Tuition dependence says “maximize enrollment”; public oversight says “serve the public”; research grants says “win prestige.” When all three speak at once, strategy fragments. This op-ed shows how mixed funding creates mission drift and suggests a clarity compact: name your primary function, publish trade-offs, and align money with the declared priority for at least five years. Purposes need budgets or they evaporate.
If you want to know a university’s true beliefs, do not read its mission statement. Read its budget. The mission is prose; the budget is liturgy. It is where ideals become line items or do not. Today, most universities pray to three gods at once. Tuition dependence says “maximize enrollment.” Public oversight says “serve the public.” Research grants say “win prestige.” Each god speaks a clear language. Together, they produce glossolalia. The institution nods to all three and then spends the week translating, improvising, and apologizing. Strategy fragments. Purpose evaporates into a mist of good intentions and end-of-quarter memos.
The Budget as Liturgy
This is not corruption. It is structure. Universities are coupled to the economy, the state, and the scientific field. Money, law, and prestige supply resources and demand legibility. Each environment proposes a different decision code—revenue/not revenue, compliance/not compliance, recognition/not recognition. Inside the university, these codes become competing premises for decisions. The result is a polite civil war fought in spreadsheets.
This mission drift is predictable. Admissions and aid begin to bend toward optics, with need-based aid quietly migrating to “merit” to lift test-score medians. Curriculum contorts to pay for unrelated ambitions, as cash-cow master’s programs subsidize research prestige and capstones that require judgment are replaced by portfolios that require neither. Faculty time is arbitraged; teaching-intensive ranks proliferate without tenure protections while research stars receive course releases. Capital flows to what can attract gifts, as naming rights favor visible labs while advising centers remain underfunded. Governance is whipsawed by time; annual budget cycles force tactical pivots while educational outcomes unfold on a five-year horizon.
The organization copes by telling a comforting story: we can do everything. We will be elite and inclusive, research-intensive and teaching-excellent, locally devoted and globally renowned. Sometimes this is true, for a season, with a subsidy. More often, “and” is an unpriced promise. The cost appears later as thin teaching, brittle research, and public cynicism.
The Clarity Compact
There is a way to slow the drift. It begins with an impolite step: choosing. Universities should adopt a clarity compact—declare a primary function, publish the trade-offs, and align money with that declaration for no less than five years. Purposes need budgets or they evaporate.
A clarity compact, in ten moves:
- Name your primary function. Choose one primary from a shortlist you write in your own language. Examples: capability at scale (undergraduate education), frontier knowledge (research), or regional uplift (access and workforce). A regional public may declare “access,” while a research flagship names “frontier knowledge.” The courage is not in the poetry; it is in the hierarchy.
- Align the budget by rule, not vibe. Adopt a binding rule for incremental dollars over the next five years: at least 60% of new discretionary funds go to the primary function. If your function is education, that means sections, advising, and protected teaching time. Exceptions require a supermajority and an explanation.
- Publish a trade-off ledger. Each year, issue a short public letter listing three things you will not optimize and why. Examples: acceptance rate (to avoid manipulative application practices) or test-score medians (to protect need-based aid). The ledger forces subtraction into public view.
- Make cross-subsidies visible. Label transfers at the program level: who funds whom, how much, and to what end. If undergraduates are paying for labs, say so; if the medical center props up the humanities, say so. Hidden subsidies breed drift. Visible ones invite adult conversation.
- Tie leadership contracts to mission, not rank. Remove rankings and raw headcount from performance reviews. Replace with mission-weighted goals: documented capability gains, reproducible research, first-generation student progression. Include negative covenants: no tactical maneuvers that boost optics at the expense of mission. Courage is contagious when it has a contract.
- Install a five-year time discipline. Lock in primary-function priorities for five years. Mid-cycle changes require an extraordinary vote. Build a countercyclical fund to absorb shocks without flipping strategy. Time is governance; without it, the most recent irritation decides.
- Gate new revenue with a mission screen. Every new program, partnership, or donor gift must pass a mission fit test: a) clear educational or research value; b) equity impact; c) administrative load; d) sunset or review date; e) exit clause if funder priorities drift. Positive NPV is necessary, not sufficient. Money is a ventriloquist; make it audition.
- Rebalance aid. If your declared primary is access or education, shift aid from merit to need over a fixed glide path. Publish the path. Expect short-term pain: test medians may dip; rankings may frown. The long-term value—talent realized, debt reduced, trust earned—is not a number that appears in spring.
- Protect core courses with money and time. Anchor the curriculum with capstones, labs, studios, or clinicals that require human judgment. Cap enrollments, assign experienced faculty, and insulate these courses from revenue scavenging. If you claim to educate for capability, but your hardest courses are taught by the busiest people as a hobby, your claim is theater.
- Create a mission protection fund. Set aside a portion of unrestricted dollars to defend mission-consistent choices that hurt in the short term (capping class size, honest grading that depresses enrollment). Publish grants from this fund. This is how you make “no” survivable.
- Objections will arrive on schedule. Some will say we will lose money. But what you gain is solvency of purpose. When everything is a revenue center, you are poor even with cash because you cannot afford to say no. Others will say politicians will punish us. Then speak in their language: show outcomes on their timelines—graduation, jobs, local impact—and explain trade-offs openly. Legislatures respect institutions that can describe costs without drama.
And what of equity? Mixed funding regimes convert inequality into strategy by rewarding selectivity optics, donor preferences, and full-pay enrollment. A clarity compact that prioritizes access must change the aid ledger and the admissions logic, then defend those changes when the composite indexes retaliate. If your “public mission” is a marketing paragraph while financial aid tells a different story, your students will read the budget, too.
This is translation, not capitulation. Modern society relies on functional differentiation: politics decides power; the economy decides payment; science decides truth; education decides qualification. Universities straddle science and education while translating pressures from politics and the economy. Translation is legitimate; capture is not. Mixed funding is an invitation to capture. The antidote is not purity—no such thing exists—but re-entry: the institution reasserts its own code in decisions.
The Price of “And”
If the compact is working, the signs will be quiet but unmistakable. Meeting agendas will change. The first slide will not be “enrollment” or “rankings” but “progress on declared function,” with evidence beyond a number. Calendars will open, as protected teaching time appears and course redesigns get sabbatical credit. Public letters will become more boring and more believable. Fewer adjectives, more trade-offs. A little less “excellence,” a little more “because.”
A small, dark joke to end where budgets live. The mission statement likes to say “and.” The budget has space for “or.” If you cannot decide, the environment will decide for you, and its choices will arrive as surprises that feel like fate.
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#re_v5 (Article 8 of 10 on global higher education issues: Funding)