From Silence to Stewardship: Business Faculty Responses to Administrative Incompetence

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Abstract: U.S. higher education faces mounting existential pressures—enrollment declines, cost escalation, political skepticism, and administrative managerialism that prioritizes short-term institutional survival over long-term scholarly mission. Despite widespread critique, business management faculty have largely failed to mount effective resistance to managerialist interventions, even as these practices erode academic autonomy and institutional purpose. This paradox deepens when considering that many senior administrators implementing managerial reforms lack formal training in management and strategy, sometimes producing poorly conceived interventions that damage institutions while expanding administrative ranks. This essay examines why business faculty—who possess expertise to recognize problematic management practices—often remain complicit in or complacent toward managerialism. Drawing on identity theory and organizational scholarship, we argue that typical business faculty identities neither frame managerialism as a personal threat nor create obligation to apply professional expertise to institutional challenges. Before mounting effective response, business management faculty may need to cultivate alternative identities as stewards of organizational practice, not merely teachers of management abstracted from institutional context.

American higher education confronts a peculiar organizational challenge: institutions responding to genuine crises with managerial interventions sometimes implemented by administrators who lack extensive management training, occasionally producing administrative expansion while claiming efficiency, and sometimes generating strategic incoherence while invoking strategic planning. Business management faculty—who spend careers studying organizational effectiveness, strategy implementation, and leadership—often observe these dynamics with remarkable passivity.

Consider trajectories unfolding at various regional universities: Administrators with PhDs in humanities or sciences implement "strategic portfolio reviews" borrowed from frameworks encountered at conferences. Vice presidents trained in fields unrelated to their new responsibilities mandate "performance dashboards" tracking metrics they may not fully understand. Presidents whose scholarly expertise lies outside management reorganize institutions using change management approaches that may contradict research their own business faculty teach. Administrative positions multiply—assessment coordinators, strategic initiative directors, data analytics officers—sometimes staffed by individuals with advanced degrees in disciplines unrelated to the organizational functions they now perform (Ginsberg, 2011).

The irony runs deep. Business schools critique corporations for poor strategic execution and misaligned performance metrics—yet often remain silent when their own institutions exhibit similar challenges. We teach that strategy requires coherent logic linking actions to outcomes, yet may accept strategic plans comprising aspirational lists. We research organizational change failures, yet sometimes watch administrators repeat documented mistakes. We critique metrics gaming in corporate settings, yet may tolerate crude metrics potentially distorting educational missions.

This essay examines why business management faculty have often failed to leverage their professional expertise to improve—or resist—institutional management practices. The explanation extends beyond self-interest or risk aversion to fundamental questions of professional identity. Business faculty have often constructed identities that position management expertise as disciplinary knowledge to be taught and researched, not practical capability to be deployed in their own organizational contexts.

The Managerialism Landscape in Higher Education

Defining Managerialism in the Academic Context

Managerialism in higher education refers to the application of corporate management techniques, metrics-driven decision-making, and market logics to academic institutions. Deem and Brehony (2005) characterize "new managerialism" in universities as involving adoption of private sector management practices, increased emphasis on quantifiable outputs, and reorganization along more business-like lines. This encompasses several interrelated practices:

• Quantification and metrics dominance: Emphasis on measurable outputs (graduation rates, research dollars, student credit hours) sometimes disconnected from educational quality or scholarly contribution

• Centralization of authority: Shifting decision-making from faculty governance structures to administrative hierarchies (Ginsberg, 2011)

• Marketization: Treating students as customers, academic programs as product portfolios, and knowledge as intellectual property (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004)

• Efficiency imperatives: Prioritizing cost containment and resource optimization, sometimes at the expense of mission fulfillment

• Strategic planning proliferation: Producing strategic plans and initiatives that may consume resources without producing strategic coherence

• Administrative expansion: Growing administrative ranks, sometimes in the name of efficiency measures

Critically, academic managerialism may constitute performative rather than substantive management in some cases—adopting management vocabulary and processes without necessarily possessing deep underlying management capability. Administrators trained as scholars in non-management disciplines may implement frameworks encountered through various channels rather than grounded understanding of organizational theory, strategic analysis, or change management research.

The Administrative Competence Question

A potentially significant characteristic of contemporary higher education is questions about the relationship between administrators' formal training and their management responsibilities. Senior university leaders typically hold doctorates in academic disciplines—humanities, social sciences, natural sciences—with varying levels of formal management education. Their path to administrative roles often proceeds through departmental chair positions and associate dean appointments, building administrative authority through experience rather than necessarily through systematic management training.

This sometimes creates what might be termed an "administrative preparation gap": Universities have expanded administrative ranks and centralized management authority while not always ensuring these positions are staffed by individuals with extensive formal management training. A dean trained in literary theory may manage a substantial budget using financial knowledge developed informally. A provost whose research examined art history may implement organizational changes based partly on experience rather than extensive change management training.

