Reimagining the university: Sustainable institutions

When I retired as Loyola business dean in 2001, I described myself as the youngest, most experienced, retired business dean in the country. And it did not take me too long to realize the benefit of voluntarily stepping down. As I learned to say, "I have the best bob on campus, former business dean." Four years after retiring from nine years as a business dean, I thought I had some good advice for those aspiring to the position. The AACSB magazine, BizEd, welcomed -- and slightly edited -- my thoughts.

Fifteen years later, I have to ask: Was it hubris or humility that produced these eight points of substance for new deans? Was I spot on or did I miss the mark by a mile? And, in any case, do the ideas hold up twenty years after my own final term as dean ended? To be fair, developments -- or maybe it's deteriorations -- in higher education over the last ten years may have made much of my thinking irrelevant today. I might best lead today with the question, "Can a capitalist (curriculum) survive on a woke campus?"Or, "Are you woke enough to satisfy the social justice mob?" The reality is that I would not be allowed to ask this questions in public, or to expect a publication devoted to university business schools to even print such heresy. Print these questions and my own cancellation would not be far away.

The real tragedy of the university commons is the complete rejection and replacement of free speech, critical thinking, academic freedom, and traditional educational missions in exchange for diversity, inclusion and equity as the guiding principles of universities, at a time when universities have become both extremely expensive and outrageously irrelevant. Were I to write a similar piece today, it would be for university presidents, and it would be a call and a challenge to re-examine their institution's purpose and direction and to restore a real semblance of economic and worldly reality to their institutions. Something as simple as, "What is the purpose of a/your university education?" Or, "What should a $300,000 education produce and provide for a graduate of your school?" Or, "What are our moral and ethical responsibilities in burying our graduates in previously unimaginable debt?" Or, "Is there a better way to execute this refined and restored mission, other than with the four-year baccalaureate degree?" Or, "What are our responsibilities to those we admit, enroll, then fail to earn a degree, even after investing tens of thousands of dollars?"