Professors as President: Wondering Skeptic

Wondering if my education and experience as a professor prepared me, Professor Dorris, to become president of the United States.

Here’s what I learned and experienced in the land of the professoriate.

First, there is the education and training aspect of professorial qualifications.

I earned a Ph.D. degree, and in the process learned how to critically think, but more importantly, how to think critically. I learned to criticize others’ ideas, harshly when to my advantage, coyly when it suited me, and on any side of an argument that caught my fancy. 

As my favorite university president used to say, with some pride, “A professor is one who thinks otherwise.”

I learned that the degree was not designed to prepare me to be a team player. For example, professors are rewarded less for publications in which there are multiple authors than those single-authored papers. There can be no "team" in I.

The most accurate advice I received prior to entering a Ph.D. degree experience was, “If you want to be happy in as a professor, choose a very small focused area of research in which you are passionate, focus on that, and stay away from committees, administration, and students.” I did not follow the advice, but it was sound advice nonetheless.

Successful professors as scholars also greet communication from others with an attitude that automatically questions the legitimacy of the message and its sender.  In other words, “I can think of 12 reasons to treat you and your message as unworthy of my attention” whether or not I know you or the content of your message.

Professors as scholars are rewarded for focusing on narrowly-focused research rather than broadly- focused research. For example, a great friend of mine earned his Ph.D. in bird lice; the degree was in biology; the degree was in entomology; but the degree was really in bird lice--that's where he became THE specialist. People with Ph.D.s in history are generally not “big picture” historians; rather, they have spent their professorial lives focused on one small aspect of one particular segment of history related to one particular part of the world. This reality results in university students studying “U.S. History to 1865” followed by “U.S. History From 1865”, etc. It is frequently the case that a professor who is deemed qualified to teach the former is not so deemed to teach the latter.

Scholarly journals are weighted as to their importance; the more important a journal is the narrower its focus, generally. In most universities, the importance of  the journals in which one publishes are synonymous with the importance of the professor as scholar.

Secondly, there is the professor in the classroom.

Traditional university classrooms are generally laid out physically like those classrooms we remember fondly from high school. Students are put in rows facing the professor. Behaviors are similar as well. Students raise their hands to speak, give the professors their best attempts to look interested, if not raptly attentive, and take notes. I used to train my Intro to Business students (300 in an auditorium) how to look me in the eyes, look down at their papers, and make me believe they were interested. Told them this was an important business skill. They believed me, because Professor Dorris was always correct.

Professors profess and students listen, write papers, and take exams which professors grade. Professors thereby have captive audiences over whom they very considerable power, viz. a viz. their grades.  The presence of captive audiences is addictive to most professors. Professors become accustomed to the complete attention (feigned or not) of a captive audience dependent them for their success or failure.

Professors are trained to be disagreeable, trained to disagree, are used to having captive audiences, and are not experienced with dealing with people who disagree with us.

Wondering why professorial credentials make any candidate viable to become president.

Talking about Racism

Wondering if I am a recovering racist. Or just a recidivist racist looking for redemption? Yeah, I know we live in a world where such questions are seldom raised, especially by an old white man from Kentucky. Old white men these days seem a bit scared, or maybe it’s just me.

In any event, this wondering is about me. I have not, do not, and will not call anyone else a racist. It is not in my power to read the hearts and minds of others. It is not in my morality to pass judgment. And I’ve never been the target for racism so can’t speak from experience.

I do wonder about myself, though, and about the power of talking about racism. Here’s why.

I grew up in a segregated  Kentucky town of about 3000 people. Black folks lived at the outskirts of town, in their own community. My interaction with the folks living in this area was almost non-existent. I knew there was a separate high school, although I never met any of my counterparts from that school until I got to college. I learned later that there was a separate hotel and small business district in this area. I was almost completely ignorant of this as I grew up.

But not quite. I did go with my father and uncle to buy bootleg whiskey from a couple of black families in this business district.

We did not discuss race in my school. I wish we had.

There were two families that lived outside that segregated area, just over Iceplant Hill from me.  Back in the day, my father had worked the mines with the two heads of these black families, Lighting and George. Although my father frequently used the “n word”, he told me that if he ever heard me use it, he’d take his mining belt to me, and if I ever used it in front of Lightening or George, they would whip me first then turn me over to him.

We did not discuss race in my family except in this one context, which was confusing at best.

I left this segregated town to attend an integrated university, where I occasionally ran into black students from my home town whom I had never met before. We did not talk about race.

I joined a fraternity and had three black brothers. We did not talk about race.

In 1964 or so, I attended a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee convention. Dr. Martin Luther King was the keynote speaker. I saw the importance civil rights fights and of ending discrimination on a global scale. But I did not avail myself of opportunities to talk personally, about me and racism. It was a missed opportunity, to say the least.

In1968, I finally began to have discussions about race and racism with other people. After finishing a master’s degree, I took a job teaching high school, and found myself to be the only white teacher in a black high school in Middle Georgia. I made friends with the football coach and the biology teacher, both charismatic black men who took me fishing after school and helped raise my consciousness on a host of subjects. One topic dealt with how I should be very careful in my relationships with my female colleagues; in this charged environment no one should even presume that I was interested romantically, or physically, in these women. There was too much history of white men taking advantage of their power in this way, and folks were extremely sensitive. I appreciated the advice, and kept it.

This was my first experience actually talking to two bright black men about racism and myself. I was a better man and teacher because of the talks. Kept my teeth as well.

Black kids never got very far in school in this part of Georgia. I had seniors who could not write their names. However, I had one very bright student in my speech class, expelled from the integrated school across town for attacking a white teacher, who would enter the classroom with a parody of the old shuck and jive routine,  “Good mawnin Mr. James, how y’all doin this mawnin, boss.” He would sit in the back of the room with a karate book open on his desk, smile at me and practice his chops.

One of his better speeches was to convince the class to burn down the town. I gave him an “A” for content—it was a well-crafted speech—and a “C” for effect—the town was still standing. This was a gamble on my part, but it did open him up a bit. He, and thankfully the class, laughed, and he swore that since I “was one of the good ones”, he’d give me thirty seconds’ notice should the burning actually come to pass.

Yes, he and I were talking about racism, and I became a better person for it.

Toward the middle of the year, I discovered the real reason I was hired to teach in this school. In these days there was a fairly widely-accepted theory that went like this. There is “standard” U. S. speech, equated with the white speech of newscasters and successful white and a few black folks; there is “substandard” speech, spoken by black folks and equated with their lack of success in the U.S. If those black folks learn to speak standard U.S. speech, they will be successful.

So, as the white guy with the master's degree I was hired to help black students speak like Walter Cronkite. Without talking about race, of course.

I shared what I found out with my seniors, as an exercise in critical thinking. Their response was put best by one of my brightest students who said,  “So Mr. Dorris, how come the white governor of this state sounds like me? Isn’t Governor Maddox considered successful? I think success is more about the color of my skin than the way I talk, don’t you?”

Yes, we were talking about race and racism, they and me, and I gained from the talking.

A number of years later, I was vice president of academic affairs in a small liberal arts college. I was hired as a “change agent”. I arrived at the college in January. The previous Spring all the black students had marched off in unison to protest what they saw as institutionalized racism. The college is the second oldest multi-racial, co-educational liberal arts college in the U.S., so this charge by these students was significant.

A young black man had converted to Islam viz. a viz. the Nation of Islam about a year before my arrival on campus. The guy spoke at a chapel event about his experiences the preceding summer working with the Nation. All the students and faculty, mostly white, were present. At some point during the presentation, he began a rant about the “blue-eyed devils” and “ice people.” The audience got very quiet. Afterward, I pulled him aside and told him I liked his presentation, but suggested that he should take more time analyzing his audience and purpose. He agreed, but with a knowing smile.

This began several personal talks about race and racism between him and me and all of the Detroit media--he brought them to campus every Friday. Yes he was that good. I was the beneficiary of our talks.

Years have passed. But as a 68 year old man I remember the “Coloreds Only” signs at restrooms and water fountains. I remember the “Coloreds Only” balconies in theatres. I remember lynchings. I remember preachers  preaching about the “curse of Cain” in reference to black folks (also remember Nation of Islam ministers using the same argument against whites). I remember being told that black people were lesser animals. I remember black men being harassed, and worse, for looking white women in the eyes.  I remember black women being thought of as fair game for white men’s amusement.

But I also remember passionate conversations with young black and white men and women about these things, and about them and me in relation to this past.

Now, in my lifetime, the U.S. has a black president, running for a second term. Yet, on a person-to-person level, I don’t talk about race or racism anymore. And I don’t hear others doing this either. Of course the vicious personal attacks on the man who is our first black president have nothing to do with his race. It’s just that he isn’t an American, he is Kenyan, he is a Socialist/Marxist, and he “is a threat to the U.S.”

Why aren’t the conversations happening? Is that because younger folks have advanced to the point that the topic is not relevant anymore?

Is it because, in my recovering state of racism, I overvalue the importance of such discussions?

Or are they happening but I don’t hear them or engage in them because my original racism has reared its ugly head in my old age?

I do miss the talk, debates, arguments, passion.

And I do wonder.

Lessons from Marriage Applied to Politics?

I’m wondering about marriage and politics, two uniquely U.S. institutions, both deeply flawed but seem destined to be around for awhile. Wondering if thoughts about one—marriage—could help understand the other. With my help, of course.

In a month I will have been married 42 years. To the same woman. So naturally I start to wonder about arguments. We both have advanced degrees in communication. So naturally we don’t argue well. We are both strong individuals who do not like to be controlled. So naturally we don’t fit well together in the yokes called marriage, where two thinking, feeling, individuals are supposed to become one, er, something or other.

I don’t think it is possible, or desirable, for two people “to become one”. That’s why at least half of us who do get married, despite their best efforts wind up involved in serial marriages. The other half, like me, settle for whatever positives of relationships there might be, engage in mass compromises, and/or don’t expect to become part of “the one” but rather opt for a “one plus one equals who knows what” marriage definition. With this half, the compromise level never reaches the point of pain and suffering either, usually.

I don’t think it is possible, or desirable, for multiple people serving in Congress (politicians) “to become one” either. But they do have to live with one another for some period of time. And there is an expectation that they will, while living together, engage in productive behavior, isn’t there? And productive behavior, as in marriage, requires some level of compromise and acknowledgment of the other’s existence, doesn’t it?

I wonder if maybe that lessons can be learned from that flawed institution of marriage?

I’m listening to the vitriol being spewed on the airways today by demagogues disguised as politicians and talk show hosts. Compromise is despised. Wonder if they are married? How many times?

I don’t believe a “happily married man” would call a woman a slut in public and ask to see her sex tapes without seriously apologizing to his spouse, his spouse’s family, the Elks Club, maybe the person called the slut, her family, etc. He would also ask for forgiveness and buy his wife, and her mother, flowers and  a new toy.  Lesson from marriage to talk show politician?

I don’t believe men and women who have been married for awhile seriously expect that compromise is evil and that it is either “my way or the highway”. Those who do find themselves on the highway a lot.  Lesson for evangelical politicians in Congress?

I played a doctor in the academic classroom for 35 years. I played a husband in the marriage classroom for 42 years. Here, using my experiences, and marriage as a herbal remedy, are my  prescriptions for politicians.

1.   Do not expect to change the other person. Ain’t gonna happen. That person will of course change over time, but it ain’t under your control, bubba.

Progressives are not going to make Tea Partiers in their own image; Tea Partiers are not going to make Progressives drink their Koolaid.

2. Do expect to change yourself. You have that power. You have that responsibility—goes with the commitment. Use it wisely. Don’t be afraid of the “flip flop” label; intelligence, rationality and commitment to the positions called spouse or Representative or Senator demand compromise.

3.   Expect to engage in a lot of compromise. Compromise ‘til it hurts, son. Do not begin the relationship by stubbornly saying you ain’t gonna compromise. It’ll make you look bad when you do. And you will.

It is the nature of the beasts, marriage and politics, in the U.S. Love it or leave it.

4.     If you get to a point where you can’t compromise anymore without losing your self, get out of the relationship.  Get divorced.

Yes, resign your position and go back home. You got your pension, you got your PAC’s shoulders to cry on, you got your kids’ college tuitions paid for. Quit with dignity and go find another relationship.

5.   Say you are sorry when you do or say something stupid, and if you don’t mean it, work on your delivery until you sound like you do believe it.

Sorry, radio talk show hosts. I don’t have a prescription for you. Not a fan of hopeless causes.

Why Can’t Universities be Run Like Businesses?

Why can't universities be run like businesses? During the 25 years I spent as a professor of management, this question always intrigued me, and is partly responsible for my having spent the last 10 years in the for-profit side of higher education. 

I found the answer. They can, but that does not mean they will be any more successful.

What does it mean to run something “like a business”? It could mean that university presidents should become robber barons; some in the for-profit and not-for-profits have tried. It could mean that university administrations should practice scientific management, engage in time and motion studies, and reward the “good lads” who meet or exceed work standards. Some have tried.

In 2001, Robert Birnbaum wrote a neat little book, Management Fads in Higher Education, that began with that question, “Why can’t a college be more like a business?” and ends with this profound statement (p. 241) : “Academic management fads are potentially disruptive in the hands of insecure or inexperienced managers who adopt them because they do not know what else to do.” 

Most current for-profit higher education institutions are indeed rife with management fads promulgated by many insecure and inexperienced administrators.

The provost in one of the for-profit universities in which I worked became enamored with a baseball book about Billy Beane. All the deans flew hundreds of miles, spending thousands of dollars in the process, for a series of management training sessions related to this book (the premise of which was fundamentally opposite to the operating structure of the university), which we were required to read, which had nothing to do with our jobs or the business in which we operated, and which was never integrated into the structure of our philosophical or existential lives. 

At this the same time this same provost had the deans and directors voting on an organizational structure. The votes were counted, but the results were ignored, and the structure changed drastically at least three times during my three years in the organization. 

Each change was explained as stemming from a need for more control of the academic administrators.

The operative word that prompted this adventure was “metrics.” The metrics that were deemed most appropriate for academics at this university comprised an alphabet soup of labels; Q rates, R rates, U rates were among the most popular of the soup. The president had an interesting logic in explaining the mission of the academics: “We admit students with an ethical responsibility; we take their money so we are ethically obligated to graduate them.” This was generally followed by, “I don’t want to hear any excuses from the academics.” The Q, R, and U metrics were used to measure how well we were doing with this ethical obligation.

There were several flaws in the soup, however. First, a mountain of research on student retention shows that there is almost a one-to-one correlation between student admissions and student retention; the logic is that if you admit the “right” students (i.e., those who fit the mission and culture of the institution), they will most likely stay. So, if you want strong retention, get everyone, including academics, involved in admissions. For me to say this in public at any of the for-profits in which I worked  invited blank stares at best (why would I know anything about admissions), and derision at worst. I saw a lot of blank stares and experienced much derision.

Admissions is key to the success of any academic organization; if you don’t attract students, you don’t succeed. Admissions offices/processes/compensation are governed by law and watched carefully, especially in for-profits, the result of several documented bad practices over the years. This has resulted in creative approaches to get around the law. One of the for-profits sponsored lavish cruises each year for “invited” admissions representatives. Of course these invitations had nothing to do with the performances of the invitees. And of course, the cruises involved “training” exercises. The fact that folks who did well with admissions got to go on cruises and hobnob with top company executives was a part of the company’s belief in training and development. 

No equivalent “training” was offered to non-admissions professionals.

The second flaw is that the most significant aspects of the alphabet soup do not relate to admissions.this university. The universities in which I worked had “open enrollment”  policies, which boiled down to the fact that if you had the tuition money you got in.  Names of potential students were bought from groups called lead aggregators, and colleges paid per name based on the quality of the leads—the cheaper the lead, the lower quality. If one of the metrics employed by the college relates to the lowering of the “cost of acquisition” of students, one does not need to have an M.B.A. to understand the “best practices” of that open enrollment institution.

The third flaw is obvious. If the quality check on admitted students is not operational, it is probable that there will be students admitted who do not have the academic wherewithal to succeed in the institution. This is the ethics flaw in the president’s message. If universities let people into the university who can not succeed, and then not provide them the tools for success, they will fail. In my experience, it was then left to faculty members and academic advisers (in the for-profits these were overworked young folks who were frequently caught in middle between professors and students) to bear the brunt of the obligation for, and work in, retaining these students, without having the proper tools to do so.

This is where the alphabet soup metrics kicked in. “Drop rates”, “Unsatisfactory Grade”, “Retention” rates were measured weekly and deans got reports. If there were too many students failing, deans got subtle messages; I was never explicitly told make sure students passed, but the implicit messages could not have been clearer, if disguised in ethics rhetoric. If there were too many students dropping out, deans got clear messages, weekly.

