Elite imitation and flailing universities

The mission of universities is thinking: teaching students to think and enabling scholars to think about the world we live in. Yet, it is debatable whether most universities in the world achieve these goals. Arguably, things are getting worse. Universities are flailing. Why?

Most universities desperately want to be elite. They want to be like Harvard, Caltech, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, ...

But non-elite universities do not have the necessary resources to be elite. Yet they are controlled by elites (management on high salaries, faculty educated at elite universities) who want to be elite and so settle for elite imitation.

"A flailing university is what happens when the principal cannot control its agents. The flailing university cannot implement its own plans and may have its plans actively subverted when its agents work at cross-purposes. The non-elite university flails because it is simultaneously too large and too small: too large because the non-elite university attempts to legislate and regulate every aspect of the work of faculty and students and too small because it lacks the resources and personnel to achieve its ambitions. 

To explain the mismatch between the non-elite universities' ambitions and their abilities, consider the premature demands by elites in non-elite universities for goals, policies, curricula, infrastructure, and outcomes more appropriate to an elite university. 

In order to satisfy external actors (government, business, parents, ...) non-elite universities often take on tasks that overwhelm institutional capacity, leading to premature load bearing. As these authors put it, “By starting off with unrealistic expectations of the range, complexity, scale, and speed with which organizational capability can be built, external actors set both themselves and (more importantly) the students and researchers that they are attempting to assist to fail”. 

The expectations of external actors are only one source of imitation, however. Who people read, listen to, admire, learn from, and wish to emulate is also key. Another factor driving inappropriate imitation is that the elites in non-elite universities—senior management and high-profile faculty—are closely connected with business elites and elite universities, usually more closely than they are to the students and faculty at their own university. As a result, this elite initiates and supports policies that appear to it to be normal even though such policies may have little relevance to the student and faculty as a whole and may be wildly at odds with the university capacity. This kind of mimicry of what appear to be the best elite university policies and practices is not necessarily ill intentioned. It is simply one by-product of the background within which the elites operates. University managers engage with business elites and managers at other non-elite universities."

I actually did not write most of the text above, I just took the text from the first two pages of the article below and replaced some words (e.g. Indian state with non-elite university, Indian citizens with students and faculty). 

Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State 

Shruti Rajagopalan, Alexander T. Tabarrok

I came across the article after listening to a podcast episode that interviews the two authors, recommended by my son.

I also recommend Shutri's own podcast, Ideas of India, including a recent episode, Where did development economics go wrong?

Previously, I have discussed similar issues from the angle of the strategic importance for nation building of non-elite institutions within a country, and how science curricula should focus more on basic skills.

What do you think? Are universities like a flailing state? Is the problem elite imitation?