What's your currency?

I used to teach a Behavioral Ecology class. Researchers in this field work to understand how animals make decisions. What to eat, where to nest, who to mate with, when to fight, and so on.

Because we're animals, it's hard not to consider these frameworks in our own lives.

These kinds of decisions are hard and important, but they also happen moment after moment. In a given day, there might be hundreds or thousands of such decisions. It helps to have a simple decision tree. We know people make poor choices when decision fatigue sets in, and I suspect the same is true for other animals as well.

A cognitive shortcut for making decisions involves choosing a currency and sticking with it, hoping that the right currency will result in the greatest benefit. (In behavioral ecology theory, it's all about fitness, aka lifetime reproductive success.) The world is a complex place, so choosing a currency to assess and make a decision based on that currency makes sense, and theory expects animals to choose currencies that result in maximal fitness.

So if an ant is wandering the desert and looking for food, what is the currency that decides whether she picks up a piece of food to bring it home? Is it the total amount of energy? The protein content? The distance to the nest? The relative availability? Or it could be a composite measure that might also be affected by the amount of time spent searching. If you go through the (old) literature, you see a lot of folks spending time puzzling over observed behaviors and then doing experiments to understand the currency at work and how it relates to fitness.

While I've spent a lot of time puzzling over how faculty choose their currencies, and how these choices change based on the amount of resources and the reward structure of the institution, now that I've had the dubious thrill of working in academic administration for several years (albeit always, technically, as faculty), intersecting with folks at all different types of institutions within and beyond higher ed, I've been able to study the currencies used by the people who hold the purse strings on our universities.

I've come away with what I consider to be a shocking discovery. Shocking to myself, at least. In my institution, with only a couple of sociopathic exceptions, everybody in administration is using the same currency. That doesn't mean that everybody gets along perfectly, because the ways that they assess the environment are different, but everybody is trying to measure the same thing and work to maximize that one thing.

What's the currency being maximized? Student success.

Without fail (except for the genuine sociopaths), it's student success that everybody in administration is working to maximize. Whooda thunk it!

I doubt it's this way elsewhere, but I do suspect that at many campuses that are extremely resource-limited—which includes most RPUs—this is the case. Because our raison d'être is student success and social mobility. Since we are so underresourced and can't do much else, then if you're in charge of running the place, you make sure that you're at the very least trying your best to meet your fundamental mission that you're charged with.

I find this laser-beam focus on student success in our administration to be both extremely heartening and painfully problematic.

The heartening aspect should be obvious. While plenty of folks like to attribute institutional problems to administrative backstabbing, bloat, and misplaced priorities, I just don't see that. There are plenty of ineffective leaders, but it's not for a lack of heartfelt intentions. (Even when the VP in charge of a non-academic division goes way over budget and signs on to a series of unwise long-term contracts and long-term commitments, and deeply exacerbates an already fraught budgetary crisis, it's not because they aren't focused on student success. They simply had a ruinously bad assessment of the conditions necessary for student success and inflated the import of their own budgetary allocation.) While good intentions aren't enough to make effective leaders, it's a big win when people running the university can all agree that students come first. That's a look under the hood that I didn't expect when I got into this years ago.

But here's the painfully problematic part: No university will thrive if student success is the only currency. When we're in a budget crisis—and really, we always truly are in a budget crisis even in good times—and you've got to decide where resources need to go, and the purse strings always choose some version of "student success," then the university will stagnate.

I would hope that all of my colleagues in the sciences, who have chosen to become professors, will agree that student success is a very high priority. But if student success of college students was our only motivation, let's face it, we would have chosen a different career path. We would have gone into academic advising, or taught at a community college, or become scholars of educational research, or done 1000 other things before getting a PhD in our discipline and going through all the hassles of what it means to be a professor. We'd have chosen practically anything else other than running our own research laboratories in teaching-focused institutions. This is a hard thing to do and we do it because we want to do research. Not exclusively, but as a part of our job. We pay a relatively high financial and personal cost to make this happen, considering how much more we'd get paid in industry and how annoying it is to deal with the hurdles of doing research in institutions that aren't quite prepared for us to do what our work requires.

No administrator who is looking for the biggest student success bang for the buck is going to choose developing and maintaining a resource-intensive STEM research lab. Even if we do bring in a lot of grant money, it still doesn't cover the cost of our operations. (Don't believe this? Glad to do the math with y'all later.)

We've become professors because we want to do scholarship in our fields. While there are some administrators who aren't happy about it, the vitality of scholarship at a university is foundational for institutional success. Yes, research is good for student training and improving student outcomes, but as an activity itself, the scholarship of the faculty is required for every university to sustain and grow.

Our universities are glad when we succeed in research despite the adverse conditions we work in, but how often are they investing in us throughout our careers to make sure our scholarship is sustained and continues to grow?

This is where it's extremely painful. I've been in hundreds of hours of meetings with administrators figuring out how to make our university thrive and address emerging challenges. Has anybody ever—and I mean ever—brought up the issue of faculty research as a mechanism for student success? Nope. (I will make an exception for the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research and their staff, of course.)

It just never comes up in conversation. We can talk about student success 1000 different ways, but what about faculty success in research? That's a huge NOPE. It hurts my heart, considering how I am as much a researcher as I am a teacher.

It does come up in conversation when we talk about budget. Because increasing indirect cost recovery can address budgetary concerns, but even that conversation has been relatively rare. When times are tough and money is hard to come by in a teaching-focused institution, how can you advocate for growing faculty research when student success is the currency of everybody holding the purse strings?

When I started academic blogging, I often reflected on how there was a hard line between teaching-focused institutions and research institutions. Even R2s and SLACs care about one far more than the other unless they're in the middle of a phase shift. Now I think I get how and why this happens. It's simply a matter of following the money.