Category Archives for Collegetown USA

Academic Bombast: A Little Bit of Cis and That

Academics can be full of surprises. Just when you are about to write off the lot of them as pompous and often criminally inclined boors whose bloated prose only a Judith Butler could love, they redeem themselves with a bit of self-aware mockery.

Wags at the University of Chicago have come up with nifty computer program that will write an entire scholarly essay for you.

University of Chicago Professor Lewis explains the sentence generator.

All you need do is populate a few fields with words of your choosing from prepared lists, string together the resulting sentences (order optional) and–voila!–there’s your essay, guaranteed to please the most discerning gender theorist. Drop what you are doing and give it a try right now.

Fun, isn’t it? Until you remember the tens of thousands of tenured faculty whose jobs-for-life are predicated on that argot. Try not to lose your lunch.

For those of you yet to get the hang of the University of Chicago’s sentence-generator, read the passage below:

The trans policy committee is sorry to announce that Kate Bornstein is sick and is not able to make her performance of Men Women and the Rest of Us tonight at 7pm in the [gym]. We are working to reschedule Kate’s performance, and meanwhile are arranging for a Gender Speak Out in the faculty lounge…from 7-9. In this space, we hope to center lived experience of gender oppression at [Liberal Arts College USA]. Cisgender people (those who are comfortable with the gender societally aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth), are welcome and encouraged to attend. It may be beneficial to have a passing familiarity with transphobia and cissexism.

The most famous cisters of all.


Is it genuine? By that I mean did I search the announcements on the Liberal Arts College USA calendar until I hit pay dirt, or did I take a little help from the sentence generator?

Commencement: Higher Ed’s Last Chance to Think Critically on Behalf of its Graduates

The envelope, please. Broadway has the Tony Awards; Hollywood, the Oscars; and then of course there is the eponymously named Booker Prize. As a species we are fond of handing out honors for accomplishments small and large. Higher education is no different, and this month begins the academy’s own silly season of awards. I am speaking of course of the honorary degrees colleges and universities dangle in front of celebrities, generous donors, politicians and on occasion worthy scholars and artists.

Universities will tell you that they award honorary degrees in order to call attention to the more important occasion of the graduating class’s big day. This not a total fabrication because often times a famous or notorious honorary degree recipient will bring the press to an otherwise lackluster ceremony at a lackluster campus. But it is a rather cruel exploitation of the graduates and their families, because in truth celebrity degree recipients suck time and attention out of festivities that ought truly to focus on the graduates alone. When I graduated from university, my alma mater had a policy, long since abandoned, of not awarding honorary degrees for just this reason: the graduates were the stars of the show.

I confess that all these years later hearing Pomp and Circumstance brings a nostalgic tear to my eye and reminds me of the young woman I once was—full of excitement and wonder about what next the academy had in store for me. That girl hasn’t been around for a while.

Inevitably every year a campus sets the bar for who qualifies as the recipient of an honorary degree at a new low. Some time back, plucky Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, for example, awarded auteur Michael Moore not an honorary degree per say but a platform from which to address the assembled multitude. Moore took his text from an assemblage of half-truths and factual manipulations that managed inflict several wounds in the hands of the administrators oblivious enough to have gone along with bringing the porcine documentarian to campus.

Michael Moore waits patiently on the platform to deliver his Commencement fabrications at Hampshire College.


But if the thought of having to listen to the likes of Michael Moore drone on ad nauseum is enough to make you want to graduate in absentia, then consider the poor men and women about to begin their post-baccalaureate journey through life taking with them their college parting words of one Winnie Mandela.

Winnie Mandela. You read that correctly. The wife Nelson Mandela dumped because there was no reconciling the savagery she rained down upon her opponents. The Winnie Mandela whose bold fashion statements included fiery necklaces of burning tires for her “enemies.” The Winnie Mandela who just last year had this to say about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Bishop Tutu and her ex-husband:

‘What good does the truth do? How does it help to anyone to know where and how their loved ones are killed or buried?
That Bishop Tutu…turned it all into a religious circus came here. He had a cheek to tell me to appear.

‘I told him that he and his other like-minded cretins were only sitting there because of our struggle and me. Look what they make him do. The great Mandela. He has no control or say any more.

Let's hope Customs officials at JFK confiscate Winnie's jewelry before she gets to JCSU.


That Winnie Mandela will receive an honorary degree this month from Johnson C. Smith University, an institution according to its website:

Founded in 1867 under the auspices of the Committee on Freedmen of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A [the university] is an independent, private, coeducational institution of higher learning. Located in the rapidly growing metropolis of Charlotte, North Carolina, “Queen City of the South,” this historically African-American university has a residential campus with a familiar atmosphere in which students are stimulated and nurtured by dedicated and caring faculty and staff.

One hopes Winnie is not introduced as a role model for stimulation and nurturing.

One hopes whoever introduces Winnie from the podium has the good sense not to mention the university’s mission, which reads in part

Consistent with its Christian roots, the university recognizes the importance of moral and ethical values to undergird intellectual development and all endeavors. …

The mission of JCSU is to provide an outstanding education for a diverse group of talented and highly motivated students from various ethnic, socioeconomic, and geographical backgrounds…

…, [JCSU] provides an environment in which students can fulfill their physical, social, cultural, spiritual, and other personal needs through which they can develop a compelling sense of social and civic responsibility for leadership and service in a dynamic, multicultural society. Likewise, the university embraces its responsibility to provide leadership, service, and lifelong learning to the larger community.

I take this mission statement at face value. There is no question in my mind the faculty at JCSU have done their very best to deliver to their students and soon-to-be graduates the promise of the university’s mission. No students work harder for their educations than the ones attending urban universities, and no faculties must help their students overcome more mountainous barriers than the faculty who work at urban universities. I have nothing but admiration for these men and women.

This is why I am so thoroughly disgusted that in order to get a passing mention in the newspaper, the suits at JCSU thought it was a good idea to bring this terrorist to campus and in so doing undo in the space of a single commencement what four years of undergirding “moral and ethical values” sought to instill.

Johnson C. Smith University wins the 2011 prize for lowest bar for a Commencement speaker. Which college will win in 2012?

It Takes One to Know One: Professor Carmola’s Ethical Lapses

UPDATE:
Addison Criminal Division
==============
05/09/11 State vs. Carmola, Kateri
51-1-11 Ancr/Criminal
Nancy S. Corsones
Plea Conference

As I believe I have mentioned a time or two, one of the most endearing characteristics typical of college faculty members is their utter lack of a sense of irony. When you put that together with their finely honed sense of aggrieved entitlement, you wind up with a winning package such as Middlebury College’s very own Associate Professor of Political Science

Kateri Carmola.

Professor Carmola’s areas of scholarly interests include the ethical ramifications of warfare and Plato and the noble lie. So sought after is she for her expertise that she has “participated in numerous forums and events on the private security industry” and “provided expert testimony for the UN Working Group on Mercenaries.” Her publications range from addressing the “legal, ethical, and sociological issues surrounding the use of private military contractors worldwide….[to] the problems of assigning blame for the crimes at Abu Ghraib [and] the concept of proportionality in the laws of war.” If you were to find yourself ensnared in an ethical dilemma, clearly Professor C is the gal you’d turn to for the way out.

Were it not for that little matter, reported by the Burlington Free Press, of “a felony charge alleging she embezzled $4,800 from the Salisbury Historical Society.” At the time of the theft, Professor Carmola was a member of the Society’s board of trustees–its treasurer, in fact.

Professor Carmola has mentored countless students.

Professor Carmola has pleaded not guilty to the embezzlement charge and is currently free on her own recognizance, her trial pending. Says the Burlington paper, “If convicted, Carmola could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and a $500 fine.” Rumor has it she’s burning the midnight oil boning up on the best way to assign blame for the affronts her dignity will suffer when she’s pulling laundry duty in the state pen. I also have heard that she’s been practicing a new pronunciation of the word “trustee.”

I was framed!

Bust-out scene from the docudrama, "Professor Carmola's Jailhouse Gang"

But perhaps her sentence will be mitigated if her jury considers the reason she suffered an ethical lapse. You see, she did it for the children. Her reason for emptying the coffers of a tiny, struggling non-profit? Besides, I mean, the obvious one that it is easier to steal from a volunteer organization of which you are a fiduciary than it is to seek funding through proper channels from your employer, who sits on an endowed nest egg of some $860 million. No, she stuck her hand in the cookie jar “to fund a series of class trips with college students in 2010”:

This will fund the snacks for our class trip!

According to a police affidavit, Carmola withdrew the $4,800 from the historical society’s bank account in 11 transactions between July 6 and Sept. 8 of last year. Carmola was on the society’s board of directors at the time but was not authorized to spend the group’s money without the board’s consent.

Society president Barry Whitney alerted police after he discovered that the funds were missing. According to the police affidavit, the society’s board confronted Carmola, who admitted she had taken the $4,800 out of the bank account and vowed to pay the money back.

“Carmola advised that she was taking money out of the savings account to fund her class trips with the Middlebury College students because she was a Middlebury College professor,” the affidavit said. The board subsequently voted to have Carmola removed from the board.

Middlebury, of course, is not acting as rashly. While it is true that Professor Carmola has copped to the crime, the chairman of her department thinks it would be “premature” to make a judgment. As does the Executive Vice President and Provost, who also evokes the p-word, saying:

The college would be very concerned if any of its employees were found to have engaged in unlawful behavior but it would be premature to comment on this legal case or to speculate about what, if anything, the college’s response will be.

In other words, Professor Carmola will be back teaching ethics at a liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont. Ironic, isn’t it?

For an excellent on-the-ground account of Professor Carmola’s teensy mistake, read this post from the MiddBlog, Middlebury’s “alternative source” for news you can use.  Were it not for MiddBlog, I’d've missed the account in the Addison County Independent, which transcribes the conversation the professor-embezzler had with Vermont State Trooper Joseph Szarejko:

“I … spoke with Carmola and she advised that she did in fact take the money out of the historical society’s bank account because she did not have enough money to fund her expenses,” Szarejko wrote in his affidavit. “Carmola advised that she transferred the money out of the historical society’s account and into hers so that she could pay for her airfare and other expenses for the trips.”

