The current organizational structure of academic departments has evolved as the number of disciplines has grown. The number of departments in a university will continue to increase in this age of knowledge. However, no organizational structure is effective forever. In fact, there are five serious problems that are exacerbated by the academic department form of university structure. These include the difficulties of creating interdisciplinary majors and eliminating duplicate courses. Shrinking departments that are losing majors is also a Herculean undertaking. The author describes some possible approaches that can be used to minimize departmental redesign problems.
The organization of colleges by academic departments is not as old as one might think. In the United States, departments were created at Harvard in 1825. This was in response to a request by the scholar George Ticknor, who had returned from Germany, and convinced the Board of Overseers that colleges should follow the model of the German research university and be organized by departments (Storr, 1953: 19-28). By the latter part of the 19th century, most universities had emulated this model and organized by department (Edwards, 1999).
The number of academic disciplines and departments has been proliferating (Cohen, 1998: 124-127, 134-137; Dirks, 1996; Hatfield, 1998; Jencks and Riesman, 1968:13; Veysey, 1965: 320-322). The University of Virginia, which together with Harvard was among the first to organize by departments in the United States, opened in 1825 with seven departments called colleges. They were: ancient languages, modern languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, chemistry, and medicine (Cowley and Williams, 1991). New York University had only two departments in 1831 (Storr, 1953: 37-41). Columbia University had 42 academic departments at the beginning of the 20th Century and started the 21st Century with more than 85 departments.
The trend toward more and more departments will continue as the amount of information in the age of knowledge continues to grow. For example, departments such as history and/or literature have split into history, women’s studies, Judaic studies, Italian studies, Asian studies, African studies, Islamic studies, Puerto Rican studies, Russian/East European studies, and gay/lesbian studies. In many universities, economics departments have spawned accounting, finance, marketing, and management departments; computer science and statistics departments have emerged from mathematics departments; and anthropology departments have come forth from sociology departments. Recently, Hunter College in Manhattan was considering the establishment of a disability studies department. Two issues that substantially undermined this expansion were the costs of establishing another department, which the President of Hunter estimated would be at least $500,000, and the fear that the proliferation of departments would siphon away resources from other departments and the core disciplines (Ramirez, 1997).
In the Internet Age, globalization and technological change are forcing organizations to do everything they can to streamline allowing faster decision making and increased efficiency. One way this is accomplished is by flattening organizational structure. Some universities may not believe that they too have to become more efficient, but the rise of distance learning and the for-profit university may change all that. Krief (1975: 5) notes: “There is no such thing as a [managerial] structure that is valid once and for all.”
This paper is not about teaching universities to operate like businesses. Myers (2001) makes it clear that higher education is about more than just learning job skills, it is the “bedrock of democracy” and its purpose is to teach people how to think and to be free. Lerych (2001) points out the danger of treating a college solely like a business and forgetting that institutions of higher education have to consider more than just the bottom line. Society will not be better off if colleges water down standards to increase FTEs and replace tenured faculty with underpaid adjuncts. Winston (1997) provides six answers to the question of why universities cannot be run like corporations. These are: (1) They are generally nonprofit and there is thus less pressure on them to be efficient. (2) As nonprofits, academic institutions tend to be run by individuals who are more idealistic than managers of profit-making businesses. (3) Universities rely on charitable donations and endowment income for a portion of their revenues and so they do not have to cover their costs. (4) There is no “perfect information” on the part of customers when purchasing education. The value of one’s education may not be known for many years. (5) Since the quality of a student’s education is affected by the other students in the educational environment, colleges have to be concerned about to whom they target their product. (6) Colleges differ very much on the price they charge for their product. Some schools can afford to provide large subsidies, while others cannot.
While it is true that universities should not be run like businesses, this does not mean that they have nothing to learn from business. Universities may not be the same as business enterprises but they too must learn how to be efficient, nimble, and responsive to change. Many firms have gone beyond reacting to change and are proactive, attempting to predict the most viable path for the future. Being inflexible and resistant to change in an extremely fast-moving environment is a prescription for disaster, whether we are dealing with a business or academic institution.
It is very difficult for universities as a whole to change without first understanding the dynamics of academic departments. This paper will examine some of the problems associated with the current departmental structure of most universities.
There is a great deal of course duplication across disciplines. For instance, statistics is frequently offered by many of the following departments: education, sociology, psychology, political science, psychology, economics, mathematics, and quantitative methods. The differences among these courses are often insignificant. Research methods is typically taught in marketing, sociology, psychology, education, political science, and management departments. There are turf battles among management, quantitative methods, and engineering departments as to who should teach the operations research/management science/industrial engineering/operations management courses. Similar computer programming courses are often taught in both mathematics and computer information systems departments. Heckman (1999) contends that subjects that are usually considered “marketing” in a strict sense (by marketers), e.g., customer service or data mining, are often taught in other departments.
A study conducted by the Association of American Colleges (1991: 6) regarding majors notes the following:
The problem [with the major] is that it often delivers too much knowledge with too little attention to how that knowledge is being created, what methods and modes of inquiry are employed in its creation, what presuppositions inform it, and what entailments flow from its particular ways of knowing, and between what students have learned and their lives beyond the academy.
