We Operate on Trust

Universities regularly complain about the regulations under which they operate. We attribute the growth of the nonacademic bureaucracy to the cost of compliance with government regulations, and explain our rising costs by saying that we have to pass those costs along to the consumer. For example, in the American Council on Education report "Putting College Costs in Context, the section "Burdensome and costly federal regulations drive college prices higher":

• Given the range of their activities, colleges and universities are among the most heavily regulated entities in America. With the exception of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, all federal agencies are involved in regulating some aspect of higher education.
• In recent years, the burden imposed on colleges and universities by federal regulation has become increasingly complex, onerous, and costly. In 1998, the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education highlighted government regulation as one of five major cost-drivers in higher education.
• Regulations impose a heavy toll on colleges and universities in the form of additional staff, increased staff development and training, additional paperwork, creation of computer systems and software to support record-keeping requirements, and higher legal fees. These regulations, in turn, increase operating costs. For instance, there are more than 7,000 regulations associated with Title IV student aid programs alone. 

This is all true where dollars change hands and in certain other business processes. And yet our core work with students and faculty is little affected by any regulation. When a college professor teaches, no one is watching and there is no audit or quality assessment of the teaching. (Don't even think of suggesting that student evaluations such as Harvard's Q play that role.) When we grade papers, nobody checks that we are doing it fairly, or in fact that we are reading the papers at all. When we assign the grading work to teaching fellows, we do little if any followup to check on them. Even modest measures to improve grading equity (such as the practice, common in Computer Science courses, of having the same grader grade an entire problem rather than a particular set of students) are seen as extraordinarily inventive. At Harvard, professors are allowed to spend something like a day a week, or 20% of our total effort, on outside activities (typically, remunerative consulting activities). We do a certain amount of self-reporting, but nobody is really watching. Because we operate on trust, there is little checking on any of these activities. We generally try, in the hiring process, to employ trustworthy people, and then leave them alone. We expect they will ask their peers and seniors if they don't know what to do in an unexpected situation, or can't handle the workload. Academics don't expect to be treated like bank tellers, who expect to have cameras on them all the time and to have their work audited daily. They also like to think that the university administration is trustworthy and will not act in the mistrustful way the managers of bank must necessarily act. This system has its problems. A student who has been cheated in grading has essentially no recourse. At Harvard, the FAS faculty handbook states,

Both undergraduate and graduate students may request that an instructor review a grade that has been received and may also ask to consult with the Chair of the department or committee offering the course. However, final authority for the assignment of grades rests with the course head.

So a student dissatisfied with a grade cannot even hope that a department chair will overrule the professor. The buck stops with the professor, period. Similarly with decisions of Harvard's Administrative Board. There is a way to request reconsideration by the Board itself, but the appeal process asks an outside body only to review the fidelity to procedure, not the considered judgment of the Board. The immunity of many of our academic processes to outside review and reversal places a moral burden on members of the academy very different from the work conditions of, say, workers in the financial industries. It is why I tend to react so strongly to abuses of professorial autonomy, especially when they are costly to the undergraduates, who are at the bottom of the power structure. It is why the reports of professional malfeasance in Gov 1310 are so stinging---withou