Selling the art collection because the endowment has lost value? Stealing another university's statement on plagiarism and calling it your own? Signing a secret agreement with a tobacco company that allows them to deep-six your scientists' research findings? Each of those recent, highly publicized administrative missteps serves as a reminder that, in higher education, an institution's reputation is fundamental to its well-being. Such decisions demonstrate a misunderstanding of higher education's norms and can be hazardous to an institution's health.
More students can be recruited, faculty members can be replaced, and financial resources can be recouped. But once tarnished by acts that demonstrate its willingness to flaunt organizational mores, a college or university cannot easily reconstruct its reputation. In such cases, the legitimacy of the institution in question will take a substantial beating, from which it may take years to recover.
Higher education's goals and outputs are notoriously difficult to quantify. Without bottom lines by which they may be measured, colleges tend to be evaluated by the extent to which they cohere with existing expectations of what a legitimate college ought to be. Maintaining your institutional status in higher education means doing the things you should do and not doing the things you should not do. Institutions should, for example, have formal policies on plagiarism, but they should not steal them from others. But what about the ways in which colleges communicate to different audiences?
We were reminded of those norms when, during a recent research project, we learned that many higher-education institutions use more than one mission statement—one on their Web page and another for the Web site of U.S. News & World Report, which is announcing its new college and university rankings Thursday. While some may view that practice as a minor transgression of the norms to which colleges should comply, we argue that publishing more than one mission statement undermines the symbolic value of such a statement, devalues the investment of people on the campus in the mission statement, and diminishes the authority of the administration that asked for that investment. In sum, it calls into question the legitimacy of the college or university, as well as its leaders.
Ostensibly, mission statements are sacred artifacts for colleges. Virtually every higher-education institution has gone through a well-considered process to produce a mission statement describing its distinct qualities and values, with the assumption that those documents will be the official and exclusive means of communicating organizational identity. Extraordinary amounts of time and resources are expended toward the construction of these documents. Working committees are convened and reconvened, drafts are considered and reconsidered, and word choices are painstakingly debated. Hundreds of hours are put into wordsmithing these formal descriptions of organizational purpose.
Given all the sweat equity invested in mission statements, we were surprised to learn that a majority of the 100 private nonprofit baccalaureate colleges that we sampled in a recent study of mission statements published at least two versions. Intrigued by those dueling statements, we compared the institutions' USNews.com mission statements with their official ones. What we found was telling.
The institutions' official mission statements tended to make claims consistent with prestige-conferring standards long associated with liberal-arts education. Colleges that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classified as "arts and sciences focus" often mentioned admission selectivity and liberal-arts commitments, and linked residential life with a holistic undergraduate education. Gettysburg College's official mission statement, for example, describes "a national, residential, undergraduate college committed to a liberal education." Institutions that offered professional programs also cautiously situated themselves in the "liberal-arts tradition" or as having a curriculum "based in the liberal arts." Colleges such as Waldorf, which acknowledged its mission of providing "professional skills for careers," typically did so with a nominal "liberal-arts foundation" tag.
By contrast, the mission statements of those same institutions on USNews.com were laden with the alluringly vague imagery and laundry lists of programs and extracurricular activities. William Penn University noted its "competitive NAIA athletics, … extracurricular activities, and … career-centered internships." Very small colleges such as Virginia Intermont and Sweet Briar highlighted their location or small classes. Consistent use of recruitment language dominated the USNews.com statements of the institutions we studied.
One the one hand, we expected the information provided by colleges and universities at USNews.com to perform a recruitment function. After all, why else were the documents included in a fee-based online resource for prospective students? On the other hand, we did not expect to find wholly different descriptions of purpose labeled as "mission statements." Yet that is precisely what we found. Only six of 100 colleges submitted an official mission statement to USNews.com, while 52 submitted a document that we classified as entirely dissimilar to the official mission statement.
Our finding lends itself to two different interpretations. We might simply conclude that mission statements do not matter. We would not be the first to conclude this. Richard P. Chait, a professor of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writing in The Chronicle in 1979, expressed skepticism about the value of mission statements. There is appeal to this interpretation. Once we grant that mission statements do not matter very much, then the presence of multiple incarnations of the mission statement proves no more troubling than would inconsistencies in campus parking policies.
We concede that a mission statement may only rarely influence action on a campus. Nonetheless, we reject the suggestion that mission statements do not matter. Instead we posit that the 100 institutions we studied developed several mission statements precisely because those documents matter so much—they are on the frontlines of these institutions' communication efforts. We found such documents on USNews.com after all, not in a campus administrator's file cabinet. Mission statements are effective recruitment tools precisely because they carry connotations of institutional legitimacy. A prospective student assumes that a mission statement reflects the essential nature of the organization as a whole. Legitimacy is also the explanation given when faculty and staff members are asked to give their time to update the college's mission statement.
Unlike technical efficiency, which may be achieved and applied far away from prying eyes, legitimacy exists only when conferred by others. The real significance of mission statements therefore lies not in what the mission statements actually do but in what everyone believes they are capable of doing. As John W. Meyer wrote in the American Journal of Sociology, "The Effects of Education as an Institution," education provides a vital credential not because the person making the hiring decision believes that education fits people for success in modern society, but because he or she believes that everyone else believes in education. Just so, mission statements matter because of their normative value: Everyone believes that everyone else believes that these statements speak for the organization as a whole.