Carmola told police she had returned the money and was “now aware that she made a mistake; she did not think anything was wrong with borrowing the money at first until she was confronted about this issue,” Szarejko wrote.

Here we have a faculty member who cannot afford airfare because “she did not have enough money,” so, like Willie Sutton, off she went to the bank, because that’s where the money is. So brazen is her sense of her entitlement, so highly degraded are her personal ethics that she told the state trooper, presumably with a straight face, that she “did not think anything was wrong with borrowing the money.” And, yeah, after she got caught she paid it back. I guess that makes her ethical after all.

In preparation for her plea deal, Professor Carmola uses ethics-for-dummies flash cards.

Mills College President Janet Holmgren Dogged by Controversy

One of the perks of working for a college president is that occasionally you get to rub shoulders with the rich and famous.  I, for example, once attended a Rose Garden swearing-in ceremony and met President Clinton, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan and General Colin Powell.  It was thrilling.  Another time I sat inches away from Stevie Wonder as he belted out his greatest hits to a private audience of 100 or so. It was a toe-tapping good time.

Of course, such moments happen but once in a great while, and a lot of mundane stuff fills the in-between times.  If you have the good luck, or misfortune, to serve as the president’s executive assistant, in addition to the mundane you perform a dizzying variety of “other duties as assigned.” This can mean picking up presidential offspring at daycare, folding laundry, and taking trips to the car wash–all tasks assorted EA’s, all of the PhD’s, tell me they have undertaken.

Being an executive assistant does not require a doctoral degree (although it might help), but it does demand that the amanuensis have a high degree of stamina.  The president I worked for once asked me to leap out of his car at a tollbooth on the New Jersey Turnpike in order to retrieve his briefcase from the trunk, an act for which foolhardiness, or a death wish, as opposed to stamina, was requisite, I suppose.  One executive assistant I knew managed to combine foolhardiness with stamina in pursuit of her extra duties.  She and the president’s spouse took two-hour liquid lunch breaks, imbibing various spirits to fuel their gossip about college employees.  As you can imagine, this career move  earned the EA great respect from her colleagues. And a big raise from her boss.  Go figure.

Decisions, decisions...what's for lunch?

These days former Executive Assistant to the President Pamela Reid, late in service to retiring Mills College President Janet Holmgren, has a lot of time on her hands to figure out how she lost her job.  Poor Pamela.  One hot August day last summer her career in higher education went to the dogs.  Specifically, to President Holmgren’s dogs, a pack that included Chihuahua-terrier mix Holly. Holly sank her dainty fangs into a toothsome bit of Pam’s left ankle as the EA was attempting to ready the president’s house for a fund-raising event.  California law makes no bones about it: victims of snack-happy canines are to report the bite to animal control; Pamela did and that’s when things turned vicious.

Holly welcomes visitors to the president's house.

According to her wrongful-termination suit, filed in Alameda County Court, after she reported the injury, Ms. Reid soon went from top dog on the president’s staff to permanently ensconced resident in the dog house.  Says Ms. Reid, “I got nasty-grams.”  The torment continued for five months, until Ms. Reid was “laid-off.”  

You know as well as I that at age 62, Pamela Reid will have a hard time finding a new job.  In today’s market, not many employers will give an old dog even the opportunity to learn new tricks, so it’ll probably be a long time before Pam lands a new position, a dog’s age I would estimate.  Her suit may be “meritless,” as the college of course claims, but I can understand her dogged pursuit for justice.  She should know, though, that looking for compassion from a college president is really, really barking up the wrong tree.

Ms. Reid searches in vain to be treated fairly.

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Profiles in Academic Courage and Class: Robert Paul Wolff

I have been following the kerfuffle surrounding a recent blog post by The New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz and the consternation it has caused within academic circles with amused interest.  The timing of this dust-up could not be more exquisite, for Peretz is about to be honored by Harvard, his alma mater and employer.  Marty, who is also a benefactor of Harvard, being as he is a major donor and a member of the faculty, landed in hot water because he wrote

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Needless to say, them fightin’ words gave NYT opiner, sensitive Nicholas Kristof, a bad case of the vapors, which he relieved by firing back in his Sunday, September 12 column with incite-full words of his own, “For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider [Martin Peretz's] blog post in The New Republic this month.”

Nicholas Kristof (r) reminds Martin Peretz to watch his p's and q's.

Venomous? Debased? Aren’t those terms more rightly applied to the activities of certain Muslims, the activities that might’ve led Peretz to his conclusion? The sectarian violence in Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Somalia, for example. The Muslim-on-Muslim attacks that generally result in bombed-out mosques replete with the late worshippers’ assorted body parts in such disarray so as to suggest that the “religion of peace” is actually the “religion in pieces.” Peretz couldn’t possibly have had that in mind when he wrote those words. Nor is it likely he was thinking about the many ways in which Muslim girls and women are killed in the name of family honor. When it comes to the final solution for flirtatious females, only the imagination limits the choices available to the dissed fathers, sons and brothers: beheading, stoning, burying alive, hacking, flinging acid at the offender. Take your pick. They do. Nicholas Kristof apparently doesn’t like to think about that, so he resorts to name-calling those who dare state the obvious.

