Universities as a worker cooperative - The Becker-Posner Blog

Becker:

Posner argues against the view that faculties should be running universities. He points out several problems with such a system, including that professors pursue their own narrow interests instead of the universities long-term goals, that professors are not selected for interpersonal skills, and that universities have become too complex to be run by a faculty collective.

Strangely, he comes down in favor of university trustees as having interests that are better aligned with those of universities. Yet my experience is that trustees typically know little about, and generally do not have much interest in, the universities they oversee, they are intimidated by professors, are not very brave in their trustees’ role, generally go along with whatever is presented to them by university administrations, and very seldom force a university president to quit.

Posner:

Evidently the Harvard faculty considers itself the owners of the institution; Summers appears to agree, as does Becker.

I disagree. The economic literature on worker cooperatives identifies objections to that form of organization that are pertinent to university governance. The workers have a shorter horizon than the institution. Their interest is to get as much from the institution as they can before they retire; what happens afterwards has no direct effect on them unless their pensions are dependent on the institution’s continued prosperity. That consideration aside (it has no application to most professors' pensions), their incentive is to play a short-run game, to the disadvantage of the institution—and for the further reason that while the faculty as a group might be able to destroy the institution and if so hurt themselves, an individual professor who slacks off or otherwise acts against the best interests of the institution is unlikely to have much effect.

All this is true of Harvard.

A commenter:

There are 1437 words in this post about university governance. Not ONE of them is the word "student."

Of course, to be fair, it is about Harvard and Harvard has very little to do with its students.