The situation becomes more complex as administrative hierarchies expand. New positions—chief strategy officers, vice provosts for institutional effectiveness, associate vice presidents for strategic initiatives—may recruit from academic ranks rather than professional management backgrounds. Business faculty may observe administrators making decisions with levels of formal management training that vary considerably.

Prevalence, Drivers, and Distribution

Managerialism appears widespread in U.S. higher education, with intensity varying by institutional type and financial condition. Regional comprehensive universities and less-selective institutions may experience more intensive managerialist interventions, though even research universities increasingly adopt certain managerialist practices (Deem & Brehony, 2005; Ginsberg, 2011).

Several interrelated forces appear to drive managerialism's expansion:

• Financial pressures: Declining state support, enrollment uncertainties, and rising costs create genuine fiscal challenges requiring difficult decisions. Institutions facing these challenges may reach for managerial frameworks to provide decision-making structure, though implementation quality can vary considerably.

• Institutional isomorphism: DiMaggio and Powell (1983) identified processes through which organizations in a field come to resemble one another. Universities may mimic peer institutions' administrative innovations and adopt corporate practices encountered through board membership, consulting relationships, or higher education conferences. This mimicry may occur without always fully assessing whether borrowed practices fit institutional contexts or whether organizations possess capability to implement them effectively.

• Accountability pressures: External stakeholders—legislators, accreditors, trustees—increasingly demand evidence of institutional effectiveness and efficiency. These accountability demands may drive adoption of metrics and management systems, sometimes with more attention to demonstrating accountability than to ensuring measurement validity (Espeland & Sauder, 2007).

• Consulting industry influence: Management consulting firms have identified higher education as a potential growth market. These firms may offer strategic planning services, operational reviews, and organizational redesigns, sometimes without extensively engaging internal expertise that might provide comparable analysis.

• Faculty governance challenges: Traditional faculty governance structures may struggle to address rapid changes and complex organizational challenges. Administrative centralization may partly fill governance gaps, though not always in ways that leverage available expertise effectively.

• Business school positioning: Business schools themselves have sometimes contributed to these dynamics by treating management education as relevant primarily for students pursuing corporate careers, not for academic administrators managing complex organizations. Management faculty may offer limited courses, workshops, or consulting to university leaders, implicitly suggesting that university administration requires different knowledge than corporate management.

Organizational and Individual Consequences of Managerialism

Organizational Performance Impacts

Research suggests that certain managerialist practices can produce organizational challenges, particularly when implementation quality varies or when practices are adopted without sufficient adaptation to academic contexts.

Strategic challenges and initiative proliferation: Organizations sometimes produce strategic plans that lack clear prioritization. Rather than identifying focused priorities requiring resource concentration, plans may list aspirational goals across multiple domains. Mintzberg (1994) has long critiqued strategic planning processes that confuse planning with strategy, noting that real strategy often emerges through experimentation and learning rather than formalized planning. When universities create strategic plans with numerous priorities and hundreds of action items, questions arise about strategic coherence and implementation feasibility.

Metrics challenges and potential goal displacement: Substantial research documents how measurement systems can influence behavior in unintended ways. Espeland and Sauder (2007) demonstrated how law school rankings shaped institutional behavior, sometimes in directions disconnected from educational mission. When universities implement metrics without careful attention to validity and potential gaming, similar dynamics may emerge. Student credit hour production metrics might incentivize enrollment growth over learning rigor; research expenditure metrics may reward grant acquisition over scholarly contribution; retention metrics could create pressures to reduce academic standards.

Change management challenges: Universities have sometimes experienced organizational change initiatives that encounter significant implementation difficulties. Kezar (2001) identified numerous challenges in academic change processes, noting that effective change in higher education often requires extensive stakeholder engagement, attention to institutional culture, and sustained leadership commitment. When administrators announce reorganizations without stakeholder engagement, implement new systems without adequate training, or mandate process changes without understanding workflow impacts, resistance and implementation problems may predictably follow.

Administrative cost patterns: Higher education has experienced notable administrative expansion. Ginsberg (2011) documented significant growth in administrative positions relative to faculty, raising questions about whether this expansion consistently improves educational or scholarly outcomes. While some administrative growth may address legitimate needs (student services expansion, regulatory compliance, technology support), the magnitude and pace of expansion has generated substantial discussion about cost-effectiveness and mission alignment.

Implementation quality variations: Even when managerialist interventions might theoretically improve performance, implementation quality significantly determines outcomes. Strategic planning processes may consume substantial time producing documents that receive limited implementation follow-through. "Data-driven decision making" initiatives may generate dashboards without ensuring administrators understand data interpretation. Reorganizations may shuffle organizational charts without addressing underlying coordination or capability challenges.

Individual Wellbeing and Stakeholder Impacts

Beyond organizational effects, certain managerialist practices may create challenges for individuals within academic institutions.