This is what Meyer and Brian Rowan, also termed the "logic of confidence." Prospective students and their parents use the mission statements provided by USNews.com to learn more about colleges and universities. Faculty and staff members at those campuses devote a great deal of time to developing those documents. In both cases, each audience has confidence that the mission statement it sees reflects the values and realities of the organization in question. That confidence has great value, to both the audience members and the specific college or university.
The presence of two or more iterations of a mission statement could seriously undermine and devalue their role. Without the legitimacy conferred by the logic of confidence, mission statements look like any other cynical marketing technique, which suggests that colleges are no different from other companies that use questionable practices to sell their products.
If an institution espouses more than one mission statement, why should anyone—within or outside of the organization—believe in the significance of any one of those documents? We contend that institutions that ignore the investments of their community and the assumptions of their audience risk their legitimacy just as surely as do institutions that plagiarize others' plagiarism policies.
Colleges and universities are not supposed to trade the academic freedom of their faculty for a grant from a tobacco company, and they are not supposed to represent their essential natures differently when communicating with different audiences. Each of those violations of normative guidelines suggests that the institution's leaders value administrative expedience more highly than their role as educators and leaders.
Of course, that may not be the case. The fact that it appears to be the case, however, is ultimately our point. Because institutional legitimacy is conferred by others, perceptions of an organization's behavior may prove far more significant than the realities that occur out of the public eye.
Christopher C. Morphew is a professor of educational policy and leadership studies at the University of Iowa. Barrett J. Taylor is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia.
Comments
1. davi2665 - August 20, 2009 at 06:38 am
I am not surprised that universities, especially the so called "prestigious" universities, try to rig their mission statements, and many other aspects of the USNWR formula, for better rankings. Hospitals do the same thing in striving for high USNWR rankings. This is a classic example of the ends justifying the means. With a clever writer who is intimately familiar with the process of the rankings, a university can be made to appear any way the organization chooses. I would like to see more objective metrics used for rankings, but wishing for such fairness is probably an exercise in futility.
2. iewluedu - August 20, 2009 at 10:37 am
I believe a clarification is in order relative to the research conducted by the authors. If, as I understand it, they compared the "Mission" statement on the U.S. News web page for each institution to the mission statement on the institution's web site, there is a problem. The actual question posed on the U.S. News survey (completed by each institution) is:
"As part of each entry in a much-expanded directory of colleges and universities, U.S. News would like to feature a brief description of the school's mission and unique qualities. Please provide a thoughtful summary of what makes your school special. What are its special strengths and attributes? What is it not? Maximum number of allowable characters is 4000. Please do not include bullets, paragraph breaks, special characters, or other special formatting."
The problem is that U.S. News asks this question and then labels it as "Mission" on its web site. They ask for a description, not the institution's official mission statement. By definition a mission statement is brief, U.S. News allows for 4000 characters. Clearly, this is a matter of asking one question and labeling it something else. Apparently the authors did not know the difference when they were doing their research. To use their results to call into question the legitimacy of institutions and their leaders is blatantly inappropriate.
3. ir_e_office - August 20, 2009 at 11:53 am
How about this as a reason: although USNWR labels it on their website as "mission," they don't ask for the mission statement. Question #321 on the survey (out of 621 questions) is labeled "Unique qualities during the yyyy-yy academic year" and they ask for "...a brief description of the school's mission and unique qualities. Please provide a thoughtful summary of what makes your school special. What are its special strengths and attributes" What is it not? Maximum number of allowable characters is 4000...."
While certainly we include aspects of our mission, this is clearly an invitation to expand upon that and provide more information. If they'd specifically ask for the mission statement, we'd give it.
4. kirkkick - August 20, 2009 at 01:18 pm
Honestly, isn't it time to do away with these rankings in magazines? Harvard and Princeton are at the top of the rankings because they are among the oldest (most established) and wealthiest universities in the world, not because they offer a superior education to, say, UCLA or Northwestern. Do professors even teach undergraduates at Harvard anymore? Oh, and Princeton, your social climate has been so vile and exclusionary over the years to students not raised in the power elite that it led alums such as F. Scott Fitzgerald to write bitter novels about it. A university's worth to a student depends on the goals, interests, work ethic, and temperament of the individual student and his or her individual experience. Don't let a second-rate "news" magazine have such power, people. Show some spine and boycott the USNWR rankings.
5. susca - August 20, 2009 at 01:20 pm
It's not a willingness to "flaunt" educational mores (would that it were so)--it's a willingness to "flaut" them.
And on a more substantive point: it would seem that the entire issue addressed by this article is explained simply and completely by comments #2 and #3 above.
6. softshellcrab - August 20, 2009 at 05:38 pm
I am surprised they ask for such a long mission statement.
7. occidentalir - August 21, 2009 at 03:58 am
"I am surprised they ask for such a long mission statement."
That's the point! USNews does NOT ask for a mission statement. What they ask for, as ielwuedu helpfully provides, is this:
"...a brief description of the school's mission and unique qualities. Please provide a thoughtful summary of what makes your school special. What are its special strengths and attributes?"
And the resulting answer is often different from the school's mission statement. Well duh.
IPEDS, in contrast, does directly ask schools for their mission statements or a link to them. If we saw discrepancies there, then that would indeed raise questions. (Interestingly, the Fall 2009 IPEDS form does allow for wordy mission statements, here's the instructions: "2. Provide the institution's mission statement or a web address (URL) where the mission statement can be found. Typed statements are