This book by William Massey, former VP at Stanford is a bit of a difficult read. It appears to be a compilation of thoughts that the author has had over the years on how universities need to managed.
If starts of with a thoughtful chapter on what it means to be a not-for-profit university and why that is vitally important. The for-profit rule is that an enterprise expands until –
incremental revenue = incremental cost
whereas the nonprofit model allows expansion until –
incremental value + incremental revenue = incremental cost
and total revenue = total cost.
While this is an attractive proposition in that nonprofits can allows themselves to be mission centred as long as they are not losing money, I am not sure that it separates clearly the profit and non-profit motive. There are many for-profits that allow “money-losing” programs since they have strategic or “mission” importance. So right away in this book I was struggling with the authors overconfidence in his ideas, which are manifested throughout the remainder of the book.
The rest of the book goes into detail about what needs re-engineering and very much from a macroeconomist perspective, some of the details are quite difficult to follow. For the business of teaching, he draws from established literature on teaching improvement bringing in some standard elements of quality improvement to produce a number of sound recommendations.
The chapter on costing makes a plea for move to activity-based costing using a bottom-up approach which while effective may be a bit much for most senior academic administrators to deal with.
Similarly in financial planning, he proposes a decision support system based on key variables and a stream of data from various university IT systems.
I took away some interesting ideas for questions I could ask external reviewers when they do a 7 year program review, some interesting possible university dashboard indicators and a new appreciation for university CFOs.