Learned helplessness and engagement: When institutions repeatedly launch initiatives that receive limited implementation or produce minimal visible impact, faculty may develop patterns of reduced engagement. Research on learned helplessness (Seligman, 1972) suggests that repeated experiences with uncontrollable outcomes can reduce motivation and increase passivity. Faculty who experience multiple rounds of strategic planning that produce limited change, or assessment mandates that seem disconnected from actual improvement efforts, may become less engaged with institutional initiatives.

Professional respect and expertise utilization: Faculty trained to value evidence and expertise may experience frustration when institutional decisions appear disconnected from available knowledge. When administrators make decisions in domains where faculty possess relevant expertise without consulting that expertise, this may communicate that specialized knowledge has limited value for institutional decision-making. Such dynamics could erode the epistemic foundations that academic culture depends upon.

Workload patterns and initiative demands: Some managerialist practices may generate faculty workload that careful implementation might avoid or reduce. Assessment systems that require extensive data collection but produce limited improvement insight, reorganizations that create coordination challenges requiring informal faculty effort to resolve, or incomplete initiative planning that offloads implementation details to faculty may all contribute to workload intensification.

Resource allocation and opportunity costs: Institutional resources are finite. Resources devoted to administrative expansion or failed initiatives represent resources unavailable for instruction, scholarship, and student support. These opportunity costs may be particularly visible to students paying increasing tuition or to faculty working with constrained departmental budgets.

Identity tensions for business faculty: Business faculty may experience particular tensions when observing institutional management practices that seem inconsistent with research and teaching in their own fields. These tensions create potential dissonance between professional expertise and institutional experience—a gap that may challenge both external credibility and internal professional identity.

Evidence-Based Organizational Responses

Transparent Communication and Inclusive Decision Processes

Research on organizational change and decision-making consistently suggests that process legitimacy significantly influences stakeholder acceptance and implementation success. Tyler and Blader (2003) found that procedural justice—fairness in decision-making processes—powerfully influences organizational commitment and cooperation. In academic settings where diverse expertise exists throughout the organization, inclusive processes may compensate for individual knowledge limitations through collective intelligence.

Effective approaches might include:

Early problem framing engagement: Including diverse expertise in defining problems before proposing solutions. When facing enrollment challenges, for example, institutions might benefit from bringing together marketing faculty, economists who study higher education demand, student affairs professionals who understand student decision-making, and academic program faculty. Collective problem-framing may produce richer understanding than administrators working in isolation.

Cross-functional decision teams: Creating decision teams that combine administrative authority with relevant functional expertise. Budget decisions might benefit from including business faculty who teach financial management; assessment design from faculty who research measurement validity; strategic planning from faculty who study strategic management. This represents genuine expertise deployment rather than merely symbolic participation.

Expertise mapping and deployment: Systematically identifying and utilizing internal expertise rather than defaulting to external consultants. Most universities employ faculty who research higher education finance, organizational behavior, human resources management, strategic planning, and change management. A useful preliminary question before consultant engagement might be: "Do we have internal expertise that could address this need?"

Decision documentation and organizational learning: Explicitly documenting decision rationale, predictions, and outcomes enables organizational learning. When initiatives achieve mixed results, examining outcomes through structured retrospectives may prevent repeated mistakes. Argyris (1977) distinguished between single-loop learning (adjusting actions within existing frameworks) and double-loop learning (questioning underlying assumptions). Universities might benefit from systematically reviewing strategic planning outcomes: What did plans predict? What actually occurred? What does this teach about planning processes and implementation capacity?

Acknowledging expertise limits: Administrators who acknowledge limits of their management expertise and actively seek relevant input may enhance both decision quality and process credibility. Such acknowledgment doesn't signal weakness but rather demonstrates wisdom and dramatically may increase the likelihood of effective outcomes and stakeholder acceptance.

Consider a scenario illustrating these principles: A university facing budget pressures creates a process engaging relevant expertise rather than administrators imposing cuts based solely on enrollment metrics. Business faculty contribute financial modeling showing different scenarios' long-term impacts. Education researchers provide evidence on program quality and learning outcomes. Student affairs professionals share retention and career outcome data. Faculty from affected programs explain distinctive mission contributions that quantitative metrics may not fully capture. The resulting decisions, while still difficult, might reflect more sophisticated analysis and generate greater process legitimacy, potentially easing implementation.

Administrative Professional Development and Competence Building

If variations in administrative management expertise contribute to implementation challenges, systematic competence development offers a potential intervention—though one pursued somewhat inconsistently across higher education.

Management training for administrators: Some institutions have implemented management education for faculty assuming significant administrative responsibility. This might include financial management fundamentals for department chairs managing budgets, human resources and employment law for anyone supervising staff, strategic planning frameworks for senior leaders, organizational change management for those leading restructuring, and performance measurement principles for administrators implementing accountability systems.

