Public multicampus systems, for the purpose of this chapter, are defined as groups of public institutions, each with its own mission, academic and other programs, internal governing policies and procedures, and chief executive officer (either “president” or “chancellor”), but governed by a single board with a system-wide chief executive officer, generally called “chancellor” or “president”--whichever term is not used for the campus heads.  The system governing board selects the system head, sets broad system policies, allocates public resources among the constituent institutions (within whatever latitude is allowed by the state), appoints the campus heads (generally with the advice of the faculty, and sometimes of a separate campus lay board, or council), and establishes, reaffirms, or alters the missions and programs of the constituent institutions.

Scholarly attention to multicampus systems (almost all of them are public) has accelerated as the model has come to dominate public higher education.  Lee and Bowen’s seminal study in 1971 covered nine of the then-11 systems that fit their definition of multicampus governance, which excluded the combination governing-coordinating board states, the “flagships with branches,” and the all-community college multi-campus models.  In their report four years later for the Carnegie Council, Lee and Bowen (1975) noted five additional systems fitting their definition, plus an increasing number of single board states. By the late 1980’s and into the 1990’s, scholarly attention to the multi campus system was increasing.  Works on multicampus systems appeared by McGrath (1990), McGuinness (1991), Callan (1991), and Gade (1993) for the Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities; Pettit (1987, 1989) and Johnstone (1992, 1993) for the National Association of System Heads (NASH); McGuinness and associates (1994) for The Education Commission of the States (ECS); Mingle (1995) for the State Higher Education Executives Organization (SHEEO); Schick (1992) for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU); Callan (1994), Bracco (1997), and Bowen (1996) for The California Higher Education Policy Center; and others drawing on their own system head experiences, including SUNY’s Burke (1994), Minnesota’s McTaggert (1996), and Maryland’s Langenberg (1994).

The Origin and Variations of Multicampus Systems

Multicampus systems evolved according to several patterns, shaped by the different histories of public higher education in the several states.  Some systems (University of California) or parts of systems (University of Wisconsin) emerged from the state’s original doctoral and/or land grant universities and the branches that were created by (or forced upon) them as state needs grew and population centers changed.  Other systems or parts of systems (California State University, the State System of Higher Education in Pennsylvania) were created from the states’ former teachers colleges, now comprehensive colleges and universities, some of them doctoral-granting, that were once governed directly by state departments of education. Others, such as the University of Houston, the City University of New York, or the former regional systems of Illinois, emerged as distinctly regional or metropolitan systems.

These differing histories, compounded by (or in part a function of) the great geographic, demographic, and economic variations in the several states, and further compounded by the differing levels and roles of private higher education and by the absence of any strong unifying federal role in American higher education, have lead to great diversity in the form and structure of multi-campus systems.  McGuinness (1991, 1994), Creswell (1985), Graham (1989, and others have attempted, with only some success, to construct simplifying typologies to describe these variations.  Among the critical dimensions of these variations are the following:

Comprehensiveness.  “Comprehensiveness” refers to the degree to which the system incorporates all of the state’s public postsecondary institutions, as among:

• the research university or universities, some of which may claim to be their state’s “flagship,” that award the Ph.D. and advanced professional degrees, and carry out their state’s Land Grant mission;

• the so-called comprehensive colleges and universities, many of which are former teachers colleges that typically award baccalaureate and masters degrees;

• various other public four-year colleges and universities that may have special professional missions or special histories, such as the historically or traditionally black colleges and universities;

• community colleges, often with origins in local school districts or local county governments, that award various kinds of two-year associate degrees and that may also award postsecondary certificates and provide other industry- and firm-specific training; and

• local and regional postsecondary, but non-collegiate, technical institutes, separate from the community colleges, that award certificates and diplomas of two or fewer year’s duration, with few if any of the credits being transferable to four-year degrees.

 “Comprehensiveness” is most usefully descriptive as a position along a continuum.  The most comprehensive systems, as in Wisconsin or Georgia, incorporate all of the state’s colleges and universities, although still excluding the public non-collegiate technical institutes.  The natural impetus toward comprehensiveness stems from the simple fact that some publicly-accountable authority must allocate state tax resources, hire and fire system and campus heads, and determine or alter the institutional missions.  Multiple public systems and independently governed public institutions thus require some other, presumably “higher,” body to allocate resources and determine missions among the systems or units of the state.  In the absence of such authority vested in a lay governing or coordinating body, coordination and resource allocation authority will almost assuredly gravitate even more strongly either to the governor (perhaps via the state budget office) or to the legislature (principally to the legislative appropriations committees).

