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Professor emeritus' computer simulation lets players test skills as college administrators
Tanya Schevitz, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, January 14, 2000
©2000 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/14/MN105285.DTL
After 30 years as an administrator at one of the country's elite universities, Stanford professor emeritus William Massy has found a new calling as a video-game designer, a field his former students might relate to.
But don't expect bloody battles with the undead or teeth-gnashing crypt-dwellers in Massy's first video creation.
The action in Virtual U is a little more cerebral. Players assume the role of a university president, facing angry professors, trying to keep frustrated students from dropping out and struggling with government officials who hold the budget purse-strings.
The idea is to give academics and non-academics alike a window into the complex workings of a university -- in the same vein as the hit game Sim City gave players a feeling for the complexities of building and managing a city.
Virtual U was designed primarily to train university administrators and graduate students and to enlighten others involved in higher education, but Massy hopes the game will have broader appeal even though nobody shoots at the president -- except maybe figuratively.
``We think it is fun,'' he said. ``It is not fun in the sense that you fire it up and start shooting at someone or drive a tank through the Sahara. On the other hand, it has some whimsy in it and there is a lot of stuff happening.''
Funded by $1 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, Massy has spent the past three years working on the project with Jesse Ausubel, a project director at the foundation who had simultaneously come up with the same idea for a university simulation game.
In designing the game, Massy and Ausubel included detailed data from 1,200 U.S. academic institutions, as well as information culled from government sources.
Virtual U is being produced by Enlight Software of Hong Kong and is expected to be sold commercially for about $129 and $60 or $70 for a scaled-down version when it is released in March. A demonstration Web site will be up in the next week at www.virtual-u.org.
Massy is well-versed in the arcane enterprise of university administration. In his three decades at Stanford, he served as a professor of business administration, vice provost for research and vice president for business and finance before retiring in the early 1990s.
Now a researcher and professor emeritus, Massy lives in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and is a higher education management consultant.
Players of Virtual U start by choosing the type of institution to manage -- public or private, large or small, prestigious or not. Tuition must be set, budgets have to be drawn up with limited resources, and investments have to be made with an eye toward a volatile stock market.
There are the problems of juggling research and teaching, and deciding whether academics, athletics or diversity get priority in admissions and financial aid.
Faculty morale drops if classes are too large or too much money is spent on athletics over academics. The university's academic ranking falls if students cannot get the classes they need to graduate. Alumni gift-giving declines if the football team loses, and the development office needs more money to woo them back.
``If you push in at one place, it pushes out someplace else. You have so many different constituencies,'' Massy said. ``Everybody has their particular agenda, and nobody understands how all those agendas fit. And people get frustrated when they don't fit.''
Massy tried to make the game as realistic as possible, designing it in such a way that a crisis can pop up unexpectedly. It could be an earthquake that levels the university, a drug scandal in the athletic department, or a last-minute cut in public funding.
The graphics may not be flashy, but what is important is what goes on in the buildings, Massy said. Players maneuver through the university by clicking on a campus map to visit classes, and they can get detailed information about student achievement.
Like at a real university, few things happen quickly or easily. If a player wants to influence how much time a professor spends on teaching versus research, the president must alter the reward system to favor one or the other.
Players learn that if they want to change the makeup of the faculty to increase diversity, they cannot simply hire more minorities. Instead, they must set hiring policies and tenure procedures, and the composition of the faculty will shift as the game progresses.
There are consequences for everything, and players are scored on their success in improving the university without going broke.
Players can run through the game quickly or go for as long as they want, unless they go bankrupt and a little man with his pockets turned out and a forlorn face appears.
``It is the sort of stuff I used to see as a vice president at Stanford,'' Massy said. ``Just like the real world, you may be doing OK, but if you don't start adjusting policies, you can find yourself in a tailspin.''
David Kirsch, an assistant professor at UCLA's graduate school of management who has played the game several times during its development, found it realistic -- and frustrating.
``You are given your resources, and you can't be Harvard right away. You want to have academic excellence, you want to win the Sears Cup for athletics,'' he said. ``You want to be the administrator at a university where everything is above average. But in that sense, it is realistic.''