Lehigh Cuts Back
By: David Gritz
Think back to before your freshman year. You were a senior with a life changing decision to make. Were you going to attend Lehigh or another similar school? In that decision, many aspects of student life were balanced: academics, food service, campus life, and available student services. Little facts like library building hours, newspapers in Rauch, and flexible course choices entered your mind as a whirling matrix of decision variables.
Many of these variables may not have seemed too relevant to you until recently. That is when they were taken away. Recognizing the end of the college readership program, the reduction of buildings hours including library hours, and ten percent cuts in department funding, might have raised your temper. These recent changes along with a systemic shift of the registrar to restrict student overloads and the business school’s insistent need to control every minor expenditure, have created a pattern of abstinence. That is abstinence from student based priorities and abstinence from transparency.
However, Lehigh is not alone. Universities including Dickinson, Whitman College, and even Harvard are facing harsh realities of budget cuts.1 These universities were forced to hold “virtual swim meets”, cap student printing, and lay off a variety of student service providers including janitors.2 With all of these cuts, the New York Times has even started a blog on what colleges can cut ³.
In what seems like a hopeless loss to the quality of the American university, there is still hope, but only if universities can radically shift their business models. Instead of prioritizing administrators’ salaries, professors’ job security, and blue sky research, universities have to return to their core business model. They must develop an educated work force, produce industry relevant research, and provide a productive environment for intellectuals to flourish.
Just like any other service business in the world, Universities must understand that the customer always comes first. Whether that customer is the student paying tuition, government agencies providing grants for economically effective research, or companies paying for research and development, universities must meet their needs.
At the same time, universities must remain competitive. That means using agile business models to adapt to changes immediately instead of ten years later, incentivizing professors to win more competitive grants, and reducing faculty and staff in weak economic times. Instead of begging alumni for money, Lehigh should be proving its research has value for companies. Instead of focusing on only tenured professors, Lehigh should hire more adjuncts and professors of practice as it does for its MBA programs. Finally, instead of acting as three independent silo colleges, Lehigh should integrate cross-college resources.
If Lehigh cannot revise its stale, 1950s business model, it might not be able to sustain itself for the indefinite future. Students might not be able to have the available resources and services they once had, and alumni might not give to a university that did not fully satisfy their needs as students.
Sources:
1 – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/education/19college.html?_r=2&hpw
2 – http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/slam/blog/263
3 – http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/what-colleges-can-cut/
