TITLE: What Can Universities Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround?
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 30, 2022 12:40 PM
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BODY:
A recent issue of Ted Gioia's newsletter asks,
What can we learn from Barnes & Noble's surprising turnaround?
In one sentence, the answer is:
If you want to sell books, you must love those books.
Perhaps we can apply Barnes & Noble's lesson to education.
If anything will save the mid-sized comprehensive university in the
face of changing demographics and state funding, it will likely be
this:
If you want to teach students, you must love both teaching and students.
Comprehensive universities (regional universities that focus on
undergraduate education) are caught in the middle between large
research-focused schools and small, mostly private schools. They
try to offer the best of both worlds, without having the resources
that buttress those other school's operation. The big research
schools have external research funding, large media contracts for
their athletics programs, and primacy of place in the minds of
potential students. The small private schools offer the "small
school experience", often to targeted audiences of students and
often with considerable endowments and selective admissions that
heighten the appeal.
Mid-sized comprehensives are unsung jewels in many states, but
economic changes make it harder to serve their mission than it
was forty or even twenty years ago. They don't have much margin
for error. What are they to do? As Barnes & Noble is
demonstrating, the key to success for a bookstore is to put books
and readers first. For the comprehensives, the key to success is
almost certainly to put students and teaching first.
Other lessons from the Barnes & Noble turnaround may help,
too. For example, in tough economic times, universities tend to
centralize resources and decision making, in the name of focus
and efficiency. However, decentralization empowers those closest
to the students to meet the needs of the students in each academic
disciplines. When given the chance, faculty and staff in the
academic departments need to take this responsibility seriously.
But then, most faculty are at comprehensives precisely because
they want to work with undergraduates.
The key element to it all, though, is putting students and teaching
first, and everything else second.
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