For example, before becoming department chairs, faculty at some institutions complete leadership development programs covering budgeting, personnel management, conflict resolution, and planning. Before promotion to dean, some administrators complete coursework in organizational design, financial analysis, and change management. Various executive education programs address higher education governance, strategy, and leadership, though participation varies considerably across institutions and individuals.

Business faculty-led executive education: Rather than exclusively sending administrators to generic executive programs teaching corporate management, business schools could potentially design customized programs addressing higher education management challenges. These programs might provide both conceptual frameworks and institution-specific application, building administrator capability while deploying business faculty expertise.

A business school might create a "Higher Education Leadership Program" for campus administrators, with modules on university budgeting (taught by accounting and finance faculty), strategic planning for educational institutions (strategy faculty), organizational change in academic settings (organizational behavior faculty), and data-informed decision making (business analytics faculty). This could serve institutional needs while giving business faculty opportunity to apply expertise to institutional challenges.

Competence-informed appointments: Some institutions consider matching administrative assignments to demonstrated competence rather than only to scholarly seniority. This might involve ensuring that faculty serving on budget committees possess some financial literacy, that those leading strategic planning have exposure to strategic frameworks, or that those designing assessment systems understand measurement principles.

Internal consulting mechanisms: Creating formal channels for administrators to access faculty expertise—management faculty consulting on organizational decisions, economist faculty advising on resource allocation, assessment experts contributing to evaluation system design. This deploys existing institutional knowledge while potentially reducing reliance on expensive external consultants who may provide less contextually informed guidance.

Procedural Justice and Evidence-Based Management

Procedural justice research demonstrates that fairness in decision-making processes powerfully influences acceptance and cooperation (Tyler & Blader, 2003). In academic settings where administrators may lack extensive management training, procedural justice might require not just inclusive processes but evidence-based reasoning and explicit consideration of relevant expertise.

Effective approaches might include:

Evidence expectations for major decisions: Some institutions establish expectations that significant decisions reference relevant research and expertise. Strategic planning might demonstrate familiarity with strategic management scholarship; reorganizations might cite organizational design research; new assessment systems might address measurement validity literature. This doesn't require slavish adherence to academic research, but systematic ignorance of relevant evidence might be considered problematic.

A governance process might require that strategic plans, reorganization proposals, or major initiatives include sections explaining how proposals relate to relevant research and what expertise informed their development. Administrators proposing significant changes would document what evidence they considered and how it shaped their thinking.

Expertise consultation documentation: Institutions might expect administrators to document what expertise they consulted and how it informed decisions. This creates accountability for seeking and incorporating relevant knowledge. Documentation need not be extensive but should demonstrate genuine engagement with available expertise.

Minimum competence expectations: Some organizations define baseline competence for various roles, similar to disciplinary expertise requirements for faculty positions. A chief financial officer requires financial expertise; a chief strategy officer might benefit from understanding strategic analysis; human resources leadership needs HR knowledge. While such expectations exist in some institutions, they may not be consistently applied across all administrative roles.

Decision review processes: Creating structured reviews where proposed interventions are examined by those with relevant expertise before implementation. Strategic plans might be reviewed by strategy faculty; assessment systems by measurement experts; budget models by finance faculty. These reviews would assess technical soundness and evidence basis, not just political acceptability.

Retrospective initiative analysis: Some institutions systematically examine outcomes of major administrative initiatives to build organizational knowledge. This organizational learning, while standard in some well-managed organizations, remains relatively uncommon in higher education. After implementing strategic plans, reorganizations, or major initiatives, structured analysis might ask: What were objectives? What occurred? Why? What implications for future decisions?

Challenging Questionable Practices Professionally

Perhaps the most direct response available to business faculty involves professionally engaging with institutional management practices that seem inconsistent with management scholarship—using professional expertise to identify potential problems and propose evidence-based alternatives.

Naming concerns professionally: When administrators propose initiatives that appear to contradict management research, business faculty might have professional grounds to identify these inconsistencies. A strategic plan listing numerous equal priorities might not demonstrate strategic focus—and strategy faculty could note this. An assessment system using potentially invalid metrics might not measure performance effectively—and faculty researching measurement could raise concerns. A reorganization that appears to ignore change management principles might encounter implementation challenges—and organizational behavior faculty might predict difficulties.

This requires professional courage but potentially serves institutional interests. Rather than remaining silent when observing practices that seem inconsistent with management scholarship, business faculty might constructively engage: "I teach strategic planning. This document appears to list aspirations rather than strategy. It seems to lack analysis of competitive position, resource capability, or implementation requirements. Perhaps we should develop a more focused strategic approach."

