Reading People with Bad Reputations

Yesterday I referred to a blog post by Michael Jinkins.

It occurred to me afterward that it's interesting that he's the only person I know who has expressed a deep interest in a figure even more problematic than my friend Talleyrand.

Michael has built much of his academic career on an effort to rehabilitate Machiavelli as a guide to contemporary leadership.

I've got to be in favor of that, right?

Wisdom about the Presidency

There is much wisdom from Michael Jinkins here. The new president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary is starting his presidency the way a wise minister starts a new pastorate, by visiting every spare minute:

The first goal I set after becoming president of Louisville Seminary was to visit with every current board member and every faculty member, all of our staff, and as many current students as are available, as well as many past members of the board, alums, pastors, other church leaders, and friends of our school, within the first year of my presidency. I am eight weeks into the project, and we are well on our way.

He is finding that the stereotypes some might have brought to the job do not apply. His experience reinforces the insight that it's crucial for the president to question his or her own assumptions. It's hard enough for a president to find out the truth without compounding the problem by failing to ask enough questions.

Synchronicity

Wendell Berry is a very important figure in my intellectual development. He gave quite a few hours of his life, which he was far from owing me, to the formation of my young mind in the late 1980s. I am deeply grateful. There are few people I respect and admire as much.

This wonderful gift notwithstanding, he is being petty, in my opinion, about this.

The donor database is the key to a good night's sleep

In a previous life, I was a pastor. Early on, a wise older minister let me know that, contrary to the reigning piety, it was irresponsible for a minister not to know who gave and how much. "You're responsible for this boat, and you've got to know who's floating it." Among other things, it makes it possible to sleep at night.

The reason, of course, is that too often people try to use money to manipulate mission. "If you don't ________, I'm going to withhold my giving." When someone says that, you have to know exactly what it means.

It happens in higher ed as well, unfortunately. But there's a difference. In higher education, there's no piety to overcome. Everyone knows or should know that there's a database at hand that stores the giving record of the one who is making the threat.

Dave Dunlop says somewhere that one of the first requirements of a good fund raiser is "a kind and forgiving nature." That's partly because people disappoint you all the time with their motives for giving and not giving. I've been told some doozies. And that's fine. The person who looked me in the eye last summer and told me he gives every year six times what I knew he really gave is still being generous in light of his resources. So a big thanks to him.

Recently I've been informed that two gifts, one of six figures and the other seven, have been "revoked" because of this and that. Thanks to this wonderful software product, I know that it takes me less than three days to earn in salary the combined total lifetime giving of these two friends of the institution. That doesn't mean we're not forgoing $1.7-million between them, but given what I know for sure, I can live with that uncertainty.

So I forgive them and I'll be kind to them. And I'll keep in touch with them, just in case. But tonight I'm going to get some sleep.

Cost Cutting and Faculty Unhappiness

I know nothing about the situation with cost cutting and faculty unhappiness at Wells College that I didn't read in this article. It may be that this faculty is completely in the right and the president is completely in the wrong. But I doubt it. I've seen some situations that were outwardly similar. At such times the president and cabinet are in a difficult spot. They are sure a fully democratic, shared governance approach can be abused to impede any action at all, and may not yield the hard decisions that have to be made, shared or not.

Since the administration does not in reality conform to the worst faculty stereotypes, they've been over everything sweating blood trying to find the least humanly and institutionally damaging things to cut. They might be wrong, but they're pretty sure they've found the least awful solution. Many smart and honorable people have worked on it, and they're confident this is what needs to happen.

But suppose you have a meeting, or series of meetings, anyway. Experience suggests that when we seek faculty participation in such a conversation as this, the result is not always a proposal that will cut costs, but rather an argument that cost cutting is unnecessary, or other things would be better to cut, or the development office should just raise more money. And those arguments may be valid. If they are, those approaches need to be pursued. That's why we have shared governance. "All of us are smarter than any of us." I am for it.

It's possible, though, that after the meeting, the cuts will still have to be made. And now the faculty are even angrier, because they provided an actual (perhaps non-cost-saving or more damaging) solution that results in no faculty cuts, which the administration then ignored.

