The culture of higher education is not kind to managers. Presidents, deans, department chairs, faculty committee heads, and others quickly learn the limits of their authority and realize that their influence depends on the grudging acceptance of others.

"I know I'm an evil;" says one of Robert Birnbaum's academic managers to the faculty, "the question is whether I'm a necessary evil." (p. 202)

In this devastatingly wise text Robert Birnbaum explores the past 40 years of academic management and offers useful advice to those engaged in university politics: how to tell a "necessary" evil from an evil. Birnbaum was a university administrator between 1961 and 1978, then a professor of higher education, and has become a self-described apostate to the cause of making higher education more businesslike.

Management Fads is a delight to read: clearly argued, massively documented, and wittily presented. I found myself wanting to flourish my copy at senate and faculty meetings, pleading, "Table the motion and read this NOW!"

According to Birnbaum the first management revolution in higher education lasted from the start of the twentieth century to about 1960. It emphasized means rather than ends and its goal was to make higher education more businesslike.

Birnbaum's book is a critical study of the second management revolution that began around 1960 and continues today. It emphasizes ends rather than means and its goal is to make higher education more businesslike.

Birnbaum's critique of management fads is a study of the psychology of managers and an application of scholarly method.

First he carefully reviews each new solution to the ills of higher education: Program Planning Budgeting Systems (1960 ­ 1974), Management by Objectives (1965 ­ 1980), Zero-Base Budgeting (1970 ­ 1985), strategic planning (1972 ­ 1994), benchmarking (1979 ­ present), etc.

Then he shows that each new approach is adopted because of its attractive internal logic while its empirical relevance to the university context and its empirical results are routinely ignored. It is as if John Locke's first test of truth has been embraced as the sole basis of reason while the second test has been utterly neglected. Where else but in faculty politics and university administration could a university scholar get away with being so one-sided?

Birnbaum argues that managers in the business world ultimately have to face the facts of the market, and therefore must abandon fads which fail. But market forces for managers in the academic world operate much more slowly than they do in the business world, and so management fads linger on in higher education much longer than they should.

The answer is not to make the academic world more businesslike, says Birnbaum. The answer is to make the academic world more scholarly. Higher education should bring its scholarly skepticism to bear on management fads that tempt managers into supporting them because they sound rational and efficient. Scholarly managers should sift the fads for the kernel of truth that each contains, then abandon the chaff and add the kernels to the wealth of traditional practices that have helped the universities to survive years of wrong-headed enthusiasms.

Birnbaum offers sympathetic insights into the constraints on academic managers: "College and university managers live in a world in which others expect them to do things that make a difference, yet at the same time they find their discretion to act constrained by existing structures, ongoing routines, the professional prerogatives of others, the lack of staff resources, and the loose coupling that characterizes academic governance." (p.182)

But he is also pointed in his criticism of their motivations: "One of the reasons the outcomes of fad implementation are not usually seriously assessed may be that the real purpose of fads may not be to improve education but to attest to the influence of management, and nothing does that like adopting a system that requires people to modify their activities." (p.183)

And along the way Birnbaum leavens the heavy dose of documentation with wit. Before you go to your next strategic planning meeting, wouldn't you like to know what he means by "The Cat on the Toilet Seat Fallacy?" Buy the book.

Tom Faulkner is professor of comparative religion at Dalhousie University and president of the Dalhousie Faculty Association.