Category Archives for Staff and Administrators

A Faculty (Almost) in Revolt: Institutional Loyalty, Acts of Conscience and Votes of No Confidence

When the temperature hovers in the upper 90’s for weeks on end, not much stirs in Collegetown, USA. Most of the underpaid, underappreciated faculty have shipped their kids off to lacrosse or computer camp, or are busy packing for the Vineyard or Prince Edward Island. It’s a tough life.

So I was mildly surprised when I ran into a former faculty colleague coming out of the doctor’s office the other day. After we exchanged languid, semi-sincere pleasantries, she volunteered that she and other faculty were having a terrible summer, and that even the shortest of attempted conversations quickly degenerated into foaming-mouth, expletive-hurling duets of rage-fueled albeit impotent calls for revolution. As a faculty, my friend said, she and her colleagues were scared, angry and disaffected. “We came so close,” she said yearningly, “so close to voting no confidence last fall.”

The faculty cordially request your presence at a pig roast. So read the invitation, but the event was cancelled.

Voting no confidence in their college’s president, to be precise. Alas, misdirected institutional loyalty kept that much-needed vote from taking place. It’s only now, some six months after the aborted insurrection, that the faculty have come to realize that loyalty to ones college is a very different thing than loyalty to ones college president, and that their failure to act when the situation cried out for action has allowed an already fetid and festering wound to continue to eat its way through flesh and bone to the heart of the college they profess to hold dear.

Make no mistake: whistle-blowing is not easy, and its consequences can be terrible. This is a lesson learned the hard way recently by a couple of administrators at Washburn University who were given the heave-ho after answering board member’s questions about university President Jerry Farley’s squirrelly ideas about finances.

According to the Topeka Capitol-Journal Online,

Two former Washburn University administrators allege in a lawsuit filed Thursday [July 8] against the institution, its Board of Regents and president Jerry Farley that they were terminated in retaliation for engaging in protected whistle-blower activities.

Wanda Hill, former treasurer and vice president for administration, was terminated April 1. Robin Bowen, former vice president for academic affairs, was terminated March 30.

A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Topeka lists three counts for the action: deprivation of the plaintiffs’ Fifth and 14th Amendment rights to due process against all three par ties, breach of contract against Washburn University and the board, and common law retaliatory discharge (whistle-blower) against all three defendants.

Vice Presidents Hill and Bowen were sacked when the president discovered they’d told inquisitive regents that he was cooking enrollment data with no-show students and handing out scholarships to them. So, with phantom students spiriting away $500,000 in grant monies, the trustees were understandably a tad suspicious. And this is where the story gets murky. Were Hill and Bowen duped by board members’ reassurances that their jobs would be safe if they told what they knew, or were they malicious underlings, out to stab their boss in the back?

Freshmen at Washburn U practice the class cheer.

Hard to tell, since Jerry Farley remains ensconced as Washburn’s CEO, and has the “110 percent confidence” of at least regent Dan Lykins, who says President Farley’s “reputation for being honest and upfront is beyond reproach.” On the other hand, the court documents suggest pretty conclusively that there was some sleight of hand in the budgetary cookie jar during Farley’s watch.

What’s of greater interest here, though, is the dangerous game VPs Hill and Bowen entered into with the board of regents. Sure, the regents are their boss’s bosses, but the promise of continued employment was not one that the women should have believed. President Farley had the power to can them, and he did. Unless and until the regents dismiss him, they will not interfere with his presidential prerogatives.

These women were either truly courageous or truly stupid, because they spoke up even though they lacked the protection that tenure would have afforded them. As administrators, they were as expendable, fair game for a vindictive president or a manipulative board. Had they been members of the elect—the faculty, that is—with the guarantee of jobs for life that tenure provides, they could have squealed on their boss with impunity.

Which brings us back to Collegetown, USA, where the faculty’s winter of discontent has given way to a summer of boiling tempers and exploding anxiety. A question gnaws at the faculty’s small, rarely used collective conscience: should we do the right thing? Having given one answer a try and finding it sorely wanting, perhaps now is the time for faculty to stand up for themselves, their students and their college.

Before it is too late.

Remember the princes and do the right thing!

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Former VP of Administration Seeks Employment as Creative Writer; Highly Experienced!