At the same time, parts of public higher education enterprise of any state resist incorporation within a system.  Many historic state “flagships” resist system governance out of a concern that their special status or national prestige or special claim on state resources might be eroded.  This may be true even when some of their branches (e.g. of the Universities of Michigan or Minnesota) clearly carry out a predominantly baccalaureate mission indistinguishable from that of their state’s comprehensive colleges and universities (and sometimes, as with Penn State’s two-year branches, indistinguishable from the community colleges).  In many cases, these “flagships” have had sufficient political clout in their state legislatures, often buttressed by state constitutional status, to resist incorporation in any larger multicampus system.

Community colleges, for different reasons, may also often resist incorporation in a statewide system.  They are inherently “local” in a way that even regional four-year colleges are not, extending frequently to local origin and local ownership.  They may be legally required to take all applicants, making their enrollments and budgets especially volatile and subject to very local demographic and economic perturbations.  And even when nominally incorporated in a larger multicampus system, the community colleges may (as in The State University of New York) have a vastly different—and far more autonomous—legal and budgetary status than the four-year institutions in the same system.

Finally, states with separate vocational-technical systems may resist being incorporated in a larger multicampus system, in part for the reason that any local unit resists being “taken over,” but more specifically because of the very real fear of job loss and/or closure due to the mission overlap with local community colleges.  In Georgia and Wisconsin, for example, the otherwise-comprehensive multicampus university systems do not incorporate the technical institutes.  Minnesota, by contrast, in 1996 combined three hitherto separate systems (four-year colleges, community colleges, and vocational-technical institutes) into the single State University System of Minnesota (but still excluded the flagship University of Minnesota and its branches).

Thus, some states have single comprehensive governing boards for all public higher education, including community colleges.  Others, still quite comprehensive, may include all four-year college and university campuses, but not the community colleges.  Still others may include all of the state’s four-year campuses with the exception of the flagship research university.  The less comprehensive systems may include states with regional systems, or sector systems--or, as in Michigan or Ohio, with only a coordinating agency and no true system at all.

Branch and Multi-Site Campuses. Campuses with branches or multiple sites can resemble “systems” in their governance by a single board, but they lack the separate-but-equal institutional heads and faculty governance bodies characteristic of a multicampus system in the meaning of this chapter.  Campuses with multiple sites or branches generally have a single head who is also the head of the largest, or principal, campus, and generally also have a single faculty governance body that speaks for all of the faculty on matters of curriculum, academic policies, and faculty membership.  Campuses with branches or multiple sites are characteristic of large flagship universities that formed these branches in response to demands for regional coverage and for strictly teaching (as opposed to research) institutions—often before the full flourishing of their states’ comprehensive college and university systems.  Multi-site institutions are also characteristic of large urban community colleges that have enrollments and geographic catchment areas that are too large, or political districts that are too disparate, to be served by a single site. In such cases, it is possible to have “system like” multi-site campuses within true multicampus systems.

Sector Variation or Homogeneity. Related to “comprehensiveness” is the degree to which the constituent institutions are within a single higher education sector--i.e., research universities, as in the University of California, or comprehensive colleges and universities, as in the Pennsylvania State College and University System--or cut across research universities, comprehensive colleges, and sometime two-year colleges, as in New York, Wisconsin, or Georgia.  McGuinness (1991) calls these variations “segmental” and "consolidated.”

The Presence or Absence of Separate Coordinating Boards.  In all but the comprehensive states (as described above, and even including some of them), there are usually separate boards, consisting of lay persons and sometimes state officials ex officio, that do not govern the public colleges and universities--that is, do not appoint chief executive officers, approve budgets, or make policy--but that coordinate the several public institutions or systems (and sometimes the private colleges and universities) through budgetary recommendations and academic program approval authority.  The somewhat overlapping jurisdictions between coordinating and governing boards may confuse the outsider and sometimes the insider, and even some members of the boards themselves.

The Presence or Absence of Local, Limited-Authority Lay Boards.  Particularly in large systems, or in systems composed of campuses that once had their own governing boards, there may continue to be local campus boards with limited jurisdiction, such as searching for and recommending presidential candidates, dealing with property or physical plans, or simply maintaining liaison with the local business, civic, and political establishments.  Clearly a potential exists for conflict between the jurisdictions of the local boards or councils and the true governing boards at the system level.