It is easy to imagine that the president makes a calculation: maybe it's best for relationships with the faculty to let them object that they weren't consulted than to give them cause to feel patronized and rejected. It's a least of the evils situation, not a sign the president is an ogre. In this situation, the leader is in reality doing the opposite of what she's accused of: she's trying to preserve the faculty's opportunities, not limit them. From the faculty's point of view, though, it's easy to understand that they don't see it that way. In the long run, seeking consensus first is best.

The worst case scenario is one I've mentioned earlier: Gaye Tuchman describes a situation at Wannabe U. There was a meeting in which faculty input was to be invited concerning a hard decision The meeting was ignored and boycotted. Then when the administration went forward anyway, faculty members said they weren't consulted. Again, I don't know that any such thing happened at Wells and don't want to cast aspersions on this particular faculty.  But it does happen, and it's not surprising that such things lead administrators to go on and do what needs to be done by their best lights.

It's one of my deepest wishes that this divide that increasingly characterizes relationships between faculty and administration could be overcome. Where is Solomon when you need him? We could at least start by recognizing that both the faculty and administrators are acting in ways that make sense to them at the time. Utter perversity is extremely rare. It's best to assume honorable motives on both sides.

An Anti-Naming Opportunity

Alumni of the University of Alberta have given $20.5-million to avoid making their business school a corporate naming opportunity.

Good for them.

I am all for naming opportunities. People like to be recognized for their gifts. We can bemoan this as some kind of moral failing, but you can't build buildings or offer scholarships with moral pique.

Perhaps one day people will all become selfless and stop caring whether they will be thanked and honored for their generosity. Meanwhile there are students to educate, diseases to cure, stars to discover. So I expect we'll keep naming scholarships, laboratories, and and dorms after people and corporations.

It's a small step from there to realizing it's just as legitimate for 170 donors to come forward to meet an eight-figure goal to prevent the naming of a school after anything but the university.

Naming opportunities make a lot of things possible, and build important connections. Anti-naming opportunities do too.

Why Talleyrand?

For the second time I've been asked what it is about M. de Talleyrand I find attractive, so that I blog under his name. It’s a little surprising given Talleyrand’s reputation that the question isn’t asked more often. But perhaps not so many people know who he was anymore. A little of it is in my profile, but I’ll try to explain more fully.

My identification with Talleyrand is lighthearted, not as serious as my questioners have feared. He is not a hero or anything of the kind. I certainly do not aspire to grow more and more like him.

It’s just that one day in the early 2000s I was working on my doctoral thesis, which has to do with a theological issue in the eighteenth century. This inevitably involved a lot of reading and thinking about Enlightenment figures. Talleyrand appeared on my horizon. I realized then that while he was no angel, much of the gossip on which his reputation was based was not true (though some of it was). At the same time, I noticed certain common threads between his life and mine. It was just a quick, appreciative thought: I could sympathize with him and even understand  him, while acknowledging his flaws (and my own). He’s stayed with me ever since.

The Bonapartist sympathies of those who contributed most to forming Talleyrand’s reputation also help explain it. Few can admire both Napoleon  and Talleyrand. One or the other has to be a scoundrel. Thinking as I do that  the peace of Europe is of more value  than the glory of France, I take Napoleon for the scoundrel. Talleyrand did as much as any other one person to derail Napoleon’s warmongering. If you revere Napoleon’s memory or identify him with French glory, this looks like treason. Otherwise, not so much.

I do not intend to defend Talleyrand against every accusation. He was, by some modern lights and some in his own time, both venal and sexually undisciplined. It doesn’t help many feel better that in these ways he was fairly normal for his class, only he didn’t pretend to keep his vices secret. In his favor, we can say that he did a great deal of good for Europe with the wealth he pursued and acquired. And we can also say that his romantic involvements, especially from middle-age on, were almost exclusively  “affairs of the soul,” as David Lawday puts it. Even in his youth he didn't get around enough to justify fully the reputation he has for it.

Talleyrand had principles, and he was almost unerringly guided by them. The accusation that he was unprincipled, already leveled during his lifetime, was always groundless. It merely showed his accusers did not understand or share his principles. He was committed to the interests of France first (even when this meant subverting a particular government, or four); he was committed to a peaceful, prosperous, civilized Europe. He believed many things could be achieved by intelligent talk, and many more by intelligent silence.

