As I mentioned yesterday, I recently spent some time at the International Association of Universities’ (IAU) annual meeting in Tokyo earlier this month. It’s tough to organize a meaningful international meeting about what you might call the “hard” issues in university management (resources, budget allocations, management styles) because these vary so much from one part of the world to another, and so the program tends to be taken up with more universalist themes like “values.”
The interesting thing about values was the divide in the room(s) about how insecure everyone felt about them. The white folks in the room spoke a lot about “challenging times,” which was mostly code for “holy crap, not Trump again, won’t we ever get out of this authoritarian populist nightmare?” But interestingly, the Africans in particular were not really interested in this discussion. They deal with strong-arming governments nearly all the time, and so there was a slight edge of “wake up, times are always challenging” to some of their interventions.
I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but something occurred to me as I listened to the various sessions: “vibes” are really the way that universities keep score of their successes, collectively at any rate. Sure, it’s nice that governments give them money—and they are bloody expensive to run—but what really matters is whether they are loved and respected.
For an empiricist like me, this is really annoying. I can measure investments and can compare them from one university or one country to another. But vibes? Very difficult to measure. Hard even to come up with a definition that makes sense across countries: in Canada we do measure how much the public “trusts” universities, but in other countries the vibes are much more directly about their ability to accept new students, or whether they are helping the country advance economically.
But what the hell? Let’s give it a try!
Below is a 2×2 (it’s not social science unless there is a 2×2!) that shows change in both total financial resources and vibes over the past five years in various countries. Data for the money axis is from my own records and analysis (you can see some of it back here from the talk I gave in Helsinki a couple of months ago), while data on the vibes axis is totally made up, based on my own observations. I’d be happy to discuss a better way to operationalize and measure this axis, but for the moment let’s just say this attempt to visualize how universities are faring is illustrative rather than in any way definitive and move on to the exercise itself
(If you’d like to argue for a specific source of information for various countries, or just argue my choice of placement of a particular country on the vibes scale, get in touch!)
What you can see plainly from Figure 1 is that higher education systems occupy one of three quadrants. There’s the one where both money and vibes are changing for the better (Turkey, India), one where money is going up but vibes are going down (the USA), and places where both money and vibes are headed in the wrong direction (the UK).
What we don’t see, really, are any countries in the top left quadrant where vibes are going up but money is going down. And I think what that tells you is that good vibes are not absolutely required in order for universities to receive new money, but they make it a whole heck of a lot easier. Which is of course why university Presidents are so concerned with public opinion.
Anyways, this is all pretty theoretical. But I think it points to the possibility that perhaps measuring public sentiment about universities in consistent ways across countries might yield some interesting insights into the determinants of public funding. And in any event, if vibes are the way that universities measure their own success, shouldn’t we try to measure that in the same way we measure institutional finances?