Also offended by what Peretz had to say is University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Robert Paul Wolff.  In his blog, Wolff wrote:

Back in 1960, Marty was an egregious little wannabe hanger-on to the group of young proto-lefties who called ourselves “The New Left Club of Cambridge,” but subsequently, he married money, bought The New Republic, and turned that fine old progressive magazine into a flack for the State of Israel. Marty has done well for himself, if you ignore the sort of person he is. It seems there is a Martin Peretz Professorship of Yiddish Literature at Harvard, no less. A scholarship fund will now be set up in his name at Harvard, and he will be honored at the lunch.

When I heard that I was going to be sharing the podium with Marty, I thought seriously about canceling. I don’t know how much time I have left on this earth, and somehow spending even a lunch of it in the presence of Marty Peretz doesn’t strike me as a good use of my time. But I am genuinely proud of my small role in the establishment of Social Studies, and besides, Susie and I have arranged to have dinner Friday evening with our old friends, Milton Cantor and Margaret Taylor. So we will go.

The good professor will deign to accept his honor, but not without setting stern, non-negotiable conditions: “I told Anya Bernstein, the current Head of Social Studies, that I was well brought up and will behave myself at the lunch, but I begged her not to seat me next to Marty at the head table.” Can’t you picture Professor Wolff stomping his foot in high dudgeon and, yes, with righteous indignation as he laid down the law to Dr. Bernstein?

Professor Wolff: I get so jeal--er,--mad when I think about Marty Peretz.

There is no figure more risible than the academic whose tenured status relieves him of the obligation to be accountable for his behavior, or even to have the thought enter his head that the standards to which he holds others apply to him too. Well, maybe there is one more risible: the professor who won’t let his principles stand in the way of chowing down on a free lunch.

Dr. Bernstein agreed to Professor Wolff's demand to seat Martin Peretz elsewhere.

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Administer with Care

Every enterprise has its own in-jokes, I suppose. In academic circles, and by that I mean in ballrooms of tony convention hotels in Washington, San Francisco, Miami, or San Diego where porcine college presidents, vice presidents and deans gather for top-level meetings on issues of national importance. In academic circles you are guaranteed a chuckle or two of recognition from an audience of your peers if you make one or more of the following three jests:

• Leading the faculty is like herding cats
• A secret on campus is what you only tell to one person at a time
• Academic politics are vicious because the stakes are so low

I’ll pause for a moment while you wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes and the milk that shot out of nose from your chin. But I’m betting that you already knew that academic administrators, or “leaders,” as they prefer to be called, are a fun group.

Fun, but not exclusive. Oddly enough, in an organization that prides itself on thinning its faculty ranks through the gymnastics of the tenure process, packing the payroll with administrators is widely regarded internally as the mark of a successful, well, administration. If a leader is really, really committed to establishing the importance of his contributions to the campus, he (feminists, forgive me, but what I am talking about here is universally a male behavior) methodically begins building his empire by bulking up his troops with senior executive associate vice presidents, senior associate vice presidents, associate vice presidents, senior assistant vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, executive directors, directors, senior associate directors, and so on down the line until you reach coordinators and dog catchers.

Academic leaders sit in wonder at their latest creation, the 3-D organizational chart.

Needless to say, the addition of administrative expertise makes the institution stronger; after all, how could a college ever get along with just a “director” when it could hire an “associate vice president” or a “dean” to do the same job? Of course, along with the title change comes a significant change in salary (upwards) because after all you get what you pay for. Or, as a recently appointed vice president I had the all-too-brief pleasure of working with once said to a faculty that had lived for decades with below-market salaries, “people with my expertise don’t come cheap.”

With all this brain power, I deserve a couple of big paychecks.

Some experts have observed that academic administration, being the growth sector that it is, is a bright spot in our flagging economy, while others, the pessimists, have pointed out that

Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research or service only grew by 18 percent. Inflation-adjusted spending on administration per student increased by 61 percent during the same period, while instructional spending per student rose 39 percent.

As long as all spending trends are up, I suppose everything is hunky-dory, except for the cash-strapped moms and dads who are picking up the tab—and the faculty who are patiently waiting to stick their mitts in the cookie jar for the crumbs the vice presidents et al in their largesse leave behind.

A handful of campuses are bucking this trend. At Washington State University, for example, university President Elson S. Floyd, PhD recently informed his faculty and staff that he was implementing a “new organizational configuration [that] reduces the total number of vice presidents from nine to six.” Floyd continues: “I would expect budget savings of between $700,000 to $900,000 resulting from these actions, although the ultimate savings will depend on a number of personnel actions and salary adjustments, which will be determined going forward.” He concludes his announcement of the vice presidential holocaust by saying, “Streamlining the administrative leadership of WSU will require all of us to work smarter, harder and faster. I have no doubt that the WSU family is up to the task.”

