University administrators have forgotten what leadership is
University administrators have forgotten what leadership is
Earlier this week I learned that college leaders decided, without consulting faculty or staff, to shutter The Gettysburg Review, a legendary journal that has shaped American letters for 35 years. This came close on the heels of an article in Forbes which refers to faculty as “the enemy within” colleges and universities. Around this time I also finished watching the film series Band of Brothers, which Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg adapted from Stephen Ambrose’s novel about a regiment of paratroopers in WWII.
All of this got me thinking about leadership and how absent it seems in academe.
The change wars
In the Forbes piece, David Rosowsky reviews Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, by Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College and visiting professor at Harvard University. Rosowsky joins Rosenberg in urging radical change in higher ed and blaming faculty for obstructionism.
Rosenberg characterizes shared governance, or structures that allow faculty a voice in policy decisions, as “a drag on any movement for change, a kind of anchor weighing institutions down.” During his time at Macalester College, Rosenberg recalls, “Not only was there resistance to change, there was resistance to talking about change. Simply raising the subject was seen by many faculty members as an assault on the values of the college.” Bold leaders, he claims, face predictable backlash from faculty: “[S]hock, grief, outrage, protests… sometimes a vote of no-confidence.”
Hence, “the enemy within.”
I always taught students to judge the reliability of information according to the SMELL Test (Source, Motivation, Evidence, Logic, Left Out). In this case, it is instructive to know that David Rosowsky is Vice President for Research at Kansas State University and a self-proclaimed “higher education thought leader, change agent, visionary, and optimist.” It’s not shocking that someone whose role is largely untethered from teaching would struggle to understand faculty concerns.
It is also no overstatement to suggest that part of Rosowsky’s motivation for publishing the piece is elevating his personal brand. This is a common playbook for college executives, who change positions every 4-6 years. There’s some truth to the joke about administrators: the first year they listen, the second year they build (or tear down), and the third year the search for their replacement begins.
Rosowsky doesn’t cite a single faculty source in his review. But he does quote himself: “Refusal to change — in a changing world — is not a strategy.” He also gives his final word to Benjamin Franklin, and, wouldn’t you know it, the line is a BrainyQuote meme.
Faculty are used to hearing platitudes like this from college leaders who don’t stick around to live in the brave new worlds they create. Fear of change is justified when it is evident that the reason for disruption is not the wellbeing of an institution, but personal gain. What other reasonable conclusion can faculty at the University of Nebraska draw after listening to Ted Carter’s bromides for less than four years, before he left for a more lucrative gig at Ohio State?
You know what they say in Texas: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…”
But caution in other cases derives less from fear than from puzzlement about what exactly is being proposed. Rosowsky writes, “Change has been a constant since the dawn of humanity. So, too, has been the fear of change. But without change there is no progress, no growth, no adaptation, no evolution.” Rape and murder date back to our earliest origins, too, so there’s no objective virtue in antiquity.
Evidence also abounds that progress, adaptation, and evolution are more dependent on constancy than on flux. Agriculture enabled a technological explosion because it freed up mental energy that had been devoted to mere subsistence. Similarly, a child’s imagination cannot flourish if they feel unsafe, underslept, or underfed.
A leader knows that no one ever grows out of those needs. I sometimes felt unfairly attacked when I chaired a governance committee. It didn’t always work, but I tried to ask myself, What is this really about? In many cases, my colleagues carried wounds that had nothing to do with me, but that deeply impacted their ability to trust anyone in a position of power. That didn’t make them my enemies. It was my responsibility to take their calls or seek them out, and in meetings to say back what I thought I’d heard, to see if I had it right.
It’s always a leader’s job to approach those with less power when trust falters. Not the other way around.
A clarion voice is silenced
The case at Gettysburg College is an acid test of Rosowsky’s argument. College leaders decided to cut The Gettysburg Review despite 35 years of excellence because they have a vision for prioritizing “student experiences” and “student outcomes.” The Gettysburg president and provost seem to have adopted the playbook that Rosowsky suggests, bypassing shared governance and breaking the news to Mark Drew, editor of the journal, and his staff, without warning.
Why hold up the process with years of stonewalling in committees and Board meetings? Better to strike quickly and get on with the new.
Except that The Gettysburg Review has privileged student experiences — precisely the sort of job-based training that corporate-minded deans and presidents have been advocating. Nearly every professional I have interviewed for my academe-to-industry series has emphasized the importance of internships (or some equivalent, such as an online portfolio) in building credible business experience. The Gettysburg Review offered a rare apprenticeship for students who hoped to work in publishing or editing: exactly the kind of program that many humanities departments are now scrambling to build for self-preservation.
The upshot seems to be that no amount of distinction — not even an editorial roster with greats like Joyce Carol Oates, Rita Dove, or E.L. Doctorow — could save the journal. It’s not that there was no case to make for the project, it’s that college leaders had no ears to hear it.
I mourn this news because The Gettysburg Review gave me one of my earliest breakthroughs. That’s my name there next to Rebecca McClanahan’s.
This publication meant more than a CV line for my next tenure review. It meant that my taste overlapped with one of the most discerning magazines out there, pages that James Tate and Jeffrey Eugenides were proud to share.
It meant that I could reasonably hope to publish my book. It meant that I was a writer in a way that mattered. It shakes me to my core to know that The Gettysburg Review does not matter to its own institution, that the institutional partnership was a marriage drained of respect.
Is there an Ikigai for literary writing anymore? Maybe not. But if mortar shells are falling on The Gettysburg Review, then faculty are justifiably afraid of change. And not because they are incapable of embracing innovation, but because so much of it seems like senseless destruction.