Degree of System Autonomy from State Government. This dimension of variation has to do with the degree to which state government (not the governing board or the central system administration) reaches into the operations of the institutions.  The three principal arenas of potential intrusion are:
 

• Fiscal: Highly intrusive, or controlling, states require extensive pre-audit approval before expenditures, constrain the movement of funds among expenditure purposes, and discourage or forbid the disposition of assets or the incurring of debt.  More autonomous systems are more likely to be permitted to execute contracts and incur debt, and to be granted a single line of expenditure authority to be allocated among the campuses, with the campus in turn allocating funds among their schools and other major spending categories.

• Personnel: Highly intrusive or controlling states retain employment and collective bargaining authority for all faculty and staff.  More autonomous systems, through the authority of the governing boards, are their own employers--and must assume all financial obligations and legal liabilities resulting thereto.

• Programmatic: Highly controlling states require approval of a separate coordinating board, and perhaps even of the governor (as in New York state) before a new degree program may be added, with such approval contingent upon demonstrations of demand, capacity, and sometimes the approval of other institutions or sectors.  More autonomous systems require only the approval of the governing board for new academic programs.

Degree of Institutional or Campus Autonomy from the Governing Board and/or Central System Administration: To the individual campus, intrusion may be intrusion, and its origin--i.e., from the system governing board or the state budget office--may make little difference.  Also, intrusion originating in state law or with the governor’s office may take the form of demands placed upon the board or system head, only seeming to the campus to have originated with the board or system chancellor.  It is also the case that institutional autonomy, while an abstraction that can seem to be an unqualified good to the campuses, may be quite qualified in application, depending on the observer and the kinds of decisions over which the campus may or may not have autonomy.  For example, campus presidents may use “the system” as an excuse or a foil when the decisions may be quite within their authority, but liable to be unpopular.  (Indeed, a system head will often invite such obfuscation, or displacement to the central system office, of unpopular campus decisions.)  Faculty, while wanting individual and generally departmental autonomy, frequently fear their own dean or president more than the more distant chancellor governing board.  Thus, faculty may perceive the authority of the system head—or even of the governor or legislature—as safer, particularly in matters having to do with job security, than the authority of their dean, provost, or president, and may thus resist any further devolution of authority from system to campus.

Nevertheless, there can be considerable variation in the degree to which a governing board and/or system head takes seriously the principles of decentralization and devolution of authority to the individual campus, particularly in matters of curriculum, appointments, and resource allocation.  In general, conventional good management principles favor the maximum decentralization of decision-making authority consistent with overarching system goals and policies.  The generally more conservative, business-oriented political climate of the late 1990s favors such devolution of authority from governing boards and system administrations to constituent campuses. At the same time, this same political conservatism is also associated with considerable mistrust of the academy.  As a consequence, governing boards and central system staff can easily go the other way: micro management, excessive demands for accountability, and other intrusions into the kinds of academic and curricular matters that ought to be left to campus authorities.
 

Public Higher Education Governance:
The Principal Parties to, and Objects of, Authority

Another way of viewing and analyzing public multicampus systems is as the interplay of: (a) parties, whether individuals or corporate-like bodies, with different degrees of authority and/or influence; and (b) the objects of such decision making authority or influence, all involving public higher education.  Within this construct, the key parties are the multicampus governing board (or boards);

• the multicampus system head (generally a chancellor or president);

• the individual institutional, or campus, heads (presidents or chancellors);

• the state coordinating board and head (if any) ;

• the governor and the key executive appointees (e.g., director of the budget);

• key legislative leaders (may be heads of the respective bodies--e.g. speaker of the state house or assembly--or the heads of the higher education committees);

• the system-wide elected faculty body and leader;

• institutional or campus faculty bodies and leaders; or

• the heads or chairs of individual campus boards or councils (if any).

These parties, often in combination, need to make the following critical decisions, all of them ultimately impacting on the individual campuses and their academic programs:

1) What are the missions of the individual campuses--to be created or altered, or reaffirmed?

2) What are the academic programs and the organized research that will carry out these missions?

3) What are the curricula--i.e., what students are to know and be able to do--for these programs?

4) Who is to be appointed membership--both temporary and permanent, or tenured--in the faculty?

5) Who is to be appointed to the position of system head and to other positions of system leadership?

6) Who is to be appointed to the positions of institutional or campus head and to other positions of campus leadership?

7) Who is to establish standards for the admission and graduation of students?