For those of you whose first language is not academic administrativese, allow me to translate for you: the Washington State Legislature slashed the university’s budget, so the president had to find some quick savings. Thinking fast, he collapsed three vice presidencies into one, and eliminated a currently vacant vice president’s position. Right away we know there’s something just a little fishy about the claim of “eliminating” a position that, being unoccupied, is not costing the campus anything. The piscine aroma grows a little stronger when we read the part about “ultimate savings” having to “depend” on “personnel actions and salary adjustments”; in other words, it has yet to be determined just how big a piece of the savings pie the surviving VP’s will carve up for themselves, given that they now must work “smarter, harder and faster.” The reward for the rest of the campus—the WSU family—for also working “smarter, harder and faster” is the comforting knowledge that their president believes they are “up to the task.”

It’s one thing, of course, for a large state university to be awash in administrators, and maybe even justifiable, given the multiple mandates the public trust demands it fulfill. But what about liberal arts colleges? Must these beleaguered institutions also beef up the administrative ranks in order to remain competitive in today’s diverse, multicultural, gender-neutral global educational market?

Of course they do. Take the fictional Liberal Arts College USA in fictional Collegetown USA as a hypothetical example. At LCA the president found a nationally recognized expert to lead a newly created dean’s office. The charge to this dean was to put the faculty on notice that its educational rubrics, learning objectives and classroom outcomes needed to be assessable, because assessment is, you know, important. Woe to the faculty member who could not break down Finnegan’s Wake into learning units, assigning each unit precise learning parameters, and ensuring each student derived the same learning outcome from each unit. Sayonara to the professor who believes students should be encouraged to establish their own educational goals. The point here is, LCA has a new dean, and he is a nationally recognized expert. On what, nobody is quite sure.

The national expert ponders his reputation.

Sometimes hiring more administrators makes a lean-and-mean institution even more efficient, and nowhere has this been more true than in the president’s office at LCA, where a year ago the then-president replaced one staff member with three, and announced plans to hire a fourth. Of the four, one failed immediately at the task she was given but was kept on anyway; one was an equal-opportunity hire, whose qualifications were based on her cohabitational preference; and one was a unusually sane appointment. The fourth is still in limbo, but will be, when (and if) he arrives, LCA’s newest vice president. And you thought administrative bloat was just for state schools.

I got my job the old-fashioned way!

Things are looking up at LCA, however. Its trustees are a remarkably dedicated group of people who are continuing to deliver on their promise to steward the college wisely. Their collective judgment will untangle the threads of the crazy-quilt organizational chart that has grown and grown over the last few years. More power to them!

NOTE to readers: “Administrative Bloat at American Universities: The Real Reason for High Costs in Higher Education,” a just-released report from the Goldwater Institute, makes for interesting reading if you want to get a sense of how universities operate and spend money. The link is above, where I have quoted from the report. I also remind readers that universities and colleges may look alike, but they are not alike, and efforts to run one as if it were the other are doomed to fail. I have drawn on the Goldwater report to make a general point, and not to compare university practice with what goes on on a well-run college campus.

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Plus ca Change : Transitional Analysis

A former boss of mine was fond of needling me and various colleagues with a constant reminder that “change is hard.” He chose his words carefully, not so much to point out the obvious (although he did a lot of that, too), but to let us know directly how much pleasure he was taking in our discomfiture at many of his dicta. While no one could call such behavior “harassment” in the traditional sense, it certainly created a chilly if not downright frosty atmosphere in the workplace. I tried my best to soldier on in this decidedly hostile environment, Nancy-Reagan smile plastered on my face and swallowed critiques that burned like acid in my throat and my thoughts. My eventual departure from the inner sanctum of my boss’s enablers was all but inevitable, I suppose. My leaving my job was a change that was hard for me, but in retrospect I see that living with the specter of the kind of change that continued to haunt the campus after I was gone was even harder for those who stayed.

A president consults his checklist for change.

Small liberal arts colleges have a vexed relationship with the notion of change. Like every organism, these institutions must regularly experience change to renew, refresh and survive. Even the doughtiest alumnus and crustiest professor recognize this simple truth. And so there is curricular reform on a pretty predictable cycle; offices of student affairs are always trying some new, sure-fire technique of encouraging undergraduates to embrace diversity and celebrate difference; and, difficult as it is for some of us to believe, faculty do eventually retire and are replaced by shiny new PhD’s with state-of-the-art ideas about their discipline. But like any host organism fighting off an unwanted parasite, a campus will resist change its collective psyche, spirit, gut—call it what you will—apprehends as hazardous to its health and future well being.

Liberal Arts College USA, like every other small baccalaureate institution, prides itself on being unique. Let us pause for a moment to reflect on what it means to be unique. Some colleges take their uniqueness very, very seriously. Consider, for example, Ithaca College. Ithaca is a typical liberal arts college with a typical faculty in upstate New York, but by golly, it is unique—and if you visit its website, it will tell you so 2870 times. Here’s a sampling of what you will find. (Thoughtful readers will not blame Call Me Miss for the errant adverbs modifying “unique” in a few of the sample texts. I guess when everything around you is unique, you need to muster a little extra verbiage so that your program can stand out as one-of-a-kind.):

The Theater Arts Management (TAM) degree is [sic] very unique program.