Departments do not want to give up their FTEs, and there is thus a bias towards majors with a large number of credits. The undergraduate major should provide students with the ability to master any new material in their discipline and thus prepare graduates with a lifelong ability to learn. Our job as educators is to teach students how to fish, not to feed them every kind of fish. Zimmerman (2001) asserts that “training in a discipline teaches people how to think about facts – how to order, analyze, and interpret them.” The number of credits that comprise a major should be based on what it takes to provide students with this ability, not on what it takes to make a department feel important, or, even worse, to increase the number of FTEs for a department and thereby obtain more faculty lines.
Edwards (1999) maintains that “achieving departmental status becomes the key signifier that one’s discipline is taken ‘seriously’ by the university.” Larger departments feel that they get more “respect” than smaller ones. Departments would rather ask for unneeded faculty lines than admit that they are shrinking and will rarely inform the administration that they are overstaffed. In fact, departments are seldom closed, even if they have almost no majors. In some colleges, the number of majors in some programs has shrunk so much that departments have been forced to run classes with four students. Note, for example, what has been happening to accounting departments throughout the United States. The number of accounting majors has unexpectedly declined in the last decade. In fact, from 1990 to 2000, the percentage of college students with accounting majors has plummeted from 4% to 2% (the percentage of high school students interested in majoring in accounting is down to a dismal 1%), and the size of accounting classes has therefore declined dramatically in some colleges (Albrecht and Sack, 2001). In absolute terms, the number of accounting majors has also dropped significantly according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. During the 1998-99 academic year, a total of 47,895 bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting were awarded; a 20% decline from the totals reported for the 1995-96 academic year (AICPA, 2000). The number of humanities majors has also been halved in the past thirty years (Weisbuch, 1999).
Given the importance to faculty members of belonging to a large department, even when the number of majors is declining, it becomes very difficult for colleges to close or to even reduce the size of departments. Thus, when there is a sudden drop in enrollment, class sizes of 4 or 5 become acceptable. Edwards (1999) contends that that “the actual elimination of departments is extremely rare and usually generates a wave of unflattering national news, so the substitution strategy is driven toward less visible, more surreptitious methods, giving rise to the decanal adage that it is much easier to starve a department than to eliminate it.”
Sometimes, even a department that is not in immediate danger of closing (e.g., a viable service department), will continue to request faculty lines even if they are not needed to meet student demand. Faculty lines are associated with power and rarely are departments willing to cede power graciously. Powerful departments will do everything they can to resist change that will weaken their influence. As Wilson (2001) points out, “higher education, fearful of ruffling faculty feathers, is infamous for avoiding tough decisions about which departments deserve more money and which deserve less.” This is why Ohio State University came up with a new approach to allocating resources to departments. A competition was held and departments presented proposals to a committee consisting of nine professors and a vice provost demonstrating how they would enhance the university’s goals of “becoming a preeminent public research university” and developing interdisciplinary programs. Of course, this approach does more to solve the problem of redistributing dwindling resources than how to reduce department sizes efficiently.
There is no question that the ability to create interdisciplinary majors is crucial for colleges that do not want to stagnate and desire to offer programs that are cutting edge. In fact, Edwards (1999) asserts that “in so many cases, the most provocative and interesting work is done at the intersections where disciplines meet, or by collaborators blending several seemingly disparate disciplines to attack real problems afresh.”
Kolodny (1998: 40-41) also feels that interdisciplinary programs are crucial for students educated in the twenty-first century, and that the antiquated way of organizing colleges — by departments — will have to “evolve into collaborative and flexible units.” Students with narrowly defined majors will have great difficulty comprehending a world in which the knowledge required of them is complex, interconnected, and, by its very nature, draws from many areas.
Duderstadt (1997) asks “whether the concept of the disciplinary specialist is relevant to a future in which the most interesting and significant problems will require ‘big think’ rather than ‘small think.’ In fact, many disciplines did not start out as pure, unidisciplinary fields. McKeon (1994) notes that “Our familiar disciplines have secret histories, their apparent monolithic integrity sometimes obscuring a radically disparate and interdisciplinary core.” Gazzaniga (1998) claims that the organizational structure of today’s university has more to do with the convenience of establishing accounting budgets than because of the demands of intellectual growth and education.
Oddly enough, there are also a number of majors that cannot be created because of disciplinary turf battles. Some majors that are difficult to create include: disability studies (history, sociology, psychology, or English?), electronic commerce (marketing or CIS?), business journalism (business or English?), corporate communications (English or business?), environmental management (physics, geology, or business?), biochemistry (biology or chemistry?), biophysics (biology or physics?), geophysics (geology or physics?), global studies (business, ethnic studies, or history?), and entrepreneurship (marketing, management, or accounting?). There are battles in various schools over “ownership” of communications. Is this an area that belongs to the speech department, the English department, or the media department?
