For the past several weeks there has been a good deal of discussion in this newspaper about the upcoming departure of the Kansas University provost and the searches for both a new provost and for several deans. A consistent theme of these various articles, letters, and columns has been that the very future of KU depends upon the outcome of these searches. Indeed, one columnist has quoted a letter from a senior faculty member saying the university “stands on the brink” either of success or failure depending upon the results of these searches.

With all due respect to both the writers of these opinions and the administrators who have left or are leaving, I believe that such an opinion fails utterly to understand both the nature and soul of KU.

Kansas University’s success does not depend upon who is the provost or dean of the law school or dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The success of KU depends upon its students, its faculty, its staff, its alumni, the Legislature and the people of Kansas and its own traditions and history as well as its administrators.

KU, like every great university, is far greater than its constituent parts, and it’s success will never depend upon a few people, even high level administrators. Indeed, as someone who served as an administrator at KU for six years, and as an administrator at Syracuse University for six years before that, I believe that what makes a university great are the achievements of its faculty and students. Harvard is a great university because of the achievements of its faculty and its students.

Administrators do not win the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the Field Medal or any of the other awards of distinctions handed out by organizations interested in research and scholarship. Administrators do not find cures for cancer, or split the atom, or conquer space. Administrators play an important role. If they do their jobs well, they make it possible for faculty and students to teach, and learn, and do research. If they do their jobs badly, they impede these activities.

Indeed, I believe that the greatest danger a university faces in administrative searches is the possibility of hiring administrators who do not recognize that theirs is a secondary role, that they exist to make the university’s central activities proceed smoothly. In my opinion, what Thomas Jefferson said of good government is as true in the university context as in the greater political realm: The government that governs least, governs best.

I suspect that what I am saying will not please some administrators. But the fact is, the great increase in funding achieved by KU in the past decade is not the achievement of those who were in charge during this period. It is primarily the achievement of the faculty, the staff, and the students who wrote the grants and did the research.

As far as I know, no ranking takes into account the quality of administration at a university. It looks at the quality of students and faculty and research staff. The administration contributes to a positive ranking by insuring that the campus is well-funded and well-run. This is not a small task and we must all acknowledge the important contributions administrators make each day. Nevertheless, a university is not built on its administration. The great universities of the Middle Ages, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna and Paris, had very few administrators: they consisted of scholars, teachers and students.

There is a great danger in overemphasizing the importance of the present administrative searches. First, it encourages a false view of the university, one that is centered on administration, not teaching, learning, and research. Second, it minimizes the greatness of KU, just as do the many magazine rankings, based as they are on pseudo-methodologies that often have little relationship to what is most important about a university.

In the end, universities are about teaching, learning, and research. Faculty and staff do the teaching. Students do the learning (as do faculty every time they teach a class) and students, faculty, and staff do the research. Administrators create the environment in which these central activities go on. But we must never forget that providing a good environment for teaching, learning, and research is only of secondary importance.

So, yes, the administrative searches this year at KU are important, but they are not critical to the future of the university. If you truly want to see where the future of KU lies, look to the students we attract and the faculty and staff we hire. That’s where the future greatness of KU lies. And, by the way, I am completely confident that our future holds greatness. Interacting with students, staff and faculty every day makes that clear to me.