There is much more, but this is enough for now.

David Lawday's Napoleon’s Master is a good recent guide for those who are interested in reassessing Talleyrand with the Bonapartist blinders off.

Fewer than Ten Influential Books

Bloggers are writing about their ten most influential books, I hear. I don’t know why. There may be at least a little interest in proving our intellectual bona fides: "I'm the sort of person who is capable of being changed by a book." Well, I am whether I blog about it or not, and whether anyone cares or not, so I’ll take a run at it.

Scott McLemee has a good point: influence and pleasure are not the same. A list of the books I found most enjoyable would be quite different from what follows. Perhaps I will make that list also, and see how it interacts with this one.

In no particular order, five books that have changed me, since I can't think of ten just now without dipping into a second tier of books less formative than these:

1. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, by Julia Child et al. This got hold of me before there was a Food Network, or at least before I knew about it. The mayonnaise recipe captured my imagination and my heart. Making mayonnaise was magic. French cooking has been through a revolution since it was published, a kind of Kantian turn to the ingredient, and I never cook from Mastering anymore, unless I’m making coq au vin, which I still love. I didn’t know about the turn to the ingredient when I discovered the magic of mayonnaise and of coq au vin, though, and this book inspired me to stop making it up as I went along and learn cooking for real.

2. The Irrelevant English Teacher, by J. Mitchell Morse. One of my parents, probably my mother (an English teacher when it came out), had this little volume on a bookshelf. When I picked it up, I was an adolescent student of some painfully relevant English teachers. That is, we spent most of our class time sharing our ignorance about what we called “issues.” Morse showed me it didn’t have to be this way just before I started AP English in my senior year of high school. That class brought a flesh and blood irrelevant English teacher into my life. Thanks to Morse, I knew how to appreciate her and finally started learning to read and write. (As a trailer for the "most enjoyable" list, in case it never gets made, I want to mention Stanley Fish's romp, Save the World on Your Own Time, which makes a similar argument.)

3. The Unsettling of America, by Wendell Berry. Ernest J. Yanarella, my Political Science advisor at the University of Kentucky, assigned Berry’s discussion of the loss of family farming in America for a seminar on food policy. (If I made a list of influential people, Yanarella would be on it, though I'm appalled at myself for not having talked with him since I graduated. In those days he was an intently counter-cultural academic. Now I see he has short hair and a tie, and sits on UK’s Board of Trustees. Amazing.) The Unsettling of America was important as much for bringing Wendell Berry into my life as for anything in the book. Berry's lucidity and independence of mind intrigued me. One day it dawned on me that he was on the faculty at UK, and would therefore have office hours. So I found his office and started talking with him. What we said and why it was important is another post, but let's just say the man is at least as lucid as his books.

4. The Nature and Destiny of Man, by Reinhold Niebuhr. “Man has always been his own most vexing problem.” Always will be. Two people can have a relationship and work things out. When a third joins them, you get politics. Politics is therefore unavoidable and should be approached with seriousness. But politics is never going to make things much better. This is a crucial line of thought for keeping my sanity.

5. The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge. There are many ways to learn there are no easy answers when you’re working with people. I finally got it for good by reading Senge. For a long time I kept a notebook, a kind of journal, where instead of writing I drew diagrams of situations. Having put so much energy into what I learned from Senge helps me see things like feedback loops, process delays, and unintended consequences. Sometimes that is like seeing the oncoming train when there's still time to get out of the way, which is hard to overvalue.

Is High Division 1 Basketball Really This White?

This is the Duke University basketball team picture for the current season.

It is or ought to be self explanatory.

I do not understand how an institution in North Carolina — or anywhere in America — gets away with this.

For contrast, here is the official photograph of the current basketball team at the University of Kentucky, an institution whose alleged racism in the past was a major theme in a popular movie. (Full disclosure: I am a UK graduate.)

I count three dark faces in Duke's picture, perhaps four. Kentucky has three white ones. If this situation were reversed, would the media be silent? Would the NCAA? Would Congress?

Duke likes to think of their basketball program as "America's Team." But America's team doesn't look much like America, certainly not much like the teams who compete against them. Why are they not held accountable for this?