8) What students are to be admitted to study, by what criteria, and in what numbers?

Considered in this way, it should be clear that most of the decisions of everyday importance to the higher education enterprise are not made by system governing boards or system administrators, nor are they made even by campus heads.  Rather, many decisions are made, or are at least influenced very substantially, by the faculty.  This faculty influence and authority can be exercised through the formal institution-wide faculty senate.  But considerably more influence is exercised over more of the core operations of the university by the “faculty” of separate schools (as in schools or faculties of arts and sciences, medicine, or law), departments, and programs, and by individual faculty in deciding what and how to teach and research.

The decisions that are generally the most contested and that have the most powerful impact, at least on curriculum and scholarship, are those dealing with the allocation and reallocation of resources, and with the appointment, promotion, and granting of tenure to the faculty.  From such decisions emerge the priorities of the institution, and the ownership of academic judgements: who shall teach what and how, what shall be researched and how, and who is to establish the standards by which both students and scholars are to be judged?  It is significant that in this day of heightened suspicion and increased contestation generally, the stated goal of most state governments is to decentralize: to devolve decision-making to the campuses.  At the same time--and in clear tension with the aforementioned principles of decentralization, delegation, and devolution--many state governments, sometimes through state governing or coordinating boards, are demanding more institutional accountability, a greater say in matters of curriculum and academic standards, and a greater responsiveness by their faculties to the needs of business and industry.  It is to this question--which decisions most properly belong to the system as opposed to the campus or to state government--that we now turn.

Functions of Public Multicampus Systems

Following principles set forth by Johnstone (1993) in conjunction with the National Association of System Heads, the essential decisions of public multicampus systems--indeed their essential functions--are the following nine, in approximate order of the degree to which they belong to the system as opposed to the campuses or the state government.

1. To determine, reaffirm, and occasionally to alter the mission of the system and of its constituent campuses.

By “system mission” is meant the sum of the constituent campus missions: a system mission that should be something greater than the sum of the missions of the constituent campuses.  By “campus mission” is meant whether the campus will have a research or a predominately teaching mission and the kinds of resources, degree programs, and faculty expectations so called for. The system board cannot by declaration alone make a research university out of a comprehensive college; ultimately, such a determination would take legislative and gubernatorial support, as well as the even more critical affirmation of the larger scholarly community.  But it is the system board and the system head that must convey to the constituent campuses, particularly those not currently doctoral or research, whether they are to be encouraged, forbidden, or merely permitted to aspire to the presumed goal of many colleges, which is to become ever more oriented to the norms and configurations of the research university.  Arguably, the need is for systems to resist further “research drift.”

This determination (or alteration) will be made through campus and system strategic planning and the building of consensus among the key parties, including the campus heads, faculty bodies, individual governing board members, the governor and key legislative leaders, and other state leaders.  Such planning and priority determination must consider the relative strengths of the individual campuses along with the overall coverage, within the system and the state as a whole (including the private sector and other public systems), of such critical public needs as access, basic and applied research, high quality affordable undergraduate education, and training in the advanced professions.

One of the great new challenges of systems as the millenium approaches is to devise ways of maintaining some beneficial order in the face of distance learning and other new instructional technologies that do not respect, nor even recognize, regional, state, or national boundaries.  Courses and even whole degrees are increasingly available electronically, through public, private, and proprietary delivers, quite beyond the reach of state educational regulatory agencies, able to be received by student consumers who have no time for, and little interest in, such traditional academic amenities as campuses, classrooms, libraries, laboratories or student life itself.  Gordon Davies, former head of the Virginia coordinating board, wrote of the imminent end of “…systems as cartels…dividing a state into regions and assigning each member institution a piece of the action” (Davies, 1997).  Future systems, if they are to be useful, will have to learn how to build alliances with other systems and with competing electronic providers.

2. To appoint, nurture, evaluate, and if necessary remove the chief executive officer (chancellor or president) of the system and of the constituent campuses or institutions.

This is the most important single function of any governing board of just about any organization or entity.  At the same time, it requires of the system board a special sensitivity to the nature of academic governance and the absolute need for effective academic leadership to carry, at the system level, the support of the campus heads, and at the campus level the support of the faculty.

