One of the most important pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States–on a par with the Northwest Ordinance, the Sherman Antitrust Act and the statute that established the Federal Reserve System–was the Morrill Act of 1862.
Justin Morrill was a lng-time legislator from Vermont, and the act that bears his name provided for land-grant universities to be established by the states.
Originally chartered to teach “agriculture and mechanic arts,” these new universities broke the monopoly of the old Eastern citadels of privilege, and immediately began mapping into the commercial interests of their communities. They spread far and wide the gospel of competition among teaching and research institutions.
More private universities followed, many of them modeled on the German system (including Johns Hopkins, Chicago and Stanford). Then came extension services, trade schools, research institutes, community colleges, national laboratories, adult education centers and all the rest. The massively decentralized system has been growing ever since the Morrill Act. No other nation possesses anything like it.
The past 20 years have seen a new burst of entrepreneurial behavior in higher education, probably sufficient to rival any of these past episodes. Some of it was triggered by passage of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which directed universities to license federally supported research where possible. Some stemmed from the enthusiasm for deregulation; some from the possibilities inherent in the telecommunications and computer revolutions.
Today, for-profit universities have begun to compete for students with traditional non-profit institutions. Advocates of distance learning–meaning methods which rely on software, videotape and the Internet–have campus-based instruction in their sights. The market for post-baccalaureate education is becoming especially intense. It is a complicated world and growing more so.
A particularly good window for keeping tabs on these developments is a young magazine called University Business, written for the administrators who run the system and the people with whom they routinely work: trustees, deans, vendors, education lenders, and so on.
Named one of the 10 best new magazines of 1997 by Library Journal, University Business combines lively curiosity with crisp journalistic skepticism.
The magazine is the brainchild of Jeffrey Kittay, now 55. An Amherst College graduate and a 1975 New York University PhD, Kittay taught French at Yale University for seven years, then put his late father’s affairs in order.
In 1988 Kittay set out to publish a magazine that would formulate an audience of upscale academics in much the same way that Rolling Stone had assembled a readership of the record-buying young.
It worked.
The first issue of Lingua Franca (that being a fancy way of saying “common tongue”) was published in 1990, with an array of hip, revelatory articles on academic life. They were closer in spirit to Vanity Fair than to the staid Chronicle of Higher Education. The magazine, slowly but unmistakably, became a success.
Gradually Kittay’s interests began to extend beyond the professors and wannabes whose antics filled the pages of Lingua Franca to the problems of the administrators whose task was to fill those classrooms. The business problems facing universities were at least as great as those facing anthropology and sociology, and they were more immediate. With the universe of suppliers of education exploding, those who ran universities large and small needed all the help they could get.
Last year Kittay launched University Business. The first issue featured a savvy narrative of the process by which George Johnson transformed a backwater commuter school in Fairfax, Va., into George Mason University in less than 20 years.
Other issues examined the buoyant growth of schools such as England’s Open University, an enormous specialist in distance education (it began life in the 1960s as “The University of the Air”) that has begun partnering with several U.S. universities, including Florida State University; the University of Phoenix, with its 55,000 students in its 98 campuses in 31 states; and Maricopa Community College District in Phoenix, which with 200,000 students has become the second-largest junior college in America, behind Los Angeles Community College District.
There is a continual emphasis on the hard, large and small choices in the “deal-stream” facing university administrators.
The moral, Kittay tells administrators, is “Know what you own.” At some point, he says, “You will be asked a question that can bring you much-needed funds–and potentially change the way you do business:
” `Can I resell that course?’ `Can we direct-market your students on college letterhead?’ `Can we sell you unused bandwidth?’ `Can we put your name on . . . ?’ `Would your faculty . . . ?’
“Some of the proposals will be appalling. Some will open doors to a very desirable future. Who gets to decide? What are the limits?”
Based in Manhattan, University Business is a controlled-circulation magazine. That means it is free to the people holding high positions whom the magazine is trying to reach, and costs $49 for 10 issues a year to those who do not qualify.
Advertising revenues pay the bills. They are $1 million so far in 1999, up from $333,000 in all of 1998.
To this point, the paper of record has been the Chronicle of Higher Education. That’s likely to continue. But University Business surely will thrive–as will the universities themselves.
