Responsibility Center Management: A Guide to Balancing Academic Entrepreneurship with Fiscal Responsibility

Multiple economic and political forces have driven universities to change how they fund and finance education and research during the last 50 to 60 years. The advent of Responsibility Center Management (RCM) in the late 1970s and early 1980s coincided with a poor economy that had adverse impacts on investments, employment, and state revenues. Similarly, the economic recession of 2008—and its lasting effects—prompted many universities to seek greater efficiencies and unleash their entrepreneurs by implementing an RCM system.

Authors John R. Curry, Andrew L. Laws and Jon C. Strauss describe the many nuances and techniques institutions can use to implement RCM in this newly revised second edition. They explain that with the right design and active management, RCM can live up to its promises of clarifying roles and responsibilities between local and central units, coupling responsibility with authority, and linking cause and effect through revenue and indirect cost allocations.

Along the way, RCM creates a new relationship between the chief business officer and provost. Because RCM allocates new authority and responsibility to provosts and their deans, the accountability line between them is crucial to academic and operational success managed by the chief business officer.