This article was originally published in the September 2024 print edition.
At the end of last year’s faculty budget presentation — featuring a meticulously crafted slide deck full of data, graphs and figures — a microphone was passed along to faculty members for a brief question-and-answer session. Concerns ranged from the need for more academic support positions such as Teaching Assistants to those about the tenure cap and administrative bloat. Almost all inquiries were addressed by VP of Finance David DeSwert, whose catch-all response was something along how we are “moving along according to our strategic planning.”
Strategic planning has been a cornerstone of American higher education for the past thirty to forty years. Strategic planning, initially known as strategic management, emerged after World War II as businesses aimed to adapt the military strategies that had proven successful during the war to the corporate sector. You analyze your strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats — this is called a SWOT analysis, by the way — and you get rid of the strengths and weaknesses and take advantage of your strengths and opportunities. This is typically the kind of work done by a consulting firm, which they then nicely package into a PowerPoint slide deck.
Recently, President Sarah Willie-LeBreton sent a campus-wide email inviting the student body to participate in “join [them] in Strategic Planning discussions.” This process involves Smith’s planning partner Wellspring Consulting, a consulting firm hired to assist in decision-making. Because, of course, who could understand the needs of a liberal arts college better than a consulting firm?
What has the consultocracy — a system where decisions, policies or significant aspects of management are heavily influenced by external consultants — done for American higher education? D’Youville University is a private university founded in 1908 in Buffalo, New York. Here, you can no longer major in English, history, philosophy and religious studies following the school’s administration’s decision to hire Gray Associates, a consulting firm specialized in helping cash-strapped schools make “data-informed program decisions.” Students at D’Youville reported that “the consultants were on campus for a month or two […] they talked about the university portfolio as if they were talking about stocks. They also did what they call a market analysis of different majors.”
Last year, West Virginia University (WVU) announced a plan to eliminate 9 percent of their majors, all of its foreign language programs and 16 percent of its full time faculty members. This decision was also followed by WVU’s administration’s decision to hire rpk GROUP, a consulting firm with “significant experience and expertise in higher education transformation and academic portfolio optimization.” Even more recently, WVU decided to eliminate other programs that include math, literature, linguistics, jazz, ceramics and creative writing. WVU is now deeply in debt and under the sway of market-obsessed consultants.
Both of the colleges cited above who were experiencing significant budget cuts were indeed cash-strapped. However, Smith has a $2.1 billion endowment — enough to sustain itself for a long time. Yet, the administration’s strategic planning efforts have already resulted in decisions like cutting funding for humanities research labs and closing the Cushing/Emerson dining hall.
Faculty and students alike have noticed that these administrative decisions often seem to mirror the kinds of recommendations one would expect from a corporate consultancy: cut “inefficient” programs, streamline operations, reduce expenses and focus on metrics like student demand or market potential. But education isn’t a business, and the value of the programs and services the student body needs can’t be measured solely by the numbers on a spreadsheet.
The creeping influence of consultants in higher education signals a worrying trend. The role of faculty governance and student input, once pillars of decision-making at higher education institutions, is increasingly being sidelined in favor of outside expertise. Strategic planning efforts and committees, with their data-driven, one-size-fits-all approach, reduce the unique challenges and values of an academic institution into something that resembles a corporate balance sheet.
What’s lost in this pursuit of “efficiency” and “optimization” is the core value of a liberal arts education: the fostering of critical thinking, creativity and intellectual curiosity. These qualities cannot be reduced to market trends or job placement statistics. They are essential to the mission of higher education, especially at an institution like Smith, which prides itself on nurturing independent thinkers and leaders. Smith must decide whether to remain a place of intellectual growth and innovation or succumb to the pressures of a corporate mindset that devalues the very essence of higher education.
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