This role is most perplexing and oftentimes frustrating to the governing board members of large systems in which the system board, simply by the very large number of campus presidential appointments, must delegate the exceedingly time-consuming task of the campus search to some combination of local faculty and lay persons, guided and certified as to the quality of the process by the system head and his/her officers.  The purpose of the actual appointment being reserved to the system governing board, which will presumably act only on recommendation of the system head, is to allow the system head, in case of a bad or corrupted campus search, to abort the process and start the search anew (including the appointment of an acting or interim campus head.)

3. To advocate to the legislature, governor, and other key opinion leaders and patrons the needs of the system.

The advocacy by the system head, system lobbyist, or even governing board chair cannot replace the advocacy of the separate campus presidents, faculty leaders, and local lay persons: after all, most politics is still local.  However, it is critical for all advocates to sing from the same page.  Ideally, this should be for a system budget that is realistic, given state resources and competing needs, yet is still “aspirational” and a “reach” for the governor and legislature.  If the campuses are allowed to advocate individually for only their own budgets, the function of the system to allocate state tax dollars fairly and appropriately among the respective campuses will be lost, and the campuses forced to engage a zero sum battle in which the campuses with the most legislative clout--perhaps the ones in the home districts of the most influential legislators—are bound to win.  At the same time, to give the campuses something more concrete for which to advocate, and the individual legislators something to bring home to their constituents, it is appropriate for local campuses to advocate for special campus-specific appropriations, such as capital or board-approved single campus programs.

4. To advocate to the constituent campuses the needs of the state.

At the same time as the system advocates on behalf of the institutions to the governor and legislature, the system must advocate to the institutions on behalf of certain state needs and perspectives that may not otherwise hold high priority with faculty and campus presidents.  These may be needs such as accessibility, or racial and gender diversity, to which some faculty may give lip service but believe to be mainly the responsibility of some other campus.  Or, the state need may be less politically controversial, but merely a burden or distraction--like public service--that the faculty (usually correctly) perceive will take them away from the teaching and scholarship for which they were hired and will be rewarded.  In such a case, the governing board must insist (one must hope in full knowledge of the opportunity costs involved) that resources be allocated, and faculty efforts be rewarded, in such a way as to make, say, contributions to state economic development or public health needs the object of real faculty time and attention.

The more difficult role for both the board and the head of the multicampus system is to convey the values and priorities of the government and the public the government supposedly represents when these values are not compatible with, nor welcomed within, the prevailing values of the academy.  This is where the role of the governing board and head of a public multicampus system diverges most from the role of a governing board of a single private institution.  The latter board can insist on measures of accountability and long run fiscal prudence that may seem less than fully sympathetic to the faculty, or even to the president.  But these postures are taken with only the long run interests of that college or university in mind.  The governing board of a public multicampus system, and the system head it appoints, need to defend the campus from the short-tem, often thoughtless and shortsighted political noise that may emanate from the legislature--even from the governor who appointed the board.  But they cannot be expected to ignore the genuine, thoughtful expression of a particular ideology or set of priorities clearly sought by an appointing governor and/or an approving legislature, even when these are different from, or less generous to the established academy than, those that may have operated in the past.

Probably the most difficult “state need” to convey to campuses is the need for greater efficiency.  The natural trajectory of colleges and universities is to spend all that is available, and to believe not only that it was spent well, but that even more could have been spent, with even greater (although largely immeasurable) benefits.  At the same time, public higher education is particularly vulnerable to budget cutting for three reasons: (1) the other possible sources of revenue, such as tuition and private giving, that are not available to other state agencies; (2) the relative political ease of imposing a single very large cut on the public multicampus system, allowing the governing board and system head to take most of the heat for where the actual damage may fall; (3) the difficulty of demonstrating conclusively (at least to the satisfaction of the governor and legislature) the damage done by budget cuts that may leave the university seriously weakened but still able to teach the same number of students.  The system head and system board must be prepared to advocate strongly for the resource needs of the system, even while working to facilitate efficiencies and difficult reallocations throughout the system.

It falls to the system head to broker and translate these sometimes differing perceptions and values between the governing board and its political base, and the campuses, further splintered among the campus heads, the faculty, and the students.  While the system head clearly serves the governing board, he or she must also be able to educate the board: in the traditions of American public higher education and the purposes that are served by policies and decision-making procedures that are almost bound to seem dysfunctional to most lay persons.  The public multicampus university system concept is at its best when this natural tension between the traditions and priorities of the academy and those of government are in a constructive balance, with the governing board, and especially the system head, tipping in the direction to best serve the very long range public interest.

