Higher Education 23: 209-214, 1992.

Book reviews

Jill Johnes and Jim Taylor (1990). Performance Indicators in Higher Education. SRHE/Open University Press. 198 pp. NP. Paperback.

There is likely to be an increase in the numbers of performance indicators to guide the allocation of government grants to institutions of higher education and to provide those institutions with incentives to make more effective use of their grants. When the Chairman of the UGC announced that indicators of research per- formance would be used to guide the allocation of grants to universities he expressed the hope that one day the UGC would be able to make similar use of indicators of teaching performance.

There is a great danger that poor performance indicators will be used to guide allocations of grants and provide criteria of success in their use. Jill Johnes and Jim Taylor, of the University of Lancaster, have written a very timely and valuable book on the problems of constructing indicators of institutional performance. Their method of assessing the quality of some 'popular performance indicators' is to 'compare each university's outputs with outputs that we would expect each university to produce given its particular mix of inputs', and that procedure is used to construct new performance indicators.

Expenditure per student from general funds is sometimes used as a performance indicator. There are however big differences between types of subjects in such expenditure and big differences between universities in the distribution of students between them. The authors show that 70% of inter-university differences in expenditure per student can be explained by differences in the subject mix. (They add another 10 per cent for differences in student/staff ratios but such differences are an important factor in cost differences between subjects, and their method of calculation does not prevent double counting.) In any case, expenditure per student is a measure of input that only becomes a valid performance indicator when universities with significantly different expenditure per student produce the same or nearly the same outputs, and currently that would be impossible to establish.

Two other indicators assessed by Johnes and Taylor are the percentage of students who do not complete (non-completors push up costs per graduate), and degree classes. In both cases adjustments for differences in the subject mix reduces differences between universities, and adjustments validated by regression analysis for differences in the A level scores on entrants reduce the differences still further. There is a further problem referred to by the authors, and highlighted by some recent sharp increases in 'first' and 'upper second' in some universities, that the use of degree results as a direct or indirect factor in the differentiation of grants may generate an upward trend in degree results.

Employment six months after graduation also needs to be adjusted for differences

210 Higher Education 23, 1992.

in the subject mix before it has much significance for inter-university comparison, and as the authors point out, to be of use in comparing the contribution of different universities to 'manpower needs' the useful information has to be gathered years not months after graduation.

For research, one popular indicator is the level of research grants and contracts from non-UGC/UFC sources per member of academic staff. Johnes and Taylor calculate that half of the large inter-university differences were due to differences in the subject mix, but the remaining differences are large and in some measure a legitimate indicator of performance. However, these grants and contracts financed only about 40 per cent of research in 1987/88. We do not know how individual universities split their general fund expenditure between teaching and research, but the UGC has made general estimates for each cost centre. By assuming that each university made such allocations it would be possible to make a better estimate of research input/output relations by universities. From 1991/92 onwards the separate UFC grants for teaching and research and the forshadowed audit requirement will provide much better information for statistical analysis.

The authors then rank universities by their corrected performance indicators for non-completion rates, degree results, employment (6 months after graduation), the percentage of graduates proceeding to further education, and the UFC research ratings, and show that no university has performed either consistently well or badly across all indicators. In the absence of any obviously sound weighting system they did not attempt to create a composite index.

Johnes and Taylor have posed serious questions about the usefulness and practicality of performance indicators, although as they write they have only scratched the surface of an immensely difficult problem, their scratching is of a kind that should encourage others to join with them in digging deeper.

Bruce Williams University of London

R. M. O. Pritchard (1991). The End of Elitism? The Democratisation of the West German University System. ISBN 0854966617. s Hardback.

In 1986, following long discussion in the Bund-L~inder-Kommission, the Bundestag passed a Framework Law for higher education. To promote more equal opportunities for higher education, credit transfer, greater co-operation in teaching and research between academic staff from the theory-based and practice based sectors of higher education, and a more economical use of resources, the Framework Law set comprehensive institutions of higher education as the model, while leaving the L~inder to decide whether the institutions were to be unitary, federal or collaborative. The Law provided for representatives of professors, other academic staff, students and general staff to be members of central committees (as

211

was already the position in some Lfinder), and for change in academic organisation to reduce the powers of full professors and to make all teachers full members of ' the community of scholars and scientists'. In 1985 this Framework Law was amended to remove the paragraph that made comprehensive institutions the basic model, and to modify the provisions for university democracy.