It is interesting to note, for example, that the technology for developing the laser existed for several decades before the first working laser was demonstrated in 1960. Part of the technology needed for developing lasers was well known in the electrical engineering field, and the quantum mechanical aspects of laser technology were well known in atomic physics. The laser could not, however, be perfected until someone who knew the two fields could combine the two technologies. Much technology works this way and it is therefore, in many cases, important for individuals to have knowledge of two or more fields. Increasingly, we find that the distinctions between individual disciplines are blurring and are due more to historical reasons than to real differences. Interdisciplinary programs are very important for the future. Indeed, many individuals trained in one discipline made major contributions to another discipline. For instance, Franz Boas, trained in physics and geography, made major contributions to the field of anthropology; Rudolf Carnap (physics and mathematics) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (mechanical engineering) made important contributions to philosophy; Peter Drucker (law) had a huge impact on the field of management. Max Weber, the father of sociology, was trained in legal and economic history. John Von Neumann, trained in mathematics, made important contributions to the disciplines of computer science, game theory, and quantum physics. This trend will probably accelerate and it is therefore very important for universities to encourage interdisciplinary programs. In a survey of provosts, a key change mentioned by respondents as to “the most important change that should occur at the departmental level” was accommodating the need for more interdisciplinary programs (Edwards, 1999). From a purely administrative point of view, interdisciplinary programs can help to bolster weak departments. For example, physics and geology might have close to zero students in the major, but combined as, say, environmental studies they may attract many more students.
One common battle within a department occurs when there is a change in a discipline. It is not unusual for one area in a department to oppose another area when this occurs. In some cases, the old guard will not allow anyone to be hired for the new area. This has happened, for example, in mathematics departments when demand shifts to applied mathematics, rather than theoretical mathematics. Indeed, some colleges have both applied mathematics and pure mathematics departments. There have been battles in philosophy departments when the old guard resented the applied philosophers. In some economics departments, the economics faculty and the finance faculty often have very different opinions as to which academic areas should be developed and expanded. Some universities have split anthropology departments into physical anthropology and cultural anthropology. This situation in academe parallels Kuhn’s (1970) “normal science,” wherein scientists who adhere to the old dominant paradigm resist the adoption of a new paradigm. Kuhn (1970: 52) notes that “normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.”
Besides being reluctant to hire individuals that represent the new guard, mediocre departments, Harrington (1977) notes, tend to maintain their mediocrity by hiring new faculty who are also average. Faculty are more comfortable hiring other faculty that are similar to them in abilities. This may produce a department filled with faculty members with similar, outmoded ideas, and a scarcity of individuals willing to innovate when a discipline changes.
Smith (1993) asserts that: “Academic departments serve as organizations that exhibit all the segmentary politics described by anthropologists: segmentation for largely demographic reasons, balanced opposition among themselves, and unitary resistance to a superordinate entity, usually the college or university as a whole.” Harrington (1977) believes that departments encourage loyalty to the discipline rather than to the university.
Dean William Mitchell of MIT claims that: “the information ecosystem is a ferociously Darwinian place that produces endless mutations and quickly weeds out those no longer able to adapt and compete” (Mitchell, 1995). Universities that want to thrive will have to create an academic structure that encourages change and, if necessary, the weeding out of dying programs.
Duderstadt (2000) suggests that the university of the future will be very different from today’s institution. One major change will be that the future university will be divisionless, i.e., there will be far more interdisciplinary programs. There will also be “a far more intimate relationship between basic academic disciplines and the professions.”
The bottom line is that departments often care more about themselves than students or the university as a whole. In business, this is exactly the kind of organizational structure one would come up with if one wanted to create a firm that would have no chance of succeeding. Imagine a company in which every product manager demanded resources, even if there were no demand for the product. This is essentially what we have in academe. What can be done to make academic departments more flexible, cooperative, collaborative, and innovative? Academic departments headed by chairs are very similar to the organization structure of used by many firms that sell numerous brands, i.e., the product management organization. With this system, every brand/product has a product (or brand) manager with the responsibility of developing, implementing, and monitoring a marketing strategy for his/her brand. Procter & Gamble was the first to adopt this system in 1931 (Low and Fullerton, 1994). One problem with this system was that, in some companies, the brand managers competed more fiercely with each other for market share than with the competition. Brand managers focused more on their product than on the needs of customers. Procter and Gamble therefore introduced a category management system. With this system, brand managers became accountable to category managers who were responsible for the entire product line. Universities that are organized by departments might consider making department chairs report to a “super” chair or dean with the responsibility for an entire school. The job of the “super” chair or dean would be to ensure that departments work together and focus on what is best for the university as a whole, not just their own department. Alternatively, departments might be eliminated and changed into programs. Programs would be grouped into schools and the programs would be headed by chairs. The chairs would report to a “super” chair or dean. Other alternatives may be possible. It is time to encourage the development of newer organizational structures that correct many of the above-mentioned problems. Universities have to rethink their organizational structure and teach departments to focus less on their own aggrandizement and more on the needs of students and the needs of the organization as a whole. Universities, as well as business enterprises, need an organizational structure that will allow them to constantly adapt to the evolving needs of their customers. Otherwise, they will be doomed to early extinction as the slow-moving, oversized dinosaur.
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