Offering evidence-based alternatives: Rather than merely critiquing problematic proposals, business faculty might develop alternatives grounded in management scholarship. When administrators propose measurement systems that seem likely to encourage gaming, faculty could design more sophisticated performance frameworks. When they announce reorganizations that appear poorly conceived, faculty might propose evidence-based organizational designs. When they pursue change processes that seem inconsistent with change management research, faculty could recommend approaches with scholarly support.

Consider a scenario where administrators propose reorganizing academic units based primarily on enrollment numbers. Business faculty might respond with an alternative incorporating organizational design principles: clustering complementary capabilities, preserving critical coordination mechanisms, ensuring manageable spans of control, sequencing change to minimize disruption. The alternative would demonstrate that better-informed options exist when management expertise shapes decisions.

Institutional service as professional practice: Volunteering expertise for institutional decision-making rather than waiting for administrators to seek it. Offering to help design strategic planning processes, contributing to budget model development, advising on organizational restructuring, supporting assessment system design. This treats institutional service not as burden but as professional practice—applying management expertise where institutions need it.

Collective professional voice: Business faculty collectively might establish expectations for organizational practice at their institutions and engage with administrative proposals through governance processes. Rather than isolated individual objections, collective faculty voice informed by professional expertise might carry substantial weight.

Imagine a scenario: A university announces a major reorganization developed without extensive consultation. Business faculty recognize the proposal may have organizational design weaknesses. Rather than individual complaints, the business school collectively responds with analysis explaining specific concerns and offering alternatives grounded in organizational design research. The response demonstrates expertise, offers constructive alternatives, and makes clear that business faculty take seriously the organizational practices their institution adopts. Such collective professional engagement might influence outcomes in ways isolated objections could not.

Building Cross-Institutional Knowledge Networks

Single institutions alone cannot fully address higher education's management challenges. Cross-institutional networks might build collective knowledge about effective academic management and address problematic practices systemically.

Professional association engagement: Organizations like the Academy of Management facilitate knowledge sharing about institutional management and organizational practices. Special interest groups focused on management education could potentially address challenges of business schools' relationships to their own institutional management.

Management research on higher education: Business faculty can direct research attention toward higher education management—studying what makes academic leadership effective, which strategic approaches work in university contexts, how to design valid performance measurement for educational outcomes. This builds evidence for improving academic management while demonstrating that management research applies to universities, not exclusively to corporations.

Collaborative administrator development: Consortia of institutions might develop shared administrative training programs, pooling expertise and resources to build management capability among academic leaders. Regional business schools might collaborate to offer executive education specifically for higher education administrators, creating economies of scale while ensuring systematic competence development.

Public scholarship on academic management: Business faculty writing for practitioner audiences (administrators, trustees, policymakers) about evidence-based academic management might influence how higher education understands organizational challenges. Articles in publications like Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed explaining research on effective institutional management could reach administrators who may not regularly read management journals.

Cross-institutional intervention assessment: Systematically studying outcomes of management interventions across institutions might identify which approaches succeed under what conditions. Multi-institutional research examining strategic planning outcomes—which planning approaches produced genuine strategic focus versus aspiration lists, what distinguished effective implementation from abandoned plans—could build empirical foundations for competent academic management.

Building Long-Term Faculty Agency and Institutional Resilience

Identity Reconfiguration: From Disciplinary Experts to Institutional Stewards

The central argument of this essay is that effective faculty response to managerialism may require identity transformation. Business management faculty might need to reconceive professional roles and what obligations expertise creates.

Traditional business faculty identities often center on disciplinary scholarship and teaching—we are strategy professors, organizational behavior researchers, finance instructors. These identities may position management expertise as disciplinary knowledge for research and teaching, not necessarily as practical capability for institutional application. When administrators implement questionable strategic plans, faculty might recognize flaws professionally but may not experience personal responsibility to intervene—strategic planning is what we teach, not necessarily what we do institutionally; institutional organizational challenges may feel like administrative rather than faculty domain.

However, this identity configuration creates potential ethical tensions when administrators lack extensive management training. Faculty possess expertise that might prevent organizational problems but may choose not to deploy it. Consider a medical analogy: If medical faculty observed hospital administrators making clinical decisions contradicting medical knowledge—prescribing treatments research shows are ineffective, ignoring protocols evidence shows improve outcomes, implementing patient care processes likely to harm results—and remained silent because "patient care is what we teach, not what we do," we might recognize this as problematic professional disengagement.

The analogy reveals potential issues with business faculty's typical stance toward institutional management. Faculty may observe organizational decisions that seem inconsistent with organizational knowledge, yet remain relatively silent because identities constructed don't necessarily include strong obligations to deploy expertise beyond teaching and research.

Alternative identities might enable different responses:

Applied management professionals: Understanding management expertise as practical capability requiring deployment, not merely abstract knowledge for teaching and research. This identity might create obligations to apply professional knowledge to organizational challenges encountered, including those in one's own institution. Just as physicians practice medicine rather than merely teaching it, management professionals might practice organizational decision-making in contexts where they possess relevant expertise.