One of the most unique programs administered by the Gerontolgy [sic] Institute is the College’s relationship with Longview, an Ithacare Community.

CMD — A unique program in which you will develop a comprehensive mastery of communication as well as an understanding of the impact of communication on an organization’s success.

Human Anatomy provides the unique learning experience of human cadaver dissection and hands-on experience to study anatomical relationships, assess gross structure, and begin to appreciate the range of normal variation and pathological changes in different types of human tissue.

Undergrad was just the beginning.
Come to Ithaca for a unique graduate experience.

The Ithaca College sport club program mission is to provide students with a unique opportunity to develop leadership, organizational and fiscal management skills in a fun and safe supportive learning environment in which participants can build a sense of community.

International Students
Come to Ithaca College for a unique and challenging experience

Besides our unique major, we also instruct all entering students in first-year writing;

Culture and communication is a unique critical-studies degree program that makes connections between two areas of inquiry: the study of how culture informs and shapes all aspects of communication, and its corollary area of investigation — how communication is the process through which culture is created, modified, and challenged.

Our group-based all-college mentoring program is unique and nationally recognized.

Even universities—the big siblings of liberal arts colleges—are in the business of being unique. Just down the road from diminutive Ithaca looms the behemoth Cornell University, a campus that sparked the War Between the Tates and the War Between Keith Olberman and Principled Argument. Given that Cornell’s enrollment of 20,300 graduate and undergraduate students dwarfs the teeny tiny Ithaca’s 7,000 or so student body, it’s not at all surprising that Cornell is 13 times more unique than its petite companion school, scoring no less than 38100 invocations of the sacred appellation on its website.

Unique colleges all in a row, artist's rendering. Surely you can spot the differences!

But there are a handful of colleges that really and truly are unique, for example, the jewel-like Conway School of Landscape Architecture, an institution with a single focus that awards a master’s degree to its exceptionally talented graduates. Or Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, a Catholic great books school with a beautifully articulated sense of purpose and grace.

Liberal Arts College USA legitimately stands in the company of these unique institutions. Although it shares in common with other colleges many challenges, among them insufficient resources, lagging building maintenance, and occasional administrative chaos, its students, faculty and the things the two groups together study represent a remarkable and, yes, unique achievement in 20th Century higher education, made all the more remarkable because all efforts to quantify, analyze, or even replicate the transformations LCA effects in its students stymie even the most ardent devotees of “assessment.”

LCA USA grads leave the college determined to do things their way, on their timetable, and woe to anybody who stands between them and their goals. Whatever mojo the faculty works on students, the “outcome” (as we in the educational enterprise are fond of intoning) is a dazzling array of men and women who don’t just say they want to change the world—they do.

So, why, one might ask, would a president looking to make a mark on such a special place seek to change the very fabric of what makes the college unique? Is change so important that it drives the essential out the door with the expendable?

As always, it comes down to the simple matter of vision. College presidents, in order to steward the precious entity over which they hold sway, must be far-sighted. A myopic president whiles away his time at the helm tinkering with a policy here, changing a title there, fretting that somewhere, in some dusty document lurks a phrase so infelicitous it will bring Erin Brockovich and her ilk running. Rather than keeping his eyes on the prize of a fiscally robust, intellectually electric college—he focuses instead on the kind of change he, and only he, can believe in: the kind of institutional changes that will look impressive on his cv when he begins his job hunt. Thankfully for LCA USA that hunt is now underway. Its faculty, staff and trustees can go back to doing what they do best: squabbling about what the future holds for LCA USA while making its present the best it can be. And that will be the most welcome change in a long time.

Dawn at LCA USA: A new day brings welcome change.

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Forget about Killing All the Lawyers; First Let’s Call the Consultants!

What comes to mind when you hear the word “consulting”? The folks at McKinsey who brought you Enron? Bob Shrum, who ignited the dynamite Kerry-Edwards campaign? Or perhaps that unfortunate laid-off fellow next door, who has added “consultant” to his resume in a futile effort to conceal his unemployment.

When I see the words “consulting” or “consultant” I think about PT Barnum’s philosophy of doing business, and how consultants have adopted it with great success to sell their services to higher education. Take Liberal Arts College USA (LAC USA) in the bucolic hamlet of Collegetown USA. The manifold consultants suckling at its budgetary bosoms are sapping the alma right out of this mater.

The national average for consultants at liberal arts colleges is approximately .0005 consultants PSI; at LAC USA that ratio is closer to 1:1. These are important numbers to know, because one of the key assignments that keeps higher ed consultants busy these days is helping colleges develop “metrics” by which they can “measure success” and “demonstrate accountability.” Having a higher than average consultants/per square inch ratio can be read several ways. The positive interpretation is that the institution has buckled down and is calling on outside expertise to identify and provide solutions for the college’s numerous “challenges.” A less positive interpretation might suggest that a campus chock-a-block with consultants is a campus whose administrators lack the requisite skills and experience to do their jobs without the training wheels and steadying hand a personal factotum affords them.

