The title of this book gives almost no indication of what it is really about. In fact it is a study of how the University of California at Los Angeles operates, specifically how it responds to pressures coming from the external environment; and it is almost entirely focused on three components of UCLA: the Anderson School of Business, the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

So why should the rest of us who make our living teaching in colleges and universities be interested in what Wilms and Zell have to say?

Well, because the problems that face the faculty in the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, in their state-of-the-art new building, with their $190,000 salaries and their "teaching quarters" which imply regular non-teaching quarters, are the same problems that affect everyone in higher education: just in different ways. One of these is declining public support and, more generally, an uncertain and probably bleaker financial future. Another is competition for other declining resources; these include the best students and prestige, as measured by rankings in various places including US News and World Report. Another is the threat of market-style planning for higher education, the Walmartization of college, all that is implied by the renaming of students as "our customers." Another is a variety of schemes for accountability, also drawn from the world of commerce. I found it refreshing that the faculty of the School of Business don't like these last two developments any more than the average English professor.

One specific event in UCLA's recent history that figures in the micro-histories of each of these academic units is the invention of Responsibility Center Management (RCM), which apparently was foisted down onto divisions and departments by a chancellor in 1994. It involved fiscal decentralization, benchmarking, and the management of costs and revenues at lower levels of administration. The authors reveal that "to many, the new language of customers, products, outputs, and markets applied to an academic milieu was offensive." After a while RCM disappeared, along with the chancellor who devised it.

But the business college went a long, long way into the market, targeting new consumer groups (fully-employed MBA students), building the MBA program and shriveling the Ph.D. program, creating business partnerships; in an effort to improve the college's ranking in a Business Week list, teaching was increasingly emphasized, very much along the "you are our customers" model. The results sound disastrous. There is much talk of dumbing-down courses, of catering to the students' most trivial desires, of making classroom presentations into Hollywood-style performances. And another result is contempt for the students. I found this characterization of the students earning MBAs at America's twelfth-best business school a bit chilling. One professor says

I had a student who said, "Look, I'm a busy person. I need to be spoon-fed." He actually used the word spoon-fed! . . . This current crop of students is the most vindictive bunch of little turkeys I've ever met--very vicious little blood-sucking leeches. They're demanding everything.

Concerned about the results the consumer-led changes had produced, the Anderson School has pulled back.

The other two case studies continue to examine responses to scarcity, but include additional problems. In the case of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, an additional problem is deciding what a school of education is for. Questions of teaching and research and beyond those, questions of research for what, divide and vex the faculty. Another way of putting the question is: who are the stake-holders for a school of education? Are they the public schools of the state of California? The editors of peer-reviewed scholarly journals? The editors of US News?

The third case makes for somewhat more melancholy reading. The Department of Phyics and Astronomy is the product of a merger between a largish physics department and a smaller astronomy department. The problem there is the continuing loss of interest by students (shared, it seems, by some of their anonymous faculty) in physics as a subject.

Of course if business practices were imposed, then budgets would be shifting from physics to somewhere else, with loss of jobs.

In their reflections on change, Wilms and Zell recognize the inertia of the academy, resistance to change enabled by tenure and strong faculty governance, as limiting factors. A close look at what the customer model of higher education means suggests that faculty inertia, in this case at least, is a useful force.

Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville