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9486 in the collection
Wanted: Someone Who Knows Nothing About the Job
by Stanley Fish
In one of those ironies that makes life interesting, the University of Colorado, which dismissed controversial professor Ward Churchill because of doubts about his academic qualifications, has appointed a president who doesn’t have any. (The final vote was taken on Feb. 20.)
Bruce Benson is an oilman, Republican activist, failed candidate for governor, co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s (now ended) campaign, successful fund raiser, donor to the university, former chairman of the Metropolitan State College Denver Board and chair of a blue-ribbon panel on higher education. Obviously he has a strong interest in education, but his highest degree is a B.A., and he has never been a member of a faculty or engaged in research or published papers in a learned journal. In short, he is no way an academic, and yet he is about become the president of an academic institution, and not any old institution, but a state university ranked 11th among public universities and 34th among universities overall.
Not surprisingly, the announcement a short while ago that he was the only candidate being put forward by the 17-person search committee drew protests from faculty, students and some alumni. The faculty assembly voted 40-4 against him. A group called ProgressNow gathered signatures for an "oppose Benson" petition. The House Majority leader, Democrat Alice Madden, said that when she heard the news, she though it was a "really bad" joke; she added that "he will be the least educated president ever considered in modern history."
Maybe in Colorado. But some people in West Virginia believe that they have a candidate for the "least educated president" prize. Like Benson, Michael Garrison has no advanced degrees in an academic subject (although he does at least have a law degree), and his appointment, in April of last year, was opposed by the Faculty Senate.
Again like Benson, Garrison has a long-term interest in higher education – he was chairman of the state’s Higher Education Policy Committee – but his main career work has been first as a chief of staff to a former governor and subsequently as a lobbyist. In recent months he has become involved in a rather murky controversy. A daughter of the present governor (a Democrat and a political ally) had claimed a degree on her resume that apparently was never awarded. When apprised of this fact, a university spokesperson said that a clerical error had been made and that the degree had indeed been earned.
But some inside and outside the university claim that the record had been re-written after the story broke. The university has now established a panel to review the matter, and Garrison has denied that he did anything wrong, or did anything at all: "The president does not award degrees." The affair has revived suspicions that Garrison’s appointment was politically motivated.
Two different states, two different political parties, but the same concerns about the academic credentials of an academic leader, about the integrity of the search that led to his appointment and about the corruption of a supposedly academic process by partisan interests.
These concerns, however, should be separated and distinguished. It is mostly faculty members who focus on the process questions – was it a genuine search? were member of the committee acting as political agents? was the fix in? – and assume that the wrong answers (no, yes and yes) would be enough to invalidate the search. But this only demonstrates how little they understand about the world of senior administrative searches. While it would be wrong to take into account the political affiliations or business connections or wealth of a candidate for a faculty position, it would be wrong not to take these things into account when choosing a president.
The reason is obvious: the political and financial profile of a faculty candidate are irrelevant to what you want him or her to do. But the political and financial profile of an administrative candidate are altogether relevant because what you want him or her to do is not produce scholarship or teach inspiring classes (although both would be welcome bonuses), but interact successfully with a number of external constituencies including regents, legislators, governors, the press and donors – to name a few. The search for such a person cannot be purely academic, because the responsibilities of the office are not purely academic.
By the same reasoning, it is unrealistic and even unwise to expect a search of this kind to be open in the sense that you cast your net as widely as possible and just see what turns up. If the qualifications for the job include the ability to win friends and influence the right people, it would be good to have spotted some types who fill that bill in advance, and then make sure that the rails are a little greased for them.
The truth is that there are no perfectly straightforward senior administrative searches. They are all a bit cooked, and often they serve more as window dressing than as genuinely deliberative processes. Indeed, given that search committees are always advisory, those asked to serve on them should be aware that the work they do will quite possibly be to no effect, either because a decision had been made before the process ever began or because the ball is taken away and given to someone else just as the goal is approached. (The phrase "university service" takes on new meaning for those who agree to participate in this piece of theater.) That’s just the way it is, and it’s not a matter of blame, but a consequence of a process that straddles two worlds, the world of teaching and scholarship and the world of high-stakes finance and politics. Those who complained about that process in Colorado wanted it to be confined to only one on those worlds, forgetting that executive leadership requires skills most faculty members neither possess nor appreciate.
But a parallel mistake is made from the other direction by those who dismiss the importance of academic skills. Their argument (which I heard at dinner last week when I was in Boulder) is that academic credentials are not that necessary because management skills, like those Benson is presumed to have, are transferable from activity to activity. Someone who can manage an oil company will be able to manage the enterprise of a university.
The reasoning, however, is specious. It is no doubt true that an experienced executive will quickly learn the ropes of an industry new to him. The product may be different, but the tasks will be basically the same: assess market share, learn the routes of distribution, fine-tune the relationship between inventory and demand, increase efficiency perhaps by downsizing the workforce.
But in the academy there is no product except knowledge, and that may take decades to develop, if it develops at all. The concept of market share is inapposite; efficiency is not a goal; and there is no inventory to put on the shelves. Instead the norms are endless deliberations, explorations that may go nowhere, problems that only five people in the world even understand, lifetime employment that is not taken away even when nothing is achieved, expensively labor-intensive practices and no bottom line. What is an outsider to make of that?
Not much, because he or she will lack the internalized understanding that renders the features of the enterprise intelligible, and in the absence of that understanding, the wanderer in a strange land will see only anomalies and mistakes that should be corrected. Items in a practice are not known piecemeal; you don’t learn them by listing them. You learn them by being so embedded in the practice that everything that happens within it has a significance you don’t have to strain for because it is perspicuous without any mental effort at all.
Benson is not embedded in the practices of the academy, and no crash course will yield the tacit knowledge that would make him a knowledgeable and informed steward of the university’s fortunes. Of course, this liability might be finessed if he leaves the academic side of things to the chancellors of the system’s campuses, as he has suggested he will, but it seems somewhat odd to hire a CEO and then hope that he will stay away from the store.
Nevertheless, the appointment does make a kind of sense in Colorado, where the percentage of state funding of the university’s operations has fallen to 7 (in what sense, exactly, is this a state university?), and further cuts are feared. It is the hope that Benson, well connected as he is, may be able to shake money out of trees that have become increasingly bare. By supporting and pushing Benson, the powers that be in the state are saying, We’ve taken your funding away and now you’ll have to hire one of us if you want to have a chance to get some of it back; and, in the bargain, you’d better be careful to run your affairs in the manner we approve and dictate.
It’s the classic pincer move: first we starve you and then we revive you, but on our terms, and one of them is Bruce Benson.
Who knows, it may work out. The financial situation may improve, and the academic enterprise may flourish if Benson really does keep hands off. But a good result, if there is one, will not justify a bad practice, and putting someone with no academic experience in charge of an academic institution is just that. Nor is it necessary, even in the straitened circumstances (hardly unique to Colorado) the university faces. There is another way, and Michael Carrigan, one of the three (Democratic) regents to vote against Benson, pointed to it when he told me, "I can’t believe that there are no candidates out there with both business acumen and academic credentials."
He is right. Those candidates were out there and they still are. Perhaps the next university tempted to go this route will take the trouble to look for them.
— Stanley Fish
New York Times
2008-02-24
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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