Consultants: Follow their advice and they'll take the hit for you.

So just who are these hired hands, and whatever do they do? Let’s discuss.

One of the first ways you know you’re in trouble is when the college president suggests a review of the office where you are in charge. Such a review is never, ever good news. At LAC, some years ago the president decreed that an office key to the success of the college and his presidency should undergo such an exercise. To make a long and predictable story short, Consultant “A” was hired to do the review, at the conclusion of which the head of the office met with an ignominious end, and was replaced by a highly inexperienced, callow youth. So young and inexperienced that the consultant—who recommended the appointment—urged that the pup be advised by a more mature, experienced coach. And so it came to pass that Consultant “A” has for years been enjoying a fruitful gig as Yoda to the apparently permanently-too-inexperienced head of the office. One could ask if a more sensible recommendation might have been simply to hire a qualified individual to run things. But then Consultant “A” might not have had the opportunity to fly cross country several times a year on LCA’s dime and enjoy 100% return on the recycled advice he shares with the college, advice that has no basis in, and is in fact counter to, the college’s interests.

Consultant “B” doesn’t have to make a transcontinental flight to reach LCA, although he followed a circuitous route to arrive at its ivied halls. Consultant “B” helps the “expert” hired by the president to sort out the various jurisdictions of the campus’s internecine jurisprudence. He is also the expert’s former boss. The expert had served in the faculty senate of a previous institution, so therefore of course not only possessed deep knowledge of this particularly thorny briar patch of college life, but without question also had the requisite street creds to give LCA faculty the reassurance they needed in order to be guided—expertly, of course—to enlightenment. Have you spotted the emerging pattern yet? Time for a pop quiz.

Consultants “C” through “F” are such fixtures at LCA that one of them even has a permanent office on campus and gets invited to official college celebrations. These guys earn their keep, and it’s a good thing, because they are in possession of intimate knowledge of every nook and cranny of LCA as well as licensures nobody on staff can lay claim to. But, wouldn’t you just know it? LCA chooses not to listen to the advice offered by this phalanx of hired hands. Just this spring decades of expensive and remarkably consistent recommendations were blithely ignored because another consultant—one with a negligible relationship to the college, but advising a new “report” to the president—tossed out a suggestion concerning buildings and grounds. The bloodshed from the ensuing mayhem has yet to prove fatal to anyone, but some vital signs are not looking good.

But..but..but...the consultant told me if I built it they would come!

And then, finally, there is the granddaddy of LCA consultants, the president’s own amanuensis. Gramps has been around since the early days of the president’s tenure and provides recommendations almost as fast as he cashes the checks he receives from the college’s capacious and opaque “general administrative” fund. I came to know this graybeard when he offered me advice on a project that comes around every ten years or so on most campuses. It’s a project I had undertaken more than once (I won’t tell you how many times lest you think I am getting long in the tooth) and for which my expertise had been recognized both on and off campus. Let’s just leave it at this: the president was none too happy when I showed him the how-to manual from which the consultant had cribbed his recommendations. Need I add that the displeasure was not directed at the consultant?

What is the take-away here? It’s not that all consultants are charlatans or never offer original advice. And it’s certainly not that all administrators at LCA are sock puppets animated by unseen and unaccountable hands of off-stage consultants. No, it is, rather, the simple suggestion that if the right person is in charge, then consultants count their stays on campus in days or at the most weeks. They do not become long-term “cost-centers” for the college. And Alma Mater does not become their cash cow.

Food for thought? Why not let the consultants decide.

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Hey Faculty! Your Priorities Need Alignment!

In June I wrote a post about Alexander Kemos, who faked his resume, landed a highly remunerative job at Texas A&M, rose quickly to an even more remunerative position, cozied up to the university president, got caught in his lies and was sent packing.

Now comes word that another senior official at A&M has lost his lucrative perch on the administrative ladder, although this time the malfeasance seems to be institutional rather than personal. Or maybe it is personal, because Robert Hash was relieved of his duties as vice dean of the medical school—and demoted to an untenured faculty position—because “he had personality differences with other administrators,” according to A&M mouthpiece/general counsel Andrew Strong.

Of course, if you ask ex-Dean Hash you get another story, one of ethics violations, real estate chicanery, sweetheart deals, and institutional retaliation for whistle-blowing. You can read all about it in the Austin, Texas statesman.com, then decide for yourself if “personality differences” constitutes a demote-able offense. You might even be moved to ask yourself if, in academic workplaces, “personality differences” play a role in getting the brass ring, tenure, the job for life. Or you can simply enjoy the farce of a lawyer saying something supremely stupid.

Dr. Hash got demoted when he wondered if the cost per-square-foot was too high.

I am interested in this all-too-familiar tale because of its similarities to what happened recently at Washburn University. There is a key difference between the two sagas, however, one well worth a few moments’ contemplation. The Washburn whistleblowers, women, were fired outright; ex-Dean Hash, a man, was demoted. For those of you out there who like to think of colleges and universities as bastions of all things enlightened, wake up and smell the sexism. When something ugly happens on a campus, you can bet the farm that punishment will be meted out along gender lines reminiscent of those found in Sharia law.

