I will confess that I am always amused when economists or social scientists formalize something most of us already understood, as if they had discovered it. In this case, I think two economists, David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, have done us all a favor with their report “How have universities survived for nearly a millennium.”  They argue that the university is a hybrid organizational form. It is at once a faculty “guild” that is connected to a “capital-protecting entity,” meaning its trustees and administration. One conclusion I have drawn from this study is that because it is a unique organizational form, the university cannot be run like a business.

Cutler and Glaeser argue that a persistent pattern in the thousand-year history of the University is the centrality of the faculty guild. Autonomous faculty band together in a cooperative arrangement. Today, we might use the adjective “entrepreneurial” to describe faculty, in that they alone decide what to research, what to teach, whom to admit into the cooperative. The University attracts individuals with a “taste for knowledge” and an insatiable curiosity. Indeed, faculty will exchange lower pay for the freedom to satisfy that curiosity. Cutler and Glaeser conclude that, historically, faculty have acted more like independent entrepreneurs than as employees.

That autonomy, at the same time, makes faculty fractious and hard to control. Faculty are forever crossing swords with administrators, with each other and with external stakeholders and authorities. The die was cast with Peter Abelard’s first heresy trials. Cutler and Glaeser argue that it is precisely the tension between these two loci of authority–faculty and administration–that has been the key to the longevity of the University. The fractiousness of the faculty results in new ideas and intellectual experimentation. Autonomy attracts those with unconventional ideas, those who otherwise would not fit into more conventional organizational hierarchies.

It is counterintuitive, at least to me, that this tension makes Universities very adaptable organizations. The University has survived and thrived over the centuries because it continually adds new products and services. Teaching was the original mission of the University. To that was added certification and accreditation services in the form of diplomas and degrees. Universities became residential communities when they began to offer housing. Athletics was added at the end of the 19th century, about the same time that research was appended to the University. Early in the last century, Universities absorbed hospitals and medical centers.

Cutler and Glaeser contend that the University has always accepted new products and services, even if those did not seem to be obvious to their mission. The land-grant university was a remarkably innovative institution, not the least of which for bringing agriculture and mechanical arts (engineering) into the curriculum, two areas that had not previously been considered important enough to be counted as “higher learning.” In the 1990s, the University of Pennsylvania and other urban universities looked around the impoverished neighborhoods in which they were embedded and chose to actively develop these neighborhoods, even though “real estate development” was not an obvious mission of the University. Dominic Endicott and I argue in Knowledge Towns that universities must reimagine their missions to include regional economic development and creative placemaking, even serving as a regional venture fund. Some of the pushback we’ve received includes critics saying “universities are not venture capitalists!” Universities have always taken on new, non-obvious missions. It is the secret to their success.

Ironically, paradoxically, the university has survived because it has been willing to alter or change its mission in response to external stimuli. The university has not adhered to a single timeless mission. I found this argument to be the most significant, especially since it contradicts the prevailing notion that universities are conservative, lumbering behemoths, slow to change and strategically rooted to the past.

Cutler and Glaeser’s assessment of the organizational resilience of the university is all the more important in considering questions of academic leadership today. Presidential leadership cannot mimic leadership in other–especially hierarchically-oriented– organizations. The university cannot be run like a business. University leadership practices must align to the unique organizational form that is the University.

Although it is 20 years old, I’ve been drawn to Jeswald W. Salacuse ‘s model of leadership in Leading Leaders.  He argues that the traditional model of command-and-control leadership breaks down when the people being led are themselves leaders. And, of course, “leader” is a very apt description of faculty.

In some organizations—like universities, but also including professional firms like legal practices or medical offices–the people a leader must coordinate are themselves highly educated, independently powerful and often have their own constituencies. They cannot simply be “ordered around.”  And yet, this kind of behavior—of ordering faculty around–seems to be the expectation today.  At many universities, the majority of faculty are at-will, precariat hires, not the independent entrepreneurs that they have traditionally been.  I once got into a public dispute with a politician here in Ohio, who lamented that faculty at my university were unwilling to give over their intellectual property to the state so that it might be exploited for commercial gain.  The analogy he employed was that faculty are like a resource that needed to be “mined.”  That is absolutely the wrong analogy: why not instead think of faculty as entrepreneurs, and the University itself as an incubator or a start-up accelerator of that talent.

According to Salacuse, the successful “leader of leaders” leads not by command but by negotiation, relationship-building and alignment of interests.  This means moving from a posture of “managing people” to “negotiating with autonomous actors.”  The implications for the University should be self-evident: a successful university president must lead through influence rather than command, creating a compelling shared direction, building coalitions among faculty, mediating conflicts and making the institutional mission meaningful. I have sometimes described this as “cultivation-and-care” rather than “command-and-control.”

And, it means not treating faculty as ordinary employees, and certainly not treating them as resources to be mined.

David J. Staley is a higher education philosopher, strategist, futurist, theorist and designer, and is an Honorary Faculty Fellow in Innovation at CHELIP.  He is the author of The AI Symposium; Anticipatory Biographies: Personal Histories of the Future;Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education and the co-author of Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets.