I could write the shortest online commentary of my entire life just replying to Len Gutkin’s interview with Stanley Fish whose headline is “Why Is Stanley Fish Teaching at Florida’s New College?”. The reply? What, you have to ask?
Let’s do something more illuminating today. I was regrettably bad-tempered after meeting with some consultants this week and I sent an email about it that matched my mood, an email which would have been better as a casual poke-your-head-in-the-recipient’s-office-door side remark. The opposite of “this could have been an email”, I guess.
Part of what happens when you’re a long-serving faculty member is that you’ve not only seen some of the same mistakes repeated over and over again (including by yourself) but in the 21st Century American academy, you’ve generally seen some of those mistakes get worse over time in consistent but also mysterious ways. For me, at least, both at my own institution and as an observer of others, this feeling is especially pronounced when it comes to the use of outside consultancies.
People are pattern-finders and story-tellers, so it’s easy to omit the contradicting examples when you identify a trend. In this case, for example, I have to remind myself that I had a very positive interaction with a consultant who was working with our library just a few years ago. On the other hand, that was an exception that proves the rule in two respects. First, the consultants in this case were very unusually inside of higher education and the person they sent was very knowledgeable about libraries and faculty relationships to libraries. Second, I found out later that at least one of the other consultancies that responded to the original RFP that almost got the contract was a firm who’d been here before that knows very little about higher education and typically sends representatives who are in their 30s with no professional understanding of higher education or much else besides the excessive use of PowerPoint slides and SurveyMonkey. So it was a close call in that respect.
What’s the issue with consultancies in higher education, then? I see six major problems:
Finding out what consultants charge is nearly impossible both in general and in specific, but as the use of consultancies has escalated, it’s hard not to conclude that a meaningful proportion of annual operating budgets goes to consultants in a way that can’t be traced, discussed or reviewed except by the people who decide to commission consultancies. Who, not incidentally, end up also being the people who get to decide all by themselves afterwards whether a particular consultancy provided services that were worth the price. For all the numerous times I’ve been asked to meet with a consultant, I’ve only been asked once, informally, whether the consultant was worth it—and that’s because I warned the person who commissioned their services that the consultant they were bringing was going to be heedlessly provocative and largely clueless about small liberal-arts colleges, which turned out to be true. Even wealthy institutions operate these days with a scarcity mindset, so it’s an affront when there’s a prominent aspect of ongoing operations that seems to be fundamentally excluded from that sort of examination.
It’s hard to escape the cynical conclusion that a substantial majority of consultant engagements are intended to shelter administrative heads and mid-ranking staff, or sometimes trustees, from the risks of policy advocacy or leadership within their institutions. When staff know there’s a proposal that the entire community will dislike but that they’re determined to put forward, hiring a consultant to make the proposal allows two things to happen: first, the staff in favor of the proposal can safely gauge just how intense the opposition will be. If it’s too intense, they can generously step in and affirm the opposition, saving everybody from that bad idea (that they originally hoped to implement). Second, now at least the idea is “in the system”, and can be incrementally worked into ongoing planning, waiting for a day when everybody has their guard down. “It was a recommendation” legitimates the idea and yet keeps the policy as a kind of immaculate conception that has no fathers or mothers within the current institution. Sometimes the idea even passes as a legacy to staff who weren’t around during the initial consultancy and have forgotten where it came from.
What makes this a bit worse is that sometimes consultants are used to deflect responsibility even for recommendations that are vague or harmless, pointing out how much risk-adversity that many mid-level staff in higher education understandably have developed. (E.g., they’re never given credit for good initiatives or outcomes, and are frequently blamed for bad outcomes even if they’re not really responsible for them.) It’s a hell of thing to be spending money and pulling substantial amounts of time from the community for an analysis if it’s being done to deflect any claim of responsibility for even the most inoffensive proposals.I haven’t seen too much of the next issue at my own institution over the last 30 years, but across higher education, there’s an undercurrent of quid pro quo for administrative professionals following from commissioning consultancies. That is to say that one of the major professional pathways for staff looking to move up within an area of specialized knowledge or experience is to move from working for a university into senior partnership at a consultancy (or even being a principal of their own firm). It’s not unlike the pipeline from work within formal politics into lobbying. Faculty generally don’t circulate in that pipeline and so are generally unsympathetic to this purpose, perhaps as much as staff are unsympathetic to the resources devoted to subsidizing faculty research or to the functioning of tenure. This might change if faculty were more commonly engaged as consultants—more on that in a moment.
