Good Question

The accrediting team evaluating one of our extension sites for degree-granting status asked me, "How do you relate your development function to student learning outcomes?"

You mean other than finding people who love to give scholarships so students can get into the path of some learning outcomes to begin with? Paying professors and utility companies so there's a teacher and a context for learning outcomes?

In other words, I was adrift on the sea.

But it's a question I'll think about for a while. Maybe someone will ask again once I've got a cogent answer.

Fundraising with African-American Alumni Is Good Fundraising

I took away from this  seminar that African-American donors will hold us accountable to many of the same standards as other donors, but more stringently.

If African-American possible donors see themselves in our fundraising materials, and if they are given evidence that the racism they have experienced from the institution is being dealt with, the rest is just good fundraising. They care more about personal connection and evidence of results than white donors do, but we should be prepared to offer those to everyone.

Actively working with African-American constituents, which is the right thing to do, will, in addition, have the effect of making the institution better at everything we do.

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."