As unemployment continues to hover around ten percent (if you are an optimist) or seventeen percent (if you are a realist), a job hunter might do well to ask herself if what she puts on her resume matters. Selling oneself in a buyer’s market is after all easier said than done, so when the rejection slips start piling up, or, as is the modern “human resources” response to applicants, the lack of rejection slips or indeed any notification whatsoever keeps her in-box empty, the huntress may wonder if she should burnish the arrows in her experiential quiver.

Padding a resume, or curriculum vitae as we in the academy call this autobiographical novella, is irresistible for a certain kind of would-be employee. Every conference attended, every membership on every committee, every letter written to the editor, every scrap of recognition earned since and including the perfect attendance ribbon at Sunday school is painstakingly recorded to document what a great hire the applicant would be. One is tempted to feel sympathy for a search committee charged with the soporific task of finding successful keepers amidst the losing weepers in the avalanche of enhanced resumes it receives for any given position, or to forgive the committee if in its puffery-induced somnolence it fails to assign a reject to its proper pile.

Such might be the case for the Texas A&M committee that recommended Alexander Kemos be hired as associate executive vice president for operations in February 2009. Mr. Kemos was quickly promoted to senior vice president for administration in March of that same year. Now, just a little over a year later, he’s in so tight with the president to whom he reports that the two are off vacationing together in Maine. Cozy. Or at least it was until Mr. Kemos abruptly resigned in order to fulfill an irresistible “desire to spend more time with his family.” So said A&M President R. Bowen Loftin.

Why the sudden familial urge? It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the recent discovery that Mr. Kemos possessed neither the Master’s degree nor the Ph.D. in international relations he claimed to have earned from Tufts University. And I seriously doubt his need to have more quality time with his kids was in any way related to the other fabrication on his resume, his service as an elite Navy SEAL.

Alexander Kemos and his impressive resume.

At the time of his employment at Texas A&M, the faux Dr. Kemos must have seemed nothing short of dreamy. Supposedly fluent in Greek, Arabic and French, he must have looked like a quite a catch. His impressive academic credentials, moreover, probably had faculty members on the search committee squealing with delight. Clearly it did not occur to them to wonder why anyone genuinely in possession of the phony Dr.’s alleged bona fides would take—or want—a job that entailed ensuring the “management, oversight and strategic planning in areas such as facilities and operations, governmental affairs, athletics, transportation services, dining services, marketing and communications, and university advancement.”

But, then, again, perhaps search committee members truly believed that a Ph.D. in diplomacy was a requirement for the position, given its specifics: “engage the Office of the Executive Vice President for Operations into academic discussions related to construction, facilities, research, real estate and physical plant priorities, as well as maintain and build relationships with stakeholders across the University.” Anybody who has ever tried to have a rational discussion about office space with a faculty member knows that not only diplomatic skills but also the training a SEAL receives will come in handy.

You misunderstood when I said I was a trained seal!

The reports out of Texas do not make it clear if Mr. Kemos remains employed by Texas A&M, only that he is no longer its senior vice president. If he is indeed unemployed, I hope he has a pleasant summer with his family. Maybe he can squeeze in some “me time” to work on his resume.

In the meantime, for those among us who do not lie about our credentials, searching for a new job just got a little harder.

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Presidential Politics, College Edition

I’m reading Game Change, which is every bit as juicy as I’d hoped it would be. I recommend it highly.

As I read about primary fights and smoke-filled rooms, though, my thoughts are carried back into the past, and try as I might to resist this tide, I can’t. So I will share with you reflections on how presidents of another venerable American institution, our liberal arts colleges, are selected. The money involved and the stakes at risk are teeny-tiny compared to our national elections, but the hubris and the ego of the players every bit as supersized.

Much soul-searching takes place campus-wide when a president announces she’s leaving. Such an announcement comes for a variety of reasons; it could be because the president has gained a new perch on a higher branch of the tree of learning, or because he’s ready at last to start living large on his pension, swollen as it is by deferred compensation, or because the faculty is coming after him with flaming torches and weaponized copies of the college’s governance documents. No matter. The trustees will gravely instruct the faculty to think deeply about the qualities most important for the institution’s next leader, and will themselves endeavor to answer the same question. Not, you understand, that they actually will do the q-and-a themselves. No, for that and other time-consuming tasks they will hire an executive search firm, just like Fortune 500’s do.

The real fun begins when the board, which—contrary to faculty conceit—is the hiring authority for bodies presidential, inevitably must choose between the lady or the tiger: academic vision or fiscal know-how. There is not a board of trustees of a liberal arts college, even the ones with bloated $1 billion-plus endowments, that does not agonize over this awful decision.