The quality of work from most consultants in higher education is just poor. Among other things: waste people’s time by making a huge show of talking to everyone about bland top-level already-known facts, know nothing about the institution they’re engaging, know nothing about higher ed generally, have almost no training in serious research methodologies of any kind—they’re not organizational sociologists, they’re not ethnographers, they’re not statisticians, they’re not social psychologists or behavioral economists, etc. They just speak a kind of formless managerialese that isn’t even specific to higher education and have an expertise that is largely about slidedeck presentations and conducting meetings that use stickies and whiteboards. As Bogdanich and Forsythe’s recent book When McKinsey Comes To Town points out, some of the bigger consultancies frequently resell their mediocre products to different clients with just the client names swapped out because their recommendations aren’t in fact dependent on any of the data they collect, including the time-wasting (and billable) exercises with community members. All of this especially rubs faculty the wrong way because they are highly trained researchers and know how much is missing (or unsupported or badly collected) from those reports. We often end up feeling like Indiana Jones asking federal agents who exactly are the “top men” examining the Ark of the Covenant—we end up reading or engaging the outputs of consultants who are speaking right into our professional lives and supposedly drawing on something like our research expertise while palpably understanding neither.
The consultative models used by most consultancies waste a lot of time that no one in charge ever credits or audits as a cost when considering whether to engage the consultancy. And it is time that is given nevertheless—the fear being that if you don’t show up, the consultancy is free to say whatever it likes about that aspect of their remit—even though that time typically informs nothing in the output. Half the time what consultants are branding as “consultative fact-finding” is just covering for the reality that they haven’t done their homework about their client and they’re billing the client for that. Compounding the waste-of-time feeling, when consultancies collect information, data or analysis that isn’t part of the direct remit that they were engaged to deliver (a charge that is often only known to the people that sent out the RFP), it may make it into some version of the final property, often much reduced, and then that’s it. It’s lost and forgotten, often almost instantly. I get really weird looks from administrators sometimes when I mention past consultant reports in detail, sometimes even those commissioned while they were around—as if to say, “Did that actually happen?” or “Who actually remembers those?”
The economist Mariana Mazzucatto has become known for her critique of the overuse of consultancies by governments, particularly the really big and powerful ones like McKinsey, on the grounds that this overreliance leads to a loss of institutional capacity. When the consultants finish their work, they leave behind a government whose civil servants know much less about their own operations, about the structure of the government as a whole, and less about the country they’re meant to serve. I think the same is true in higher education. Rather than providing insights that would always be beyond the scope of what a university administration could know about its own work, consultants often end up substituting for the work of an actually existing office and the people who work within that office. When the consultants finish, the staffing in that office now know less than they used to and are less practiced at doing the work they’re assigned to do. The data they produce is a consumable that sits in a file rather than in the heads of people doing the work. Experience that would stay in the room instead leaves forever. Over time, you end up with an institution that learns less and less about itself and is more and more vulnerable to further loss of capacity on turnover in leadership or in mid-ranking staff.
In my own institution, there’s a sequence that I think of as exemplifying all of these problems. In 2013, we had a significant episode of student activism that converged from multiple directions that uncovered a lot of unhappiness but also uncertainty among students, staff and faculty who weren’t entirely sure how to process all of the criticisms. The following year one of the deans decided to commission a campus “climate survey” (e.g., how people were feeling about one another) from an outside consultancy, a very small firm where the principal was the main person engaged in that work. The principal consultant gave a briefing on the findings late in the academic year, by which point the dean who had commissioned the study had already moved on (and is now a consultant herself). The faculty who went to the briefing pointed out some substantial statistical errors in the study which were later corrected, but we also heard some very interesting things from the consultant about how we compared to other institutions. Those things, unfortunately, were not in the final report because the consultant didn’t want to put them on paper.
In the next year, the institution decided to engage another consultant to help the community process the results of the climate survey. The next consultants didn’t reference the climate survey very much (to the point of being confused about what we were talking about in the faculty-centered meeting) but also took broad feedback from various campus constituencies about everything, almost none of which went into their final report, which was focused really only on one major recommendation, which was to build a new student center as a way to address some of the negative feelings within the student body that had emerged out of 2013.
Then we hired another consultant firm in the following year to study building a student center and reconstructing the dining facilities, which were increasingly not meeting the needs of students. Everything else from the climate survey, several consultants back, was now forgotten at the institutional level.
I may be exaggerating a bit there in the sense that various aspects of all of those reports were picked out by our existing shared governance structures and incorporated into their work, and individual administrative leaders also implemented some of what had been discussed in the reports. But that was usually because they were already talking about those issues and imagining those solutions: it is easy to imagine a counter-factual history of those years where no consultants came and we’d have all of the same policies and initiatives that we adopted. The need for a student center, for example, had been talked about for years, and the options for building it were already fairly well understood.
I sound here like I’m resolutely anti-consultant in all cases. Not at all. There are some really well-established streams of consultancy that I think are necessary and productive and that avoid most of these issues. One of the most prominent are recruiting firms. While it’s true that most of the recruiting firms tend to reinforce a kind of insularity in how we imagine particular leadership jobs, making it hard to be someone who comes from a different professional pathway or who has an unusual take on leadership, they handle a lot of the work of building a competitive candidate pool that would be exceptionally difficult for any institution to do on its own. I think there are specialized consultancies in certain domains that do a great job of bringing resources into decision-making that most institutions couldn’t possibly have on their own.
More importantly, I think there are things consultancies could be that they’re not because the people who engage them aren’t thinking clearly about when and why you should want one and because existing consultancies aren’t positioned to offer the services that might be really valuable.
What a consultant to higher education should offer is the following:
Direct experiential knowledge of higher education relevant to the charge given the consultant.
Experts with serious training in relevant research methods and practices.
A clear sense of how their services go beyond what an institution could do for itself and a situational sense of when those services are necessary.
Providing a bespoke product where the consultants already understand the distinctiveness and identity of the client before they ever start the work. No “Hey Charlie, get me a Model 22-B Close Four Humanities Departments and Build a New Gym off the shelf, willya?”
In some domains—admissions, student affairs and residential life, DEI, endowment management, fiscal procedures—it’s not hard to satisfy the first condition. There are a lot of people in consultancies who have direct experience in those areas. In other domains, you’re out of luck. The vast number of consultancies that want to advise universities on pedagogy, curriculum and the use of educational technology in instruction almost never have faculty or former faculty serving as principals or as leads on a particular contract. You also generally will not find consultants who are deeply expert in higher education’s history and culture overall, who really see its big picture in a way that’s differentiated from other institutions, corporations and organizations.
In most cases, you’re absolutely out of luck if you want consultants with deep expert training in any single major research methodology who can produce work that will stand up to expert scrutiny by faculty, let alone hoping for an analysis that is usefully multi-modal.
Most importantly, existing consultancies have very little sense of when an outsider perspective is genuinely needed in response to particular circumstances—and unfortunately, often, administrators seeking consultancies also don’t think very clearly about that point. What would be especially valuable—and is essentially unavailable from most existing consultancies—is when you need an insider-outsider: a team that intimately understands the issues and structures involved in a difficult problem but who are not parties to that problem and have no prior stake in its resolution.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time with a close colleague and we’ve come up with a business plan that argues that what higher education really needs is a faculty-staffed, faculty-run consultancy. There are so many faculty who have deep insight into how higher education operates. Some of them are tenured faculty with a lot of administrative service who have elected not to go into a leadership role. Others are faculty who have worked on contingent contracts in multiple institutions and whose labor and expertise is being under-utilized. Working with faculty immediately provides a wide range of highly trained research expertise for the asking. Faculty participate already in consultancy-adjacent roles like external reviews or being on assessment committees—with a bit of work, that can shift into a more distanced kind of insider-outsider approach to a situation.
Administrative wariness towards faculty might make them hesitate to bring in such a consultancy (even though many staff and administrative leaders work perfectly fine with faculty on their own campuses) but that wariness might be a positive force in reframing the general demand for consultants. E.g., if you don’t just turn to a consultancy to provide a bland managerial endorsement of an already-decided goal, and instead are looking for expert researchers who also know a lot already, you might be more precise about the circumstances when you need that. Even for RFPs where you wouldn’t turn to a faculty-led consultancy, completely legitimately, you might start to develop a more demanding view of the services you’re buying, the needs you’re fulfilling, and the quality of outcomes you expect.
And I wouldn’t mind if this adjustment in attitude, and the accompanying adjustment in staffing, spread into consultancies and ed-tech firms more generally. I repeatedly get emails from an ed-tech company that is asking me to fill out surveys to help them understand what services faculty need to support their pedagogy. (Unsurprisingly, the most recent ones are focused on AI.) Every time I get an email from them, I go off to look at their company webpage and look at each and every employee listed in the “About Us” link. It’s about 35 people, from the boardroom right down to the mailroom, more or less, and the only person who has ever been inside of a classroom is one guy who taught a couple of secondary-school classes in China a long time ago. That’s it. I don’t need to fill out the surveys until those guys want to invest in their own business by hiring a lead consultant or product lead who has actually taught people. Then they might be asking questions that could lead to services that might be worth the money.
You would think in a neoliberal age that I wouldn’t have to say, “At least make sure you’re getting value back from value paid”. Or “At least hire one person who knows what they’re talking about.” But that’s the thing about our moment: only some people have to prove that they’re using money wisely, and sometimes the easiest way to sell a service is paradoxically the hardest road for those sellers to take.
A funny thing about observation 1 (which is sadly true) is that in the traditional economics literature on the choice for a firm to “buy” an input (hire a consultant) or “make” the input (assign a faculty committee to make recommendations) is that an *advantage* of “buy” is supposed to be “well, at least we know exactly what it will cost”, whereas “make” has all sorts of hard-to-measure opportunity costs
Man how do I get on that gravy train?