Page 282 - Crisis in Higher Education

Reforming Administration and Management • 253

b. Increasing faculty involvement in managing universities and the
strategic planning process.
2. Universities should change their culture in regard to customers,
books and learning materials, organizational structure, relation-
ships between administration and faculty, and state funding.
3. To make change, students, parents, other family members, and friends
must support state government as it convinces boards and presi-
dents, who must, in turn influence top and middle management at
universities.
4. As culture changes, management practices must change.
a. Decentralize decision making, so colleges have more freedom to
pursue innovative and entrepreneurial activities.
b. Hire more faculty members for administrative posts and create
a faculty resource committee (FRC) to participate in strategic
planning and university-level budgeting.
5. Executive leadership must achieve higher productivity by identifying
work that is unnecessary, setting targets for reducing administration
that can be met over several years, and providing management tools and
training as well as information technology that improves productivity.
6. Professional managers and specialists must increase productivity
by focusing on systems thinking and process improvements. This
involves lean thinking, quality improvement efforts, value stream
mapping, seeking process redesign, and implementing continuous
improvement efforts.
7. The productivity of nonexempt support staff should improve as
processes are redesigned and specific IT projects are implemented.
8. Increases in administrative salaries can be moderated by eliminat-
ing benchmarking in salary determination and creating more com-
petition for high-level administrative jobs.
9. Change organizational structure, lower costs, and enhance quality
through mergers, closing branch campuses, and, most important, by
outsourcing activities.

REFERENCES
1. Ginsberg, B. 2011. Administrators ate my tuition. Washington Monthly, September/
October. http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septoct-2011/administrators-ate-
my-tuition/ (accessed December 27, 2016).