The board at a small Ursuline women’s college, the College of New Rochelle, recently had to decide. In justifying the board’s choice, the chairman said,

“Although financial needs and educational needs are both part of the picture, in the College of New Rochelle’s case, financial needs are absolutely paramount at this time,” said Michael N. Ambler, a former lawyer at Texaco and a member of the college’s board since 1993. “We felt that the crying need for the college over the long haul was financial in order to keep it alive, and without that, we were nowhere.”

To pull the CNR back from the brink of nowhere, the board in its wisdom dispensed with a search and named the vice president of finance, eight-year employee Judith Huntington, president. Ms. Huntington is a former audit manager at KPMG and holds a baccalaureate degree.

The chairman elaborates on the board’s choice:

With “virtually no endowment” (about $20 million, for an enrollment of 6,000 students), “the financial requirements of CNR are very difficult to meet,” Ambler says. “We have balanced our books, based on regular revenue and rather small gifts from alumnae, and Judy has been responsible for a great deal of our ability to do that.”

Huntington, he says, has nearly a year to more fully “familiarize herself with the educational side, to the extent she didn’t already have it.” Hiring a president with stronger academic credentials and lesser financial bona fides could have put the college’s future at risk, he suggests. “If we had an educator as president, I’m not sure the college would survive.”

There are two sets of Monday morning quarterbacks that sit in judgment of a board’s actions: the faculty and the alumnae. Both groups at the College of New Rochelle began full tilt analyzing the decision, writing letters and issuing statements. Did these manifestos take the board to task for its failure to consider the academic mission of the institution? Did either group question if the board investigated whether the education offered by CNR might be the reason for its shaky finances? No, of course not. In fact, education seems to have been the last thing on the quarterbacks’ minds. They were upset—stop me if you have heard this one before—over process. Seems the trustees conducted their “search” under cover of darkness, so sure enough

a group of alums wrote an impassioned letter (which was soon followed by others) urging the board to “recognize that more than anything else, at this critical time, the College needs a rigorous, open, inclusive and transparent process to identify the best person to lead CNR.”

The head of the Council of Faculty had these fighting words to offer: “I understand the concerns of others and respect and share the concern for the procedures that were followed in this case, we’re all best served at this juncture to be behind [the board’s decision].”

I wish President-elect Huntington all the best. She seems like a nice lady with a big job ahead of her. But I weep for my former professional home, of which CNR is but a leading indicator of the demise of liberal arts colleges should they continue down the path it has blazed. The choice between academic vision and fiscal know-how is no choice at all, because if you don’t have the former you don’t need the latter. A sustainable budget that sustains a poor curriculum is sustainable in name only. The financials might be balanced, but after the students have gone and the faculty are left scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened, the accountant can shut off the lights on his way out.

The College of New Rochelle isn’t the first institution to make this potentially fatal mistake; it’s just taken it to the next level. For years many colleges have instructed their search firms to find them a president who can raise money. The search firms do their best to comply, but with this “or else” dictum guiding their actions they must range further and further afield from the traditional academic leader, a man or woman of scholarly accomplishment, comfortable in the classroom and capable of making informed decisions about the business of education—teaching, learning, and research. Instead, they offer up pseudo-executive types, who may or, more likely, may not have had up-through-the-ranks academic careers, but who know their way around a spreadsheet and a cocktail party of high rollers.

Sadly, the colleges who look for this kind of savior in a pinstripe suit often get exactly what they want. The new president arrives. The beans are counted. The procedures are put in place. The outside experts are brought in. Never mind that the faculty is in turmoil, so distracted are they by the thought that something new or, horror of horrors, something additional might be asked of them, that they fail to realize the Sturm-und-Drang of the new regime has sapped them of any capacity to invigorate what very possibly is an anemic academic program much in need of a transfusion of new ideas, new commitment, and new passion. The place grinds to a halt, but, by golly, it can account for every bean!

I am a great fan of capitalism. Maybe I even think that greed is good. But as a capitalist I look at liberal arts colleges who hire accountants as their presidents and I scratch my head. Isn’t the first principle of capitalism to make your product so good it’s the one everybody wants to buy? Are penny-perfect spreadsheets and word-perfect governance documents an acceptable substitute for an education that will enable students to stretch their minds, test their principles, and expand their aesthetic capacity?

I don’t think so.

NOTE to readers: All quotations are from “Finances First,” by Doug Lederman in the Febuary 8, 2010 edition of Inside Higher Education.