Institutional stewards: Viewing universities as shared organizational resources requiring active protection from potentially harmful management practices. This identity might frame questionable managerialist interventions as threats to resources under stewardship, potentially demanding protective action grounded in professional expertise.

Organizational diagnosticians: Recognizing that management faculty study organizational health, diagnose organizational challenges, and propose evidence-based interventions—capabilities that might be deployed when institutions experience organizational difficulties.

Exemplars of professional practice: Understanding that business schools' legitimacy partly depends on demonstrating that management expertise matters—that organizations perform better when managed competently. Institutions provide laboratories for demonstrating (or undermining) these claims. When business schools tolerate questionable management at their own universities, this might undermine claims that management expertise produces better organizational outcomes.

Identity transformation proves challenging. Business faculty socialization emphasizes research productivity and teaching excellence, not necessarily extensive institutional service. Tenure and promotion systems typically reward publications over institutional contributions. Professional networks may value theoretical contributions over applied impact. Moving from primarily disciplinary expert identity to applied professional/institutional steward identity requires navigating these institutional pressures.

Yet business schools occasionally cultivate broader identities. Professional MBA programs emphasize applied problem-solving; executive education engages directly with organizational challenges; some schools maintain traditions of significant institutional citizenship. These models demonstrate that alternative identities remain possible—they require intentional cultivation rather than passive acceptance of default disciplinary identities.

Concrete practices potentially supporting identity transformation might include:

Valuing institutional contributions: Tenure and promotion processes recognizing substantive institutional service and application of professional expertise to university challenges. A strategy professor who significantly contributes to institutional strategic planning, improving its quality and coherence, might receive recognition comparable to publishing strategy research.

Applied research legitimacy: Treating research on higher education management and organization as valuable scholarly contribution. When business faculty study university strategic planning effectiveness, academic leadership, or organizational change in educational settings, this might count as legitimate management scholarship—applying organizational theory to important contexts.

Practitioner engagement modeling: Senior faculty modeling engagement with institutional management challenges, demonstrating that professional expertise applies to organizational contexts beyond corporations. When respected scholars serve on strategic planning committees, contribute to organizational design, or consult with administrators on management challenges, this signals that such engagement represents legitimate professional practice.

Internal consulting normalization: Making it normal for business faculty to consult internally on institutional decisions, similar to external corporate consulting. Creating structures and compensation for internal consulting might treat this as professional service rather than unpaid favor, while ensuring systematic expertise deployment.

Distributed Leadership and Management Competence Development

Effective engagement with institutional management may require distributing management competence throughout faculty ranks rather than concentrating expertise in a few individuals or ceding authority to administrators.

Faculty management literacy: Developing basic management literacy across faculty—understanding budgets, recognizing strategic coherence, comprehending organizational design principles. This enables informed participation in governance and competent evaluation of administrative proposals. When faculty understand budget fundamentals, they can meaningfully engage with resource allocation decisions. When they understand strategic planning principles, they can distinguish between focused strategy and unfocused aspiration lists.

Institutions might offer "management literacy" workshops for faculty: sessions explaining university budgeting, strategic planning frameworks, organizational design principles, performance measurement approaches, and change management fundamentals. These workshops wouldn't make all faculty management experts but might provide understanding enabling competent governance participation and informed evaluation of administrative proposals.

Rotating governance leadership with development: Faculty governance positions that include explicit management competence development—training in financial management for budget committee members, strategic planning education for planning committee chairs, organizational design exposure for restructuring committees. This treats governance not just as representative participation but as organizational leadership requiring systematic capability development.

Business faculty governance engagement: Rather than viewing governance primarily as burdensome service, business faculty might treat governance participation as professional practice—applying management expertise where needed. This might include budget committee membership deploying financial management expertise, strategic planning leadership applying strategic analysis capabilities, assessment committee participation contributing measurement design knowledge.

Consider the potential difference: Instead of budget committees staffed entirely by faculty without financial training, business faculty with budgeting expertise provide informed leadership. Instead of strategic planning committees producing unfocused aspiration lists, strategy faculty guide development of coherent, evidence-based institutional strategies. Instead of assessment committees implementing potentially invalid measurement systems, faculty who research assessment design create systems with stronger validity foundations.

Cross-institutional learning: Facilitating faculty governance networks across institutions to share effective practices and identify common challenges requiring collective response. When faculty from multiple institutions compare experiences with strategic planning, reorganization, and assessment, this may build recognition of systemic patterns rather than merely local frustrations.

Mission Clarity and Strategic Coherence

Institutions that maintain clear, distinctive missions and strategic coherence may prove more resistant to questionable managerialism than those with vague aspirations and unfocused initiatives. Business faculty expertise in strategy formulation and implementation might strengthen institutional strategic capacity—if such expertise is deployed institutionally.