Lessons in leadership from Normandy and Bastogne
I’ve never been one for military metaphors, but they seem apt in a time when administrators are openly using words like “enemy” in headlines about faculty. As I’ve followed Easy Company from basic training, through D-Day, and on to the end of the war in Band of Brothers, I’ve thought more than once that faculty and staff have a great deal in common with those paratroopers.
The soldiers who volunteered to parachute into Normandy were driven by a call to serve, but whatever enticements they were offered, like higher pay, vaporized when they dropped into chaos in France. Once their boots touched the ground, it wasn’t always valor that pulled them forward so much as the recognition that there was no way back.
Soldiers in combat need to trust their leaders absolutely. During the Siege of Bastogne, several soldiers chafed under the leadership of Lieutenant Norman Dike, whom everyone saw as a career opportunist. Dike was a law student at Yale who showed little interest in the men under his command, struggled to make tactical decisions, and frequently abandoned them during heavy shelling. Dike lost his command after ordering troops to halt in the open while taking heavy fire — a time when the only reasonable choices were to retreat or advance.
Some officers lose the respect of their regiments because they blame those with the least power for their own mistakes. But Dike repeatedly proved that he cared only about his own advancement. The dreams and nightmares of the soldiers under his care simply did not register with him.
By contrast, the leaders in Band of Brothers who earn respect are those who place their own welfare last. Unsurprisingly, these are also the leaders who produce results. One is Carwood Lipton, who starts as a private and earns his promotions by suffering hardship and wounds alongside his comrades.
Another is Richard Winters, the star of the series, who shows such bravery in the trenches that he rockets up the ranks. Whenever he proposes a risky battle maneuver, Winters runs first into enemy fire. Winters even resists promotion at times because he wants to be sure his brothers in Easy Company are in good hands.
Band of Brothers is fiction — and a Hollywood production at that — so it might seem like a fanciful guide for leadership. But Rosowsky’s review and the mystifying decisions at Gettysburg College show that some college administrators have forgotten the basic principles of earning their colleagues’ trust and respect.
The first principle is to understand that if higher ed is under siege, as many agree that it is, then it is lunacy to mistake one’s comrades for enemies. By Rosowsky’s own account, some college leaders gaslight faculty about their commitment to shared governance, believing secretly that they ought to have carte blanche for executive power. Small wonder that faculty either mutiny or adopt a bunker mentality. The threat they perceive is real.
The second principle is to earn trust through shared risk. A college president’s proposals might have little bearing on their future employability whether they succeed or fail. But major disruption, such as canceled majors, shuttered journals, or outright termination, often has lifetime ramifications for faculty. Many of the 143 professors who lost their jobs at West Virginia University this year will never work in higher ed again. As long as faculty and staff shoulder the greatest risks, they are right to be wary. No one should be made to feel like cannon fodder.
The final principle of leadership is to honor the collective, not the individual. The real Dick Winters captures the idea at the end of the series, where he recalls a conversation with his grandson, who asked, “Grandpa were you a hero in a war?” Winters said he was not, but that he served in a company of heroes.
The people showing up to teach, curate the library databases, and prepare fresh cafeteria meals are the true heroes of higher ed. A leader worth their salt will never forget it.
Please see the partner site
later today for new writing by .Also, our October book club will meet Friday, October 27, at 7pm EST to discuss Robert Icke’s dazzling play, The Doctor. The play feels especially urgent now, since anti-Semitism is a core part of the story. You can buy The Doctor in paperback or Kindle form.
Josh, I like this weaving of different elements into a single theme. I’ve watched Band of Brothers, and a variety of related documentaries, multiple times. Contrary to what Richard Winters says, he was the epitome of a hero, including for going home, as he expresses in the series, just to lead a normal life. I highly recommend the follow up series, The Pacific, a more spiritually harrowing experience.
My entire tenured teaching career, with one exception, was shadowed and brought to a gradual close by such hostile and imperious college Presidents. In the end, another president on that five-year cycle arrived during my post-chair service, when I was senior member of the department. During his faux listening and into his tear-down phase, acting on advice from other administrators, he systematically excluded me from every consultation and planning meeting regarding the English program. The current chair and the rest of the department sought my leadership in fending off his effort to recreate the program on his terms. As part of that effort, I was already leading preparation of our own lengthy and detailed planning document for a reconfigured program. He used his powers to prevent its consideration before the academic senate. The department’s only success, in the only meeting with him I ever attended, was in stopping his de facto assumption of departmental rule, which included, by the way, our “voluntary” devotion of hours per week tutoring in the writing lab at no additional pay. So nothing was achieved by anyone. It was at that point that I concluded finally I had no happy future on the campus.
A too brief counter anecdote, from when I was department chair, of that exception. During service on opposing contract negotiating teams, I and the college’s future president, with a reputation as a hard ass, developed a joking but increasingly respectful relationship with each other. When she assumed the presidency, we trusted each other, had regard for each other’s vision, and worked well together. We accomplished a lot and it was the happiest time of my teaching career.
I spent nearly two decades in faculty leadership ending with multiple terms as faculty president. At all three institutions I worked at, it was the same: the administration didn't trust their faculty even in their own field of expertise. I think that it is telling that most of the upper administrators I encountered we never faculty, and had degrees in "educational leadership" that ensured a chasm those making decisions and those having to live with them. At my last institution, where I was for 10 years, I noted that the president only walked in the liberal arts building a handful of times, which makes it less surprising that it hadn't been remodeled in 60 years, while the buildings he loved and frequented were always up to date.
What I don't get ... even as I do ... is how oedipal academic leadership is. And even when not that, how brazenly opportunist.
As you noted, Josh, one thing they don't get is that cutting a faculty line almost certainly ends that person's career given that colleges fill their classes with part-timers in lieu of full-time positions in a naked, exploitative, cash grab. Of course faculty are going to be prickly--they've spent their whole professional lives being exploited!