Who Puts the University Back Together?

Organizations divide work because specialization is useful. As they grow more complex, they create units with different kinds of expertise, responsibilities, and ways of looking at problems—finance, marketing, operations, technology, and so on. Specialization allows organizations to handle complexity by breaking it into more manageable pieces.

But dividing work creates another problem. Someone eventually has to put it back together.

I started thinking about this after a discussion during my university’s last Faculty Assembly about our senior leadership structure. It brought to mind a classic organization theory paper I read in graduate school. In their 1967 article, Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch described this as the tension between differentiation and integration. Organizations need specialized units, but those units still have to coordinate when decisions cross their boundaries.

Universities are a great example. Academic, financial, administrative, and student-facing functions require different kinds of expertise, and there are good reasons to organize them separately. The CFO should not be deciding what belongs in a philosophy course, and faculty probably should not be managing the university’s debt portfolio.

The benefits of differentiation do come with a tradeoff, though. Choices that cut across those divisions can be harder to make. A new academic program might look promising to enrollment, questionable to faculty, financially attractive to the CFO, and appealing to a donor. Everyone involved can be doing their job well and still disagree about what the university should do. Research priorities, retention efforts, new facilities, online programs, and plenty of other decisions create similar tensions.

Differentiation itself is partly a design choice, but organizations often do not make that choice from scratch. The nature of the work frequently requires distinct kinds of expertise. Universities need faculty with disciplinary knowledge just as construction projects may require architects, engineers, and builders with different professional skills. How those specialized roles are divided shapes the coordination problem that follows. The more responsibility is separated across units with different expertise and priorities, the more decisions will eventually require someone to reconcile those perspectives. For universities, then, the question is not simply how to divide the work, but where responsibility for putting it back together should lie.

Universities answer that question in different ways. In some, the heads of major functions report independently to the president, leaving the president as the primary integrator. In others, some of that authority is delegated to a provost, executive vice president, chief operating officer, or another senior leader.

A university in which many executives report directly to the president may look relatively flat. But the irony is that if no one below the president has the authority to resolve disagreements across functions, important decisions still move upward. The reporting structure thus may be flat even while coordinating authority remains concentrated at the very top. That puts more of the work of integration on the president, who is also responsible for boards, donors, government, alumni, community relationships, and other external demands. Major disagreements will always reach the president, but not every cross-functional issue has to.

A provost who serves as the president’s senior internal partner can provide another place for those issues to be worked through. The role may extend beyond representing Academic Affairs to weighing competing claims across functions and resolving some tensions before they reach the president. An executive vice president or COO can play a similar role. But it’s important to recognize that where that authority resides also affects how competing claims are understood and weighed.

This is not unique to universities. Companies can divide responsibility among marketing, finance, operations, engineering, and other functions, but those functions cannot each determine the organization’s priorities on their own. At some point, someone has to decide how the functions’ diverse interests fit within the organization’s overarching priorities.

I have argued before that a mission statement is useful only if it helps an organization choose among competing priorities. Organizational structure should reflect the same logic. Where authority sits ought to have some relationship to what the organization considers most important.

University missions are often expansive. They may emphasize service, access, community engagement, social mobility, research, formation, economic development, or any number of other goals. Those commitments can be real and important. But whatever else appears in the mission statement, academics has to be at the core.¹ Universities exist to educate students, create and disseminate knowledge, and sustain the people and programs that make those activities possible. Finance, enrollment, advancement, technology, facilities, athletics, and other functions are essential, but they support an institution whose defining work is academic.

This gives universities a reason to think carefully about where integrative authority sits. A provost whose primary responsibility is the academic enterprise is likely to approach questions about money, enrollment, staffing, facilities, and technology partly in terms of what those resources allow the university to accomplish academically. Some universities assign that coordinating role elsewhere. But these arrangements are not interchangeable. Where integrative authority resides helps determine which priorities are treated as the starting point when competing claims have to be reconciled.

There is a difference between treating academics as the core work that other functions help sustain and treating Academic Affairs as one more unit competing for resources. A proposal to invest in faculty, for example, can be understood as an investment in the institution’s core work or as one request among many for a limited pool of money. This is not intended as an argument that academics should always win. Universities face real financial constraints, enrollment pressures, operational needs, and other demands that academic leaders may underestimate. Faculty and deans can be just as parochial as anyone else. The point is that integration requires some basis for deciding among competing claims, and mission and organizational purpose ought to provide at least part of that basis.

Universities are only one example of the broader problem. As organizations divide work among specialized units, those units can begin to pursue their own priorities and evaluate problems from their own perspectives. The organization still needs some way to bring those perspectives together around what it is trying to accomplish.

An organization chart cannot tell us everything about how that happens. Informal relationships can shape how work gets done alongside the formal reporting structure. But the chart does tell us something about where an organization expects integration to happen, who has the authority to make tradeoffs, and which perspectives are positioned to shape those decisions. In that sense, organizational structure is not separate from questions of purpose. It is one of the ways an organization decides what gets put back together, by whom, and around what.

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Footnotes

1. And this is a hill I am willing to die on. ↩