Strategy expertise deployment: Business faculty might contribute professional expertise to institutional strategic planning through multiple mechanisms:

• Teaching administrators strategic analysis frameworks before planning processes

• Facilitating planning processes using evidence-based approaches rather than exclusively aspirational brainstorming

• Identifying when proposed "strategies" may lack strategic logic—when they conflate aspirations with strategy, list everything as priority, or lack resource-capability analysis

• Helping institutions focus on coherent priorities rather than initiative proliferation

• Providing analytical frameworks for assessing strategic alternatives and making strategic choices

A strategic planning process with active strategy faculty participation from inception might differ substantially from typical approaches. Faculty could begin by clarifying what strategy actually means—not aspirations or wish lists but coherent logic connecting institutional capabilities to competitive positioning and stakeholder value creation. They might facilitate analysis of the institution's competitive position, distinctive capabilities, and resource constraints. They could guide development of focused strategic priorities with clear logic explaining why these priorities matter and how they connect to institutional strengths.

Mission-market alignment analysis: Using marketing and strategy frameworks to analyze whether institutions' missions align with market positioning and resource capabilities—or whether mission statements represent aspirational rhetoric. Business faculty might help institutions distinguish between mission (what we distinctively do well that creates value for specific stakeholders) and aspiration (what we wish we could achieve but may lack capability or positioning to accomplish).

Performance measurement design: Contributing measurement expertise to design assessment systems capturing mission-relevant outcomes rather than crude proxies. Business faculty research on performance measurement, balanced scorecards, and multi-dimensional evaluation directly applies to academic assessment challenges. Faculty understand that measures influence behavior (often in unintended ways) and that measurement system design requires sophisticated understanding of validity, gaming risks, and behavioral responses (Espeland & Sauder, 2007).

Assessment system design guided by measurement expertise might differ from systems designed without such input: Rather than counting easily quantifiable outputs that may drive goal displacement, systems might measure outcomes more directly connected to institutional mission. They might acknowledge measurement limitations rather than suggesting crude proxies represent genuine performance. They might anticipate gaming and design appropriate protections. They might balance quantitative indicators with qualitative judgment, recognizing that some important outcomes resist quantification.

Evidence-based resource allocation: Helping institutions develop resource allocation frameworks that connect budget decisions to strategic priorities and mission fulfillment rather than defaulting exclusively to enrollment-driven formulas or across-the-board cuts. Business faculty understand financial modeling, activity-based costing, and resource allocation under constraint—expertise directly relevant to university budgeting challenges.

Strategic review and learning: Facilitating systematic evaluation of strategic initiatives to build organizational learning—what worked, what didn't, why, and what this teaches about future decisions. Business faculty research organizational learning and performance feedback systems; this expertise might improve institutions' capacity to learn from experience rather than potentially repeating mistakes (Argyris, 1977).

Conclusion

Higher education faces genuine organizational challenges requiring competent management. Yet institutions sometimes experience problematic managerialism: interventions implemented without extensive management training, producing administrative expansion while claiming efficiency, generating strategic incoherence while invoking strategy, and potentially damaging institutions.

Business management faculty occupy a complex position in this landscape. We possess professional expertise to recognize questionable management practices, identify potentially flawed interventions, propose evidence-based alternatives, and build administrative competence—yet often remain relatively passive observers. We teach strategic planning while administrators may implement unfocused strategies. We research organizational change while institutions sometimes repeat documented change management mistakes. We critique corporate governance dysfunction while tolerating comparable or worse governance at our own universities.

This essay has argued that faculty response patterns may stem fundamentally from identity configurations that neither frame institutional management as faculty responsibility nor create strong obligations to deploy professional expertise beyond disciplinary teaching and research. Before business faculty can effectively address higher education's organizational challenges, we may need to cultivate different identities—as applied professionals, institutional stewards, and practitioners of competent management rather than merely teachers of management abstracted from institutional context.

The case for identity transformation strengthens when considering variations in administrative management training. When those making management decisions may lack extensive management education, business faculty's failure to engage might represent missed opportunity to contribute valuable expertise. We possess knowledge that could potentially prevent organizational problems but often choose not to deploy it institutionally.

Yet alternatives exist. Business faculty could deploy management expertise for institutional benefit. We could advocate for competence in institutional decision-making as vigorously as we advocate for rigor in research. We could design strategic planning processes producing genuine strategy rather than aspiration lists. We could create assessment systems with stronger measurement validity. We could facilitate organizational change that improves rather than disrupts. We could build administrative competence through systematic development.

These alternatives require courage—courage to engage with administrative challenges, to volunteer expertise for institutional benefit, to hold institutions to management standards we teach. But perhaps even more fundamentally, they require reconceiving who we are and what professional expertise obligates us to do.

