Higher Ed Musings 5. Brigade d’Academia

What The Bear Can Teach Us About Higher Ed

A good way of explaining colleges and universities to a public skeptical of higher ed starts by watching Episode 3 in Season 1 of The Bear: the introduction of the Brigade de cuisine model of organizing kitchen labor. There’s the chef, the sous-chef, the saucier, the pâtissier, down to the line cook and the dishwasher.

The episode demonstrates the idea that even a neighborhood beef joint with a limited menu benefits from a division of labor and clear hierarchy. Individual talent can develop, as we see with Marcus researching and spending nights at the restaurant to learn to make the perfect doughnut, though at the expense of his usual duties. As the season goes on the lesson is clear: talent and systems coexist messily but if you work together to create decent and reliable fare, there will be customers. When there is respect for each other’s talents and roles, excellent dishes can be the result, and there will be lines out the door.

Perhaps I should say that the restaurant analogy explains how higher ed should work but doesn’t.

If you’re inside of academia, the first season of The Bear is better than The Chair for dramatizing department politics. There is a new outside chair (Carmy), faculty members siding with old ways of doing things (Tina, Richie), a new hire who sides with the new chair (Syd), a scholar who is finally inspired to do first rate research (Marcus pursuing the perfect dessert) but who neglects his primary job, as well as a vague administrative structure (Richie, in his co-owner role, and Sugar) and financial backers.

Carmy is in some ways both a chair and a dean but more on that another time. The point is he wants everyone to be better and fights with upper administration to back him.

Consider the goals of a restaurant: good food, good service, satisfied customers, a balanced budget (if not a profit), a good reputation. Consider the goals of a university: groundbreaking research, teaching, successful graduates, a balanced budget, a good reputation.

Looking at the org structure of neighborhood sandwich joints to sit-down family chains to high end starred restaurants to massive 24-hour hotel operations that do breakfast, lunch, dinner, room service, banquets, and weddings, with complex meals and specialty desserts, you can get a sense of how colleges and universities of all sizes work.  All have the same aspirations: good food served well, leading to satisfied customers and profitability, if not reputation.

Not every institution of higher ed shares all these aspirations. In fact, the fundamental conflict in higher ed is between research and teaching, both of which are performed by the category of “faculty.” Small colleges may focus solely on teaching. Some research universities focus far more on research, leaving teaching to graduate students.

In the analogy of a college or university as a restaurant, faculty are both cooks and servers, creating meals and serving them to students. Even if the only two products of the restaurant were food and service, it takes constant work to invent new dishes, improve old dishes, search out the best old and new recipes, find obscure ingredients, and prepare dishes perfectly. It takes constant practice to serve meals well and appropriately.

Even without watching The Bear - where there are no waiters really – everyone who has eaten at a restaurant grasps that the talents needed in the kitchen are different than the talents needed tableside. Similarly, the talents needed for scholarship are different than those needed for teaching and for everything else higher ed is required to deliver these days.

In the large university analogue to a large hotel restaurant open all day, faculty-cooks (researchers) are increasingly specialized. Faculty-servers (teachers) are not interchangeable; most faculty would only be qualified to serve specific meals to specific groups of student-customers.

The brigade org chart for large restaurants in competitive markets (let’s say Ruth’s Chris or Benihana) is designed to ensure appealing and high-quality meals prepared and served well. Expertise in food research, design, and innovation—as well as cuisine traditions—are valued. Expertise in serving and customer service are also valued. The leader steering the enterprise would rely on a variety of managers to oversee hiring and training and to ensure quality all the way down to the bottom of the org chart, to the valet and cleaning staff.

Ideally, in higher ed, faculty members who are better in the kitchen would be rewarded for staying in the kitchen and faculty members better serving students would be rewarded for focusing on that service. Occasionally, evaluation systems work this way, but it’s complicated.

In higher ed, funding for a good proportion of faculty research (particularly in the sciences) comes from outside the institution. Expertise is needed to apply for and oversee grant funding to advance knowledge. The org chart must include a unit to support a variety of revenue streams that may not be part of knowledge dissemination. The restaurant kitchen expands to include an experimental kitchen while the dining room stays the same size. In the experimental kitchen, faculty often work solely with graduate students, no longer cooking for undergraduates.   