I was on a phone call with deans of on-ground colleges owned by this major corporation, hosted by the corporate vice president for faculty, dealing with drop rates and retention. “Everyone knows learning is a drag,” she said, “So get those students out of class frequently and feed them ice cream and pizza. We should learn from my experience at this large department store, where I went I last week to buy a pair of shoes and came out with their having sold me $1000 worth of other things. Feed them and get them enrolled in more courses.” This approach is perfectly consistent with buying cheap leads and letting everyone in the door, and reflects a remarkably condescending attitude about learning, higher education, and human beings. 

It was an attitude that pervaded the culture of  “the management” in this institution.

Academic deans, faculty members and advisers were held accountable for retention. They were not privy to lavish cruises, however, training or no training. They were not privy to praise. They were privy to metrics reports. I asked the president what the motivation was for these folks, given this reality. I was told “You get to keep your job.”

Metrics seems to be a Twenty-First Century business word, like “buckets” and “at the end of the day.” I’ll use it in a sentence: “The metrics for your college indicate a downward trend in student retention, which, at the end of the day, shows some significant problems; we need to re-examine each of your buckets, using these metrics, to determine the scope and significance of this significant problem.”

At one of the for-profits I worked for, “drop rates” were viewed as significant metrics. No one knew why, exactly, but we measured them weekly. At the end of the day, we knew no more about the effectiveness and efficiency of the college. We did know that we were delivering 30 percent margins. We did know that was not good enough. I knew it was not good enough because top management had made promises to the parent company, not based on any metric other then greed and hubris, that they could not keep. The management theory then deployed was to intimidate and demand performances, using undefined metrics, examining non-existing buckets, which would, at the end of the day, result in their being able to keep their promises, and therefore their bonuses.

Rakesh Khurana’s book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (2007) makes elegant points about what he sees as the denigration of the academic profession of management. His basic case is that business schools have shifted their attention to the training of students to use “financial engineering tools, like leverage and stock options, to align corporate actions with the goal of maximizing shareholder value.” (p. 364). These business schools graduated the management teams that ran the for-profits I worked for; one prided itself on the number of MBAs from big-league schools comprising their corporate leadership.

Jerome Groopman, in his book, How Doctors Think (2007), makes the point that in recent years “medical students and residents are being taught to follow preset algorithms and practice guidelines in the form of decision trees. . .  Similarly a movement is afoot to base all treatment decisions on statistically proven data. This so-called evidence-based medicine is rapidly become the canon in many hospitals.” (p. 5)

These two books document the widespread acceptance of this newest fad, not only in higher education management, but also in at least two professions.

           

The metrics fad in higher education causes problems. Groopman talks about doctors taught the algorithms approach, looking at the decision trees rather than listening to the patient. There is nothing wrong with decision trees; they just don’t tell the whole story, and one does not begin with the trees and fit patients into them, but uses the trees as tools in diagnosis. The metaphor is most apt for higher education.

The business that is higher education is at its core a very easy one to understand. In order to  “run the college like a business”, one first needs to understand the nature of the business. The business of higher education is straightforward on its face if a bit more complicated when one digs. It is the business of higher education, says me: to provide students the opportunity to grow and develop intellectually, professionally, and socially; to challenge what is currently assumed to be known; to promote the development of “new” knowledge; and to promote the intellectual and social growth and development of societies.

In order to accomplish these goals, the higher education institution needs to  maintain fiscal solvency, defined slightly differently in for-profit than not-for-profit institutions. In not-for-profits, fiscal solvency means generating the means to sustain itself, living within its budgets, and securing funds to ensure its solvency over time. The danger is in not paying attention to budgets but in assuming lofty ideals without attending to the checkbook and savings account.

For-profit institutions have these responsibilities, plus there is the additional demand to deliver a reasonable (defined by the market) profit to its shareholders. The danger is in assuming their only reason for existence is to provide ever increasing profits to shareholders, thus confusing means and ends.

For both, students provide a fundamental means for accomplishing the ends, and the mechanism for ensuring fiscal solvency. Students are the core of the business, without which the industry and businesses within it cease to exist.

Higher education is an industry. Universities should be run like businesses. This means they should have missions, develop strategies to accomplish missions, and develop and grow resources (people, financial, process) to implement the strategies. They should  monitor (maybe even use appropriate metrics) the accomplishment of strategies, and change to meet new challenges.

In this industry, however, we should not begin with the supposition that “learning is a drag.”