Several actionable implications emerge:

For individual business faculty:

• Consider that professional expertise may apply to institutional organizational challenges, not merely to corporations studied

• Volunteer expertise through governance participation, administrative consulting, and engagement with institutional decisions

• When observing questionable management—strategic plans lacking strategic logic, metrics likely to encourage gaming, change processes inconsistent with research—consider professional engagement

• Build management literacy among non-business colleagues, enhancing collective capacity for competent governance

• Recognize that silence when observing questionable management may represent missed professional opportunity

For business schools collectively:

• Consider valuing and rewarding institutional application of management expertise in tenure and promotion

• Potentially develop administrative education programs building management competence among academic leaders

• Create formal mechanisms enabling faculty to consult internally on organizational challenges

• Conduct research on higher education management, building evidence for effective academic leadership

• Address the relationship between teaching management competence and tolerating management practices at one's own institution

For administrators genuinely committed to institutional welfare:

• Acknowledge limits of personal management expertise and actively seek faculty knowledge

• Create structured processes for incorporating business faculty expertise in strategic decisions

• Invest in management competence development rather than relying exclusively on intuition

• Value process quality and evidence-based reasoning alongside decision efficiency

• Recognize that some faculty possess management training that could improve institutional performance

For faculty governance bodies:

• Consider establishing management competence expectations for administrative decisions

• Create development programs building faculty capacity for substantive governance participation

• Deploy internal expertise before hiring external consultants

• Hold administrators accountable for evidence-based decision-making

• Build organizational learning systems preventing repeated management mistakes

The path forward may require becoming the professionals we claim to be. We might become stewards of organizational practice, not merely teachers of management abstraction. We might apply expertise where it matters most—in institutions facing genuine organizational challenges. We might hold ourselves and institutions to standards of competent management we teach others to maintain. We might demonstrate through organizational practice that management expertise produces better outcomes than alternatives.

This transformation won't be easy. It requires courage to challenge authority, wisdom to engage constructively rather than merely criticize, humility to recognize that expertise doesn't automatically transfer to academic contexts without adaptation, and persistence to continue engagement even when initial efforts meet resistance. It requires reconceiving professional identities in ways that navigate powerful currents of disciplinary socialization and institutional reward systems.

But the alternative—continued passivity when possessing expertise that might help—becomes increasingly uncomfortable. As higher education's challenges intensify, as certain managerialist practices produce visible difficulties, as public confidence in universities experiences pressure, business faculty's silence may become more costly. We possess knowledge that could help. We have expertise that institutions need. We understand organizational principles that might prevent recurring problems. Our reluctance to deploy this knowledge institutionally may represent missed professional opportunity.

The question ultimately becomes: What kind of professionals do we choose to be? Are we primarily disciplinary technicians, applying expertise within constrained domains while remaining largely indifferent to broader organizational contexts? Or might we become fuller professionals—experts with potential to deploy knowledge for beneficial purposes, potential stewards with interest in protecting institutional resources from questionable management, potential citizens with commitments to apply expertise where it serves important purposes?

The answer will determine not just how institutions navigate current challenges but whether management expertise—the knowledge we spend careers developing and teaching—demonstrably matters for organizational performance. If we cannot or will not apply expertise to improve our own organizations, we might implicitly suggest that management knowledge makes limited practical difference. But if we become active stewards deploying professional expertise for institutional benefit, we demonstrate through practice what we profess in theory: that competent management may produce better organizational outcomes, that evidence-based decision-making might yield superior results, and that expertise potentially matters when organizations face genuine challenges.

This represents the choice: continued silence, passive observation, or engaged professional practice. The stakes—for our institutions, our profession, and ultimately for higher education's capacity to serve students and society—may demand we choose engagement.

References

1. Argyris, C. (1977). Double loop learning in organizations. Harvard Business Review, 55(5), 115–125.

2. Deem, R., & Brehony, K. J. (2005). Management as ideology: The case of 'new managerialism' in higher education. Oxford Review of Education, 31(2), 217–235.

3. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–160.

4. Espeland, W. N., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity: How public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 1–40.

5. Ginsberg, B. (2011). The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all-administrative university and why it matters. Oxford University Press.

6. Kezar, A. J. (2001). Understanding and facilitating organizational change in the 21st century: Recent research and conceptualizations (ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, Vol. 28, No. 4). Jossey-Bass.

7. Mintzberg, H. (1994). The rise and fall of strategic planning. Free Press.

8. Seligman, M. E. P. (1972). Learned helplessness. Annual Review of Medicine, 23(1), 407–412.

9. Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

10. Tyler, T. R., & Blader, S. L. (2003). The group engagement model: Procedural justice, social identity, and cooperative behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7(4), 349–361.

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Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Associate Dean and Director of HR Programs (WGU); Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD/HR/Leadership Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.

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Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2025). From Silence to Stewardship: Business Faculty Responses to Administrative Incompetence. Human Capital Leadership Review, 28(3). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.28.3.2