UK should accept this gift and use the controversy to teach about philanthropy

The University of Kentucky has its hands full with a naming opportunity. This is the kind of diplomatic challenge that makes administrative work so engaging.

Joe Craft, who gave the naming gift for the basketball practice facility at UK, has worked with twenty other coal industry players to assemble a $7-million package of gifts to build a new dormitory for the basketball program, to replace the aging Joe B. Hall Wildcat Lodge.

The group of donors has stipulated that the word "coal" must be included in the name of the dormitory as a condition of the gift. This is the rub that has lit up the phones.

A group of students has sent a petition to the trustees, urging them not to accept the gift with this condition. Their reasoning, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, is that it "does not represent the feelings of all students."

A spokeswoman for the group of students is quoted as further arguing, "I think it shows that Kentucky is not committed to moving forward in terms of energy and new jobs for people in Eastern Kentucky," she said.

Others are worried about other things. Why would the university build this building when there is a hiring freeze in place? What about the $1.5-million the football program needs for a multi-purpose recruiting room?

However, most of the debate is about whether coal is good, bad, or indifferent. (The "indifferent" blogger is worried about euphony in the new name, which is a good point.)

Diplomacy is important in situations like this. Here are some things to consider:

• While the students' objections, as they have expressed them, are irrelevant, it is both right and prudent to treat them with respect and help them understand the gift more fully. Eventually, some of the current students will be in a position to advance their own values with a seven figure gift. The sense they have, that UK is "their" university (so it seems relevant to them that this gift doesn't reflect their feelings), is a valid and strong foundation for their future relationships, as graduates and perhaps as major donors, to the University.

• The question whether coal is good, bad, or indifferent is an opportunity to talk about other aspects of UK's mission as a land grant university, and about their "green" initiatives. Clearly, UK's mission nearly requires it to contest gently any flatfooted claim that coal is bad. However, they can point toward UK's role influencing a future in which coal's role or consequences are different. They can also highlight their mining engineering programs, focusing on mine safety, perhaps.

• This attention to restricted giving creates an opportunity to highlight UK's willingness to work with donors, whose values are always widely diverse, to express what is important to them in advancing the mission of the institution. This is the only purpose for which this gift is offered. It is not an unrestricted $7-million that UK has chosen to use in this way. The only choice facing the administration and trustees is to build this dorm with this name, or to forego the gift. However, other gifts provide other opportunities to emphasize other donors' values, and UK is presumably open to those conversations also.

What should UK do? I think they certainly should accept the gift, since it addresses a genuine need consistent with their mission. At the same time, they should lead the story by talking clearly and abundantly about why they are doing so.

Honor Among Thieves

The chancellor of the Texas A&M system, Michael McKinney, is indignant that the former president of the flagship campus, Elsa Murano, conducted a real search for a cabinet level officer.

The chancellor blames the ex-president for not keeping her word — he impugns her integrity — because she, in a moment of weakness, agreed to hire a predetermined, apparently unqualified candidate for a key job, but then rightly conducted a real search with a consulting firm and faculty input, and hired someone else.

She should have resigned rather than agreeing to hire the guy from Washington at the outset, no doubt.

Once she turned around and did the right thing, though, the chancellor should have been the one in an impossible position, at least apologizing and acquiescing. Instead, he's indignantly blaming her — for publication and from the comfort of the chancellor's office — for not keeping her word!

The indignant chancellor still has his job, and the ex-president is looking for what is next in her life.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wannabe U 2

Almost two weeks ago, I promised a further post on Gaye Tuchman's Wannabe U, and I have worked over a draft much of that time. I'm not sure it's worthwhile to continue stewing about it.

Perhaps it's the fact that I'm in the administration now and have begun to see the world through those windows, but I'm skeptical that things could be as bad at Wan U as she suggests, so I am perplexed how best to respond.

Certain themes stay with me, though:

1. I suspect that behind much of her narrative there are a lot of faculty and administrators who are honorable people doing the best they can with their flawed selves in a stressed and stressful situation. If this is not true, and the environment really is as poisoned by self-serving cynicism on all sides as it looks in Tuchman's narrative, I can hardly believe anyone works there at all.

2. If the relationships at UConn (or wherever) really are that poisoned, and yet people who have choices do in fact continue to show up, I trust someone is working on finding a better way. If not, the place cannot survive much longer without imploding.

3. I want to shake some of the faculty members she describes, if they are as she describes them. Why do they not see that scholars who realize they can best use their gifts as administrators are not "failed academics" but academics who are contributing to the cause in a different way? Why would anyone expect a cabinet level administrator who has plenty of work of a different kind to do to be contributing new research? Why would you boycott the meetings where you can contribute input and have an influence, and then complain that you weren't consulted?

4. I want to shake some of the administrators she describes, if they are as she describes them. The institution is a stewardship we've been given, not a platform or a stage on which to present ourselves to an admiring world. If you treat an academic faculty like a battalion of infantry, it is no wonder they start shooting at you.

5. I agree with what I understand to be a premise of Tuchman's thinking about higher education: the faculty is the heart of the institution. The role of administrators is to create and maintain a culture in which they can thrive as teachers and researchers. Inevitably that sometimes means doing things the faculty find troubling. For example, faculty members who think teaching is an annoyance need someone to help them rethink that, in my opinion. That they don't want to rethink it doesn't change reality: you can't have a school without students.