The unit on the org chart supporting research funding may be effectively reducing the quality of knowledge dissemination by paying the best faculty members to stay in the kitchen. The faculty members doing innovative research may never see students and the faculty serving students may be doing the least amount of innovative research. You see the problem.

Many universities address this gap with graduate students who study with faculty researchers and teach undergraduate classes. The quality may be excellent or may be abysmal; there is rarely a unit assigned to ensure quality of graduate student instruction.

Now here’s where the analogy gets difficult. College students are actually the restaurant’s customers as well as its products. Students are enticed to select a particular restaurant in order to be sent back out to the world as a well-fed representative of the restaurant. Student customers are charged at the beginning of each meal and asked to give again upon leaving because the meal was so transformative and because they are now healthy, well-fed alumni.  

In the brigade /org chart for large institutions, the manager in charge of ensuring healthy students isn’t allowed to tell the faculty chefs or faculty servers what to make or what to serve. Historically, at elite schools, this was rarely a problem, as students often entered from a prep school, so named because it was designed to prepare students for both the academic and social aspect of college. Families paid good money for this. Prep school graduates arrived at the restaurant knowing how to make the most of the experience, graduating wearing the school logo and ready to write big checks.

At most institutions of higher ed today, an in-house unit does the student preparatory work. There are new jobs on the org chart, such as Chief Experience Officer. This is a good competitive strategy, as a broader population of students, including underrepresented minorities and first-generation college students, choose to spend years at a restaurant/college.

In the restaurant analogy, imagine an individualized host staff, welcoming student-customers, standing beside them, checking in on them, ensuring their wellness, but having no interaction with the server faculty unless there’s a problem with the meal. Dining time may even shrink if host’s goal of ensuring the student is in the right frame of mind to learn is more important than the actual dining, if ensuring the mental health of students is considered a wholly separate institutional product than creating and serving them knowledge. The host staff may have no interaction with the research kitchen and may have no incentive to tell students to visit there to see what innovations are going on there and what cool new things may be on the menu.

This is the structural problem of higher ed today. But maybe it points to a solution.

Ideally, the unit ensuring healthy, prepared students would work closely with the unit ensuring high quality dining so that quality of the experience would support the quality of the food and the service. But in practice, the units focused on the student experience work far from the units ensuring the effective advancement and dissemination of knowledge.

On some campuses, the conflict between student experience and student learning is a matter of athletics. Many students choose a restaurant not for the food or service but rather because it has a sports team attached. Some come to play, some to watch. The success of the athletic teams is often key to the financial health and survival of the institution.

While this is all going on, the college/restaurant needs to manage its continued existence in a broader context of the industry and government standards.  

At a minimum for the purposes of oversight and government funding, institution of higher ed must be accredited, curricula must be legible, and courses hew to industry standards for transferability of credits from one institution to another and for degree equivalence across the industry. Standards for faculty workload and productivity are roughly equivalent across institutions. Libraries must use the same catalogue systems; laboratories must use standard equipment. Standard teaching models (lecture, seminar, labs) are followed. The vast majority of institutions of higher ed operate according to the same standards. Some institutions are more well funded and are more selective about admitting students; these are higher status.

Of the many arguments about what’s wrong with higher ed – colleges and universities are too expensive, too left leaning, too clannish, too coddling, too expensive, a waste of money – none focus on how talents and systems should lead to better products.  Constant internal jostling to promote some products at the expense of the others generally means lower quality for all.  

Different institutions weight the five main goals of a university – research, teaching, prestige, financial health, student success – differently. Students choosing institutions may weight them differently. Faculty choosing positions at institutions (in those rare cases when faculty have a real choice) may weight them differently. External funders of research may weight them differently. But nearly all institutions are interested in producing all five.

The primary challenge for any multi-product firm is ensuring that production units are not in conflict with each other, that raising the quality of one does not lower or make more costly the quality of the others. It’s not hard to see that production of the five products of higher ed are in fact in conflict at most institutions.

I haven’t started Season 3 of The Bear but I hope it offers some solutions.