Amherst College, where I teach, recently changed the designation of its senior administrators, who were formerly called “chiefs,” as in chief financial officer, to “vice presidents.” We now have 10 of them, as well as 15 other individuals who hold titles such as senior associate, associate or assistant vice president.
Not too long ago, in the time before they became chiefs, our VPs would have been called deans, directors or, in the case of our chief financial officer, treasurer. (Indeed, some retain a dean title along with their vice presidential one—the vice president of student affairs and dean of students, or the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.) I respect and value the work that they do, regardless of their title. I know them and am aware of their dedication to the college and the well-being of its students, faculty and staff.
But, for a small, liberal arts college that has long been proud to go its own way in many things, including in its idiosyncratic administrative titles, that’s a lot of vice presidents and associate and assistant VPs.
Today, many of America’s colleges and universities are grappling with the issue of grade inflation. They are coming to terms with the fact that if everyone gets an A, as Christopher Schorr argues, “grading becomes a farce.” At the same time that grades have become inflated, another kind of inflation has affected our campuses.
I call it the “vice presidentialization” of higher education.
That trend is a sign of a shift in power from faculty to administrators, who are focused on protecting and managing their college’s brand. It is another sign of the growing administrative sector in American colleges and universities.
Titles matter.
For example, the title “dean of students” suggests a job that is student-facing, working closely with students to maximize their educational experience. The title of “vice president for student affairs” suggests something different, a role more institution-facing, dealing with policy, not people.
Mark J. Drozdowski, a commentator on higher education, put it this way more than a decade ago: “Higher ed, as the casual observer might divine, is awash in titles.” He observes that for faculty, “The longer the faculty title, the more clout it conveys … Yet among administrators, the opposite holds true: president beats vice president, which in turn beats assistant vice president, which thoroughly trounces assistant to the assistant vice president.”
“We’ve grown entitled to our titles,” Drozdowski continues. They “bring luster to our resumes and fill us with a sense of pride and purpose … Titles confer worth, or perhaps validate it. They have become a form of currency. They define our existence.”
What was true when Drozdowski wrote it is even more true today. Administrative titles may “confer worth” on the individuals who hold them, but higher ed will not prosper if administrative titles define its worth.
The multiplication of vice presidents and title inflation mark an embrace of hierarchy on the campuses where it happens. They may also signify and propel a division between those who see themselves as responsible for the fate of an institution and those who do the day-to-day work of teaching and learning.
What was once designated a “two cultures” problem to explain the divide between humanists and scientists now may describe a divide between the cadre of vice presidents and the faculty, staff and students on college campuses.
Having someone serve in the position of vice president at a college or university is not new, although the growth in the number of vice presidents at individual colleges and universities is. In fact, the role can be traced back to the late 18th century, when Princeton’s Samuel Stanhope Smith (son-in-law of the university president) became what the historian Alexander Leitch calls “the first vice president in the usual sense.” His primary duty was to step in when the president was unavailable. Yet, as Jana Nidiffer and Timothy Reese Cain note in their study of early vice presidencies, the position was not “continuously filled” at Princeton after that: After 1854, they write, “the role remained unfilled for almost thirty years and the title disappeared for more than a half-century.”
Today, having a single vice president—or having none at all—seems almost unimaginable across the landscape of higher ed. Harvard University, for example, now lists 14 people as vice presidents in addition to the 15 deans of its schools and institutes. The University of Southern California has 13 vice presidents on its senior leadership team. Yale University lists nine vice presidents, as does Ohio State University. Emory University lists eight, and Rutgers University seven.
The number of vice presidents at liberal arts colleges also varies significantly. Middlebury College has eleven. Dickinson College has nine, Kenyon College seven, Whitman College six, Goucher College six, Williams College three.
And don’t forget Amherst’s 10 VPs.
Those figures suggest that the number of vice presidents a place has is not simply a function of its size or complexity. The proliferation of vice presidents is driven, in part, by the desire of colleges and universities to make their governance structures legible to the outside world, and especially the business world, where having multiple vice presidents on the organization chart is standard operating procedure.
And once one institution of higher education adopts the title of vice president for its administrative officers, others are drawn to follow suit, wanting to ensure that their leadership structures are mutually legible. The growth of vice presidencies may also help propel career mobility. How can a mere dean compete with vice presidents for a college presidency?
More than a century ago, the distinguished economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen warned that “standards of organization, control and achievement, that have been accepted as an habitual matter of course in the conduct of business will, by force of habit, in good part reassert themselves as indispensable and conclusive in the conduct of the affairs of learning.” His response was to argue that “as seen from the point of view of the higher learning, the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate.”
That is not my view. However, we have a lot to learn from Veblen.
It would be a mistake for faculty and others who may be accustomed to the way things are done in banking or in other businesses to overlook the impact of the proliferation of academic executives on campus culture. It will take hard work and vigilance to make sure that the cadres of vice presidents on campuses govern modestly and that vice presidents don’t become local potentates.
To achieve this, colleges must insist that their VPs stay close to the academic mission of the places where they work. This requires that we not allow our vice presidents to accrue privileges foreign to the people they lead and not escape from the daily frustrations that faculty and staff experience working in places where emails are not answered and nothing can get done without filling out a Google form.
It may be helpful if our vice presidents leave their offices and interact with faculty and students on a regular basis. They should sit in on classes, visit labs and studios, and occasionally answer their own phones.
Ultimately, even places like Amherst may be able to live with our own vice presidentialization—so long as those who have the title don’t take it too seriously and never forget that the business of education is not a business.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