I'm going to keep doing my bit of working and hoping and praying that faculty and administrators in America's institutions, whether they are Wannabes or not, can find a pattern of workable partnership in governance before the whole task of higher education winds up in the hands of stockholders.

Anybody want to move to New York?

What this and this may tell about the economy or the academic job market, I don't know, but  Cornell's hiring freeze has suddenly thawed. They have posted a breathtaking 139 new (mostly administrative) jobs so far today at Inside Higher Ed.

The decision process that opened this floodgate must have been fascinating.

Never Thought of That

I've got to change the name of my blog. Google thinks it's a French langauge blog, because, of course, "Talleyrand in Academe" features a French historical figure and the title itself is in French.

So it will be just "Talleyrand: Negotiating Higher Education."

The more things change...

Gaye Tuchman's book has arrived, and I have read through it once. It gave me the sense of deja vu. We have seen a version of this argument before.

In my last post, I mentioned the question whether the book would be helpful if next year is not 1910. (It will, about which more in a later post.) At least we can say that if next year is 1910 Thorstein Veblen will be glad to have a commrade in arms.

Veblen created one genre with which Tuchman's book can be identified in 1918 with his "memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men" entitled The Higher Learning in America. He worried nine decades ago that, "Plato's classic scheme of folly which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge" (57). He was bothered by "the incursion of business principles into university policy" (95).

Tuchman and Veblen are concerned about a strikingly similar list of issues, which are often even expressed in similar terminology. Here is a partial list:

• The influence of accountants
• "Auditing" and "Surveillance" by administrators
• The role of money in decision making
• The compromises student recruitment can entail
• Underpaid and understaffed faculties, while the university is spending large sums on real estate
• Presidents who are not contributing current research in their academic disciplines (!)
• Administrations who buff up appearances rather than making actual improvements
• The prominence of athletics and the salaries of coaches

There are important differences between the two books as well. For example Tuchman does not, as Veblen does,  include "undergraduate instruction" among the "extraneous activities" by which a university might allow itself to be distracted from its real work (12).  Also, the role of Tuchman's wannabe corporate managers is played in Veblen's book by the faculty of "lower" professional and technical schools (such as business, law, engineering, and divinity) who are interlopers in university governance, representing "the supercession of learning by worldly wisdom" (149).

Reading Tuchman's book alongside Veblen's from ninety-one years ago, at least we can say that the transformation of Wannabe U that is the focus of Tuchman's ethnography was probably at most a transformation from an older business-driven model to a newer one.

And Tuchman and Veblen agree that there is no way to take American institutions back to a time, if there was one, when commercial values did not influence them.

Wannabe U?

I ordered Wannabe U, by Gaye Tuchman yesterday. I suspect the academic blogosphere will be alight with it shortly, and I don't want to miss the party.

I'm curious whether Tuchman has a constructive proposal that could help us negotiate higher education inside and outside the academy if next year does not turn out to be 1910. I'm hoping the book is more than an articulate rant about those awful administrators who persecute innocent professors. (Administrators rant about awful professors too, of course, but rarely in book form.)

In my fantasy world, it would be possible to form a real partnership between administrators and faculty that allows each to contribute what they can to the thriving of the institution and the public good.

If such a fantasy is to be reality, we're all going to have to calm our anxieties and do less ranting and more listening.

We'll see what Prof. Tuchman has to say.

Civility

I keep thinking about the problem of civil discourse in the academy.

Today, there's a think piece on Inside Higher Ed's web site in which Susan Herbst proposes that, through our approach to teaching, academics could help improve the civility quotient in society at large.

I wish I thought we were in a position to make that work. The problem is, students see not only how we lead discussions in class but also how we treat each other and our external publics.

It seems to me that we in the academy have a lot of work to do on ourselves if we are to help make things better in the larger culture. Unfortunately, it seems to me that we are a significant part of the problem right now.

Before we could lead any change by giving an example of civil debate to our larger culture, first we would have to learn the basics of civil debate within ourselves. Academics may debate the easy cases civilly -- that is, the small intramural controversies among those who fundamentally agree. But we are as vicious as AM talk radio when it comes to matters of real social significance. There are few measured, calm discussions then.

For example, when Mark Lilla proposed in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently that "conservatism is a tradition, not a pathology," the comments section below that article showed what academics are really like when truly fundamental disagreements such as those that vex us today are at stake. Measured and calm it was not.

I have been deeply guilty of ridiculing and vituperating those with whom I have disagreed. In late 2008, I decided to start working on not doing that any more. Some people who were enjoying the show have asked me why I disappeared from certain debates. The reason is that I decided then to try to stop doing damage to relationships and institutions I care about.

I fall off that wagon embarrassingly often, though I will say in my own favor that I have not often done so in front of the wide world or in print in this past year, but I think I've learned that it's worth the effort.

We in academia have been practicing incivility for decades, and we've gotten very good at it. Maybe if enough of us start today trying to calm ourselves down, in twenty or thirty years we might be in a position to offer help to someone else.