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced
plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin
Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges
and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By
having one experienced group of administrators make decisions for
hundreds of campuses simultaneously, MOOA would help address these
problems expeditiously and economically. Since MOOA would allow
colleges to dispense with most of their own administrators, it would
generate substantial cost savings in higher education.
"Studies show that about 30 percent of the cost increases in higher
education over the past twenty-five years have been the result of
administrative growth," Ginsberg noted. He suggested that MOOA can
reverse this spending growth.  "Currently, hundreds, even thousands,
of vice provosts and assistant deans attend the same meetings and
undertake the same activities on campuses around the U.S. every day,"
he said.  "Imagine the cost savings if one vice provost could make
these decisions for hundreds of campuses."
Asked if this "one size fits all" administrative concept was
realistic given the diversity of problems faced by thousands of
schools, Ginsberg noted that a "best practices" philosophy already
leads administrators to blindly follow one another's leads in such
realms as planning, staffing, personnel issues, campus diversity,
branding and, curriculum planning. The MOOA, said Ginsberg, would
take "best practices" a step further and utilize it to realize
substantial cost savings.
Ginsberg pointed to the realm of strategic planning. He said that
thanks to to the best practices concept, hundreds of schools
currently use virtually identical strategic plans. Despite the
similarities, however, these plans cost each school hundreds of
thousands or even millions of dollars to develop. The MOOA would
formalize the already extant cooperation by developing one plan that
could be used by all colleges. Ginsberg estimates that had the MOOA
planning concept been in use over the past ten years, schools would
have saved more than a half billion dollars.  "One way to look at
it," he said, "Is that through their tuitions students paid about
$500 million for strategic planning that might have been used for
curricular development or other educational purposes."  The MOOA
plan, he declared, would end such wasteful duplication.
According to Ginsberg, another place where the MOOA concept is
immediately relevant is "branding."  Following contemporary business
models, hundreds of schools pay consulting firms hundreds of
thousands of dollars to help them improve their "brand" identities.
The results of these expensive individual efforts often seem quite
similar. For example, after a major and costly rebranding effort, the
University of Chicago School of Medicine declared that its brand
would be "University of Chicago Medicine." After working with
consultants, the Johns Hopkins Medical School decided that its brand
would be "Johns Hopkins Medicine." And, the University of
Pennsylvania Medical School was helped by its consultants to coin the
brand, "Penn Medicine." A MOOA might have identified a brand that all
medical schools would be happy to use, such as "[School's Name]
Medicine."
Ginsberg also suggested that the "best practices" philosophy has led
administrators at many schools to develop similar tasks and projects.
At his own university, administrators created a "committee on
traditions" to rediscover forgotten school traditions or, if
necessary, to invent new ones. Similar committees had also been
created by administrators on a number of other campuses including
Emory, Duke, Middlebury, and Bowling Green.  "Interestingly," said
Ginsberg, "administrators meeting on dozens of campuses have
uncovered or devised very similar traditions." Substituting one MOOA
"committee on traditions" for the dozens, perhaps hundreds of such
committees would generate significant savings.
Ginsberg has named his MOOA "Administeria," and plans to begin
operations in early 2014.  He admits that widespread use of MOOAs
could result in substantial unemployment among college bureaucrats.
However, he noted that their skill sets make them qualified for work
in such burgeoning industries as retail sales, hospitality, food
services, event planning, and horticultural design.
_______________
Benjamin Ginsberg is David Bernstein Professor of Political Science
at The Johns Hopkins University.
(Photo: Benjamin Ginsberg. Credit: Johns Hopkins.)

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