Why the Framework Law? What effect did it have on higher education? Why was the law amended so drastically in 1985? In this book, Dr Rosalind Pritchard of the university of Ulster at Coleraine, provides her answers to these questions.

The concept of a community of scholars and scientists had been undermined by the growth of a large sub-professional tier of research and teaching staff, usually untenured, and the monopolisation of power and influence by tenured professors, and the reliance on 'the unity of research and teaching' became progressively unsatisfactory for students after 1946 as a consequence of inadequate buildings and equipment, a great increase in student/staff ratios and a dilution of staff quality.

In the post-war period there was also, as in other countries, a shift in Government attitudes to higher education. It was seen as a factor of growing importance in economic growth and strength in international trade. The big growth in expenditure increased government interest in economical use of resources, while the desire to exploit university research for economic growth led to a greater interest in inter- disciplinary research and in what it hoped would be a productive mixture of the theoretical and practical traditions in different sectors of higher education. Dr Pritchard implies the importance of the Wissenschaftsrat - the most important German advisory committe on higher education - the SDS - the official student group of the SDP until expelled - the organisation of the non-tenured academics - which called for the integration of all third-level institutions - the student revolt of 1968 and the OECD review of German Education policy in 1972.

Because Dr Pritchard is an enthusiast for the unitary model of comprehensive institutions of higher education on the grounds that it is more democratic she concentrates on that in her treatment of what followed the 1976 Law. That severely limits the range of her analysis for only in Hesse and North Rhine Westphalia (both Lfinder with SDP Governments), were her 'comprehensive universities' established. She provides a very good account of their achievements and of the continuing problems created by amalgamations. She makes much of the students' satisfaction with comprehensive universities, but accepts that their favourable staff/student ratios and relatively small size are part of the explanation. That points to a problem not explored by Dr Pritchard - that her institutions are multi-level but far from comprehensive in their offerings.

Why the 1985 amendments? The author's answers to that question are the least satisfactory part of the book: 'With the oil crisis of 1973-4 the financial climate deteriorated dramatically', the major obstacle to successful merger was the opposition of academic staff in the traditional universities who 'were able to harness the Constitutional Court to the defence of their interests'. The Constitutional Court had ruled as early as 1973 that in accordance with the Basic Law, university teachers must be guaranteed a form of organisation that would facilitate their scholarly activities. The reasons why her com~'ehcnsivc m~iversities were not totally

212 Higher Education 23, 1992.

successful she concludes is 'attributable more to factors inherent in the larger society than in the institutions themselves'. Whether the Social Democrats would have stayed with the 1976 policy is itself a matter of doubt.

Bruce Williams University of London

Page Smith (1990). Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America. New York: Viking. $19.95 Hardback.

Distinguished historian, Page Smith, has given us a new volume entitled Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America. Knowing Professor Smith's provocative, irreverent, sometimes idiosyncratic approach to America's past - and with that blazing title - here is the promise, I think, of a rousing new history of the American college and university. Here at last is a scholar who will pierce the pious cant of so much of the existing effort in the field. But, regrettably, this is not the case. So much for the Rorschach effect of a provocative title. Approximately a third of the volume, it is true, is an historical sketch of the higher learning in America, chronologically ordered, from the Reformation's first fruits to the late twentieth century's decline and fall of the Western Civilization curriculum. But it is just that, a sketch. The remainder of the book is taken up with a review of issues of today, comment on the ravages of secularism, giantism, scientism, and so on, in the author's own highly personal style. Smith has rounded up the usual suspects and given them a kind of op-ed treatment. These essays are, nevertheless, lively, sharp and often very insightful. A systematic analysis of the current corporate, market driven enterprise called higher education, it is not.

In his opening chapter, 'Mapping the Desert,' Smith outlines his major themes beginning with a problem he terms 'academic fundamentalism'. The spirit is impoverished, he writes, by the academy's refusal to recognize any truth beyond that contained in current professorial dogma. An important book on Populism, by illustration, includes no mention of evangelical Protestantism, the author explaining that he is not interested in religion. 'He was a typical academic fundamentalist,' Smith comments: 'he doubtless thought that by omitting any reference to religion he was being 'scientific'.' The dominance of science, or more accurately 'scientism,' is in fact another of Smith's major themes. The control of discourse even in the humanities and the arts by so-called scientific method has meant the universities no longer address 'the Big Questions,' the meaning of humanity and virtue, the love of truth and justice, of faith and spirituality.