5. To allocate operating and capital resources and missions to the respective constituent institutions and missions.

 Some system or formula, or at least set of principles, must be employed to allocate the state’s tax resources among the constituent institutions and missions.  The formula may be simple and largely incremental (that is, beginning from the previous year and only examining or justifying the additions).  It may be based only on simple measures of workload--i.e. students and/or course credits taught.  Or it may be based of some measures of performance or outcomes.  The system may give lots or little room for gubernatorial or legislative manipulation.  But some authority is going to allocate at least the state tax dollars, and the less involved is the system governing board and head, the more involved must be either the governor or the legislature.  One of the principal rationales for a system is that governing boards and academic system heads are probably better entrusted with this critical function than are state budget officers and legislative committee staffs.

 A critical system function that is inextricably tied to the allocation of state tax dollars is the establishment of a tuition policy and/or the actual tuition rates for the constituent campuses.  These may seem to be quite different policy decisions, and indeed they may be in the very short run.  However, the establishment of tuition is so politically volatile--both to the students and their parents and to the governor and the legislature--that any delegation of this authority to chancellors or presidents will ultimately come back to the governing board.

Furthermore, any policy to differentiate tuition among the different institutions or sectors of a system will affect--or be affected by--the allocation of tax resources among these institutions or sectors.  This is because the capacity of a public institution to raise tuition is highly dependent upon the socioeconomic make up and the related academic selectivity of the student body.  Campuses or institutions that attract a traditional-age, academically able, high socioeconomic status applicant pool can charge much higher tuition than institutions with non-traditional students or students from lower socioeconomic status families.  Thus, a decision to allocate equivalent tax revenues to two campuses differing substantially in their ability to raise tuition revenue, and then to charge, or to allow to be charged, higher tuition in the campus that has the higher socioeconomic applicant pool, is to make a policy decision that a public institution can spend more if it attracts a more upscale student body.  This is a contestable, but by no means an indefensible, policy.  Among other points in favor of market-sensitive tuition for public colleges is that it may encourage them to become more attractive generally, including the offering of better teaching and better programs.  But it is a policy that only a governing board or state government itself can make.  And the tuition policy--for example, whether or not to charge differential tuition, and if so on what basis--must be made in cognizance of the basis for allocating base state tax funds differentially among the system’s constituent institutions.
 6. To provide liaison between the executive and legislative offices of state government and the member campuses.

 This function is in part a service to government, both to the legislature and to the many state agencies and offices that may have questions for the several campuses of a system.  It is also a service to the campuses, which can be shielded from the almost insatiable demands of executive and legislative staff for answers and information.  With the system office playing a coordinating role, the governor and the legislature are more likely to get information drawn consistently, measuring the same thing.  The campuses are saved not only some time, but the awkwardness and occasional embarrassment of providing information to the same inquiry with different interpretations and sometimes very different levels of thoroughness and candor.

7. To mediate disputes over programs and missions among Constituent Institutions.

 Common inter-campus disputes include:
 

• New program proposals that duplicate existing programs at another campus. The proposing campus is likely to say that its program is actually different, or that it serves a distinctly local need, unmet by the other campus, or simply that the demand is considerable and that it ought to be allowed to compete.  The campus perceiving its academic territory encroached upon is likely to claim not only damage to its program, but a waste of taxpayer dollars.

• The acceptance of students by a campus that hitherto would not have accepted them. Moving down the “academic food chain” is usually precipitated by declining applications or acceptances at the “offending” campus, which then maintains its enrollments (and presumably its state resources) by lowering its traditional standards and accepting students that it would not hitherto have admitted.  The aggrieved campus is the one normally less selective in its admissions standards, which will typically claim not only that the lowered standards are unfair, but inappropriate: that the student attracted to the hitherto more selective campus will be served less well.  Frequently, the encroachment happens between sectors, as when a research university begins accepting students that traditionally would have enrolled at a comprehensive college, or a comprehensive college accepts students that traditionally were acceptable only to the community college.

• The encroachment of traditional comprehensive college or university on the turf of the research university.  The natural drift in American colleges and universities is in the direction of the research university. This direction includes a greater orientation to research and graduate instruction, a more traditionally prepared (and predominantly upper middle class) student body, and greater expectations for scholarship and grant production from the faculty.  While the system can usually limit encroachment into the doctoral or other advanced professional programs, and can deny the richer funding that generally accompanies a doctoral mission, it is nearly impossible--and would probably be undesirable anyway--to discourage the faculty of a comprehensive institution from competing for research grants and the peer recognition that comes of quality scholarship.  And an aggressive comprehensive institution with some ambitious and talented faculty, sharing the same metropolitan region with a research university, can also seem to be encroaching into academic and service realms that the research university may think more properly belong to it.