A long-time colleague of mine, a woman I respect as highly for her professional expertise as I do for her warmth and compassion, was recently given her walking papers at a small liberal arts college located in Collegetown USA. Her “supervisor”—a faculty member put in charge of my colleague’s non-academic division—let her go after subjecting her to a year of petty humiliations.

Since this scenario—a new male boss enters the picture and it’s bye-bye women of a certain age—has been replayed ad nauseum in the last few years at Liberal Arts College USA, my former colleague was not surprised by her dismissal. She, like every other member of the staff and administration, served at the pleasure of the trustees, so unemployment lurks around every corner ready to getcha at a moment’s notice.

But what, you might wonder, had this particular administrator done to incur the trustees’ displeasure? According to her boss, she was “not in alignment” with her fellow administrators. Keep in mind that this is a liberal arts institution, not a school of chiropractic, so her “alignment,” or lack thereof, should not have been an issue at all. But, just like a personality difference, a difference of alignment can be fatal when the stakes are every man for himself.

And that’s pretty much how it is these days at LAC USA: every man for himself. Women are useful so long as their alignments conform to the patriarchy’s specifications, but female administrators are about as welcome on campus as full-need students with C- averages and no claims to victimhood. As a former administrator and a woman still, I scratch my head over how so sorry a situation has come to pass.

If we can't adjust her alignment, she'll be the next to go!

Actually, I don’t. I know exactly why it happened. When former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis ran for president, he evoked what he called an old Greek proverb to describe the Reagan-Bush administration. Fish, the governor said, rot from the head first. Not a pretty image, but a compelling one and applicable today at LCA USA.

The official presidential portrait

The college has been adrift for five years now, when a new president arrived and promptly announced that he had been hired to “clean up the mistakes of the past.” And to his credit, that is what he did. Noticing that the president had to use the same toilet as the rest of the male administrators on his floor, he acted decisively: the very first bricks-and-mortar project he “tasked” the buildings and grounds department with was the installation of a bathroom, complete with shower, for his personal use. After that, construction and renovation pretty much stalled on campus, but one terrible sin of the past had been redressed. The next wrong the president righted was to cut down on the amount of driving that he did. This was not so much a go-green gesture as it was long-overdue recognition that it was absurd to expect a college president would not have a car and driver at his disposal.

The Throne Room: A President's Enduring Legacy

Having addressed his two most pressing priorities first, the president then turned to the meat-and-potatoes of college life, the mission and future of the campus. He penned a think-piece intended to stimulate the faculty and the board to begin strategic planning for the years ahead. The LCA USA, he wrote, needs to “reinvent liberal arts education,” “educate students for a global economy,” “find away to become sustainable.” Are you yawning yet? This tattered list of been-there, done-that shibboleths has floated around every college campus for decades—the only difference being some of those colleges years ago turned their rhetoric into action.

But the president’s approach to planning was two-pronged. For the board he wrote an annual retrospective chronicling his achievements of the past year and his goals for the coming academic year, thus guaranteeing that LCA USA would have an event horizon no further out than the president’s next evaluation and compensation review.

Such an iteration of incremental enhancements year-to-year can accrete to overall improvements in the college. The substitution of short-term projects for long-term aspirations and directions is worse than no planning at all, however, for it presents a convincing illusion that the long-term interests of the college are being served. Here we are five years later still waiting for a strategic planning process to begin.

In the interim, though, the president has continued his bold correction of the “mistakes of the past”: nary a woman in charge of, well, anything on campus five years ago is still present and accounted for on payday. My colleague is simply the most recent in a long line of female former LCA employees joining the queue at the unemployment office. Men who didn’t measure up were given different titles and new offices.

But let’s hold our noses and revisit Governor Dukakis’s decaying flounder. The president also worked his mojo on the LCA USA board of trustees, once a national model of diversity with a heady mix of men and women, blacks and whites, young and old. As a trustee retired (or resigned), chances are if he were a man he was replaced by a man and if she were a woman she was replaced by a man. The president convinced the board that it needed a shake-up, so a game of musical chairs began whereby the heads of various committees were replaced. When the music stopped and the chairs were filled, guess what? With one lone exception, all of the women who had led committees had been relieved of their duties so that a man could take their place. They don’t call them “chairmen” for nothing, after all, and with the men back where they belong—in charge—the president could finally say his board was in alignment with the as-yet unspecified and unplanned-for future goals of the college. Oh, happy day.

The president and his dream team study the campus map to root out the last of the female administrators. (Scene recreated using actors.)

My colleague should wear her premature retirement as a badge of honor. She has joined the ranks of some impressive professionals. More than their ouster, these women share something else: all held non-faculty positions. Their commitment to the college, their contributions, their wisdom all counted for naught, and there was no safety net of tenure to protect them from the caprices of a misogynist president.

And all the while, the faculty stands by and enjoys the show. So sad. By their failure to act, the faculty will get the administrators they deserve. And then it really will be too late.

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