Yet another theme is the essentially worthless nature of most academic research, the empty mediocrity of much of the monographic publication in any field. This sad state of affairs suggests the related problem of the flight from teaching on the part of faculty. Academic prestige is measured in fact by how little actual teaching one is

213

obligated to do. The faculty's quest for tenure, that secure safe haven, therefore creates not only a vast body of useless research and writing, but is accomplished by evading the classroom, on time stolen directly from students. The disintegration of the disciplines, another theme, seems to follow inevitably from the emphasis on original research and the search for tenure. The saftey of specialization has led to fragmenting of disciplines to the point that there can be little communcation among people even within the same discipline, much less across fields. And in a final theme, Smith explores the problems that have followed from the rise of 'big-time' collegiate sports. Not a frivolous matter, he maintains, the corruption of university athletes is a reflection on the moral failure of the higher learning in America.

Smith has, indeed, 'mapped a desert.' He then sets out to explore its desolate reaches, first in an historical sketch of the 350 years or more since the Harvard founding to the multiversity of today. Then in a series of topical essays, he surveys the landscape, from Derrida to today's youth culture, from the education of Vice Presindent Quayle ('booze and broads' in his father's judgement) to the current collapsed state of academic philosophy. It is a remarkable range of topics with often considerable depth of insight on the state of higher education today. Smith brings a kind of streetsmart awareness to the issues he explores. In the essay on 'The Inhuman Humanities,' I found his comment on the study of history particular illuminating. He notes that the anti-historical spirit of the times extends by and large to the historians themselves. 'They seem to wish to use history to denigrate both the past and the present,' he writes. 'They presume to triumph over history by explaining it in terms that suit their ideological requirements.' The result, he concludes, is ' . . . that the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the culture, the devil, call it what you will, was able to use academic history to destroy history, or at least rob it for generations of its potency and relevance.'

Is there no hope for reviving this flagging spirit of the higher learning? At one point, early on, Smith suggests that the hope of the future may lie with the community colleges: . . . 'free for the most part of the snobbish pursuit of the latest academic fads. . , free also of the unremitting pressure to publish or perish... They carry out their mission with spirit and 61an.' But thereafter he makes no further mention of such colleges. The focus of the work is in fact squarely on the elites, the ivies and the like. Hope then is problematic. In his summing up Smith states that one of his 'laws' is that, 'when the organizational structure of an institution of higher education is indistinguishable from that of a major corporation, the spirit dies.' For most of the colleges and universities across the land, struggling in these times of ever rising costs and expanding budgets, and demanding ever more acute managements, we can only await the obituaries.

John Hardin Best, Professor The Pennsylvania State University

214 Higher Education 23, 1992.

Elchanan Cohn and Terry Geske (1990). The Economics of Education, Third Edition. Elmsford, New York, and Oxford, UK: Pergamon. 430 pp. s Hardback.

This is a thoroughly revised version of a text which was first published in 1975 and which has been much in use for studies in the economics of education. The new edition has had to allow for the much enlarged literature in this field and for significant changes in recent research emphases, for example away from cost-benefit studies and towards input-output analysis. The resulting text is up-to-date, comprehensive, clear, and very readable.

The application to the world of education of economic concepts and principles is fraught with difficulties, with a mix of attempts to quantify the [seemingly] unquantifiable, attempts to apply financial and profit-related considerations to an area where they had been deemed inappropriate, attempts to include the effects of spill-over benefits sometimes so large as to dominate calculations, and attempts to allow for widely differing economic and social circumstances in various countries. Many educationists continue to be openly hostile to the intervention of economists. Yet with education systems coming increasingly under scrutiny, certainly through- out the developed world, with finance for education often decreasing in real terms, and with falling school rolls so that schools and colleges increasingly come to compete for scarce numbers of students, education became a field where increased attention from economists became inevitable.

Increasingly, economists have had much to offer to education and in recent years the development of economic policies in many countries has drawn on principles derived from economic thought.

Cohn and Geske bring much of this out in this book. They write very clearly and explain often complex concepts in an accessible and straightforward manner. Their approach is clearly aimed at students in the USA in that many of their examples, and most of their statistics, relate to that country. There are also, however, a good many references to situations in other countries and tables of comparative data, and there are numerous good references to the developing countries.

The major revisions of education in the UK in recent years, in which economic principles predominated, should have been worth a reference but do not seem to have been included. The detailed two-page table (No. 11.4) of school finance systems in the USA could perhaps have been related to similar systems in other countries.

But these are relatively minor quibbles. This is a very worthwhile text, especially suitable for American students, but also potentially of much benefit to students elsewhere.

J. R. Hough Loughborough University