8. To foster cooperation among campuses that can both cut costs and enlarge options for students.

Examples of such ventures include:
 

• provision of campus legal services, information systems, financial assistance and loan servicing, purchasing agreements, state-wide recruitment, and overseas programs;

• articulation agreements and joint admission programs between two and four year campuses that guarantee admission to the senior institution after satisfactory performance at the two year college;

• system-wide general education requirements that facilitate transfer with minimal credit loss;

• collaborative multicampus proposals in response to major research and training requests for proposals (RFPs);

• most recently, investment in capital-intensive technology infrastructure, such as satellites, transponders, fiber connectivity, and instructional software development.

It is notable that many of these centralized functions that once would have been carried out in a central system office, with system staff, are now being “contracted out” to one of the system campus, which performs the consolidated service for the system, often through a system of chargebacks to the separate campuses.  A rule of thumb proposed by Terrance McTaggert, who has headed both the Minnesota and Maine systems, is that “[t]he presumption should always be in favor of decentralization to the individual campuses or units.” (McTaggert, 1996, p. 215).

9. To audit and otherwise assess the stewardship of resources, including the assessment of academic programs.

This is a period of intense interest in performance assessment, originating partly in a search for programs and activities to cut or downsize, exacerbated by a general public perception that most colleges and universities are profligate, and further encouraged by the defensive resistance of so many faculty to the call for evidence of outcomes.  But this is a perfect role for the multicampus system, bridging, as it does (or should): (a) the demands of parents and students for indicia of quality; (b) the legitimate need of the public for an accounting of how their taxes are being spent; (c) the frequently exaggerated, but strongly felt and not-to-be-ignored, feelings of governors and legislators, that the academy is full of waste; (d) the fact that the outputs of colleges and universities are multiple and hard to measure, at the very least; and (e) the feelings of faculty and presidents that the academy is misunderstood and an easy target for political demagogy.

 This bridging is not an easy task.  The general public--or at least parents whose children are potential students at public multicampus systems--want affordability and quality.  “Affordability” means tuition that is manageable--which in turn means a level that will force neither significant reduction in current family consumption not excessive student indebtedness.  “Quality” often means prestige, which in turn is reflected by the selectivity or academic preparedness of the entering students.  “Quality” in this sense is most easily assessed by the kinds of measures used by the popular magazines in their rankings of “top colleges.”  These are dominated by average entering SAT scores, high school rank in class, and average time-to-degree—all correlating overwhelmingly with socioeconomic class and the academic preparedness of the entering freshmen class., and having little to do with the college or university’s contribution to student learning.  In the meantime, state governments are looking for measures of efficiency and productivity, and finding their indicators in time-to-degree, student-faculty ratios, and teaching loads, and generation of other-than-tax revenues.

Presidents and faculty are sensitive about the misuse of simplistic performance measures by students, journalist, and politicians alike.  But they often have little to offer as alternative indicators, other than protestations about the difficulty of measuring what they do: protestations, however valid, that often sound limp, self-serving and even arrogant.  So it may be up to the system head to resist the heavy-handed, sometimes misleading and even invalid measures of quality and output, while at the same time urging upon faculty and campus leaders both the validity and the inevitability of some kinds of performance measures.

10. To foster consolidation of those activities that can be done more cost-effectively on a system-wide or consolidated basis.

 Such activities might include, for example: personnel and financial systems development and maintenance, telecommunications and network development and maintenance, overseas and other highly specialized academic programs, legal services, and some purchasing.  It is not necessary for all of the constituent campuses to be part of every consolidation.  Some might be large enough to obtain all possible economies of scale on their own.  Others may have needs that are too specialized.  Still others might have alternative purchasing partners: say, within a region, even in combination with colleges or universities outside of the system.  Nor is it necessary for consolidated services to be centralized; frequently, member campuses can serve as the lead campus, or service provider, for different functions.  But a system board and a central system administration should serve as the goad, facilitator, and broker to provide campuses with the greater efficiency and enriched opportunities that can come from the greater critical mass of system activity.

 Management and Leadership Challenges for Multicampus Systems

The description above of the functions of multicampus systems presumes some continuity in the basic patterns of governance, finance, and curriculum that have guided public higher education--indeed, all of higher education--in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Such patterns include, for example, the delivery of most undergraduate instruction didactically, by lecture and professor-led discussion, in units known as "courses," of a given duration, usually extending 14 or 15 weeks.  Degrees are granted after an accumulation of courses, allowing easy "stop outs" and frequently prolonging the time to degree, as well as permitting easy transfer between institutions.  Legal authority for all decisions in both the public and the private sectors is held by an outside governing board, patterned after the traditions of lay governance borrowed from Scottish, Dutch, and Irish sources by the early American Colonial colleges (Duryea, 1973).  However, traditions of academic governance place de facto responsibility for curriculum, instructional methodology, and key decisions on appointments and promotions in the hand of the faculty.

Many influential leaders--politicians, business and civic leaders, and many within the academy, including both faculty and administrators--believe that these patterns must be fundamentally changed.  Universities and colleges (especially public ones), according to this view, must radically restructure.  Tenure must go, at least in all but a few of the most scholarly institutions.  Most non-instructional services, according to this view, should be out-sourced or otherwise privatized.  Faculty at all institutions must teach much more and much better--a fundamental change in professional lifestyle--and spend less time trying to gain disciplinary recognition and playing at academic governance (that is, getting in the way of good, decisive management.)  Institutions should teach what is demanded by students and employers, not what the faculty is comfortable teaching.  If students (or whoever is paying the bills) are more satisfied with what can be downloaded from Internet deliverers in self-paced instructional modules, then this is the direction that public higher education must go--or lose out to institutions, public or private, that will. Most importantly, according to this view, higher education systems and their leadership will have to facilitate this radical change or stand in the way of progress and become part of the problem, to be radically altered or done away with.

However, if the more current and familiar patterns of higher education are to continue into the foreseeable future, as this author (Johnstone, 1998) believes they will, then systems as described in this chapter will survive, even though the political road may be rough.  System boards and system heads will take much of the blame from those who are deeply unhappy about the course of American higher education and who presume it to be profligate, insufficiently oriented to the undergraduate or to teaching, insufficiently rigorous in standards of both entry and exit, and slow to adapt to new needs and new technologies.

But these charges, while containing important elements of truth, are both overstated and old.  Some of the unhappiness comes from ignorance or misunderstanding: a failure to appreciate how dramatically so many institutions have changed over the last decade, or how overwhelmingly oriented most (not all) faculty at most (not all) institutions are to teaching rather than to research.  Much of the unhappiness also stems from the dilemma of fundamental yet conflicting social and political expectations upon public higher education: access and opportunity, yet with high standards; great teaching and a student orientation, yet a recognition that many parents and students, just like many faculty, are looking mainly for scholarly prestige; a reverence for the liberal arts and learning for its own sake, yet an acknowledgment that most of the public is seeking practical and vocational ends from their higher educational studies.

In this more conservative view, the objectives of public higher education, for all the criticism, and for whatever restructuring will take place over time, will continue to be both multiple and exceedingly hard to measure.  Universities will continue to be both repositories of culture and tradition as well as servants of change and social and political criticism.  The most productive faculty will continue to be so because they operate in a context of freedom and professional autonomy: the very context that inevitably allows a few to be obstinately unproductive.

In this context--a vision of the future not fundamentally different from the present, and quite contrary to those who see, and may even wish for, the end of the university as we have known it--the challenge to system leadership is to defend the fundamentals of the academy while continuing to press for the incremental changes that will make a difference over time.  But there is no single right vision, any more than there is a single reform agenda.  Leadership needs to take the system where is will not necessarily go on its natural trajectory.  For some institutions within some systems, the need may be to raise the standard of scholarship, to award tenure more parsimoniously, and to encourage a more aggressive faculty entrepreneurship.  For other institutions and other systems, the need may be to provide a counter pressure against these very propensities: to turn faculty away from a preoccupation with research and a search for scholarly prestige, and more toward students and to the needs of one’s own institution.

Leadership needs to counter the inherent tendencies toward administrative aggrandizement.  Leadership needs to attend to those faculty, however few, who give the professorate a bad name and jeopardize both faculty governance and the principle of academic freedom.  But in this admittedly conservative view, the greatest single challenge to the leadership of public higher education may be to counter the view that all public colleges and universities need dramatic, truly fundamental, change, without becoming captive to the status quo or losing credibility with governors, legislators, and governing board members.  This is a role best played in the future, as in the recent past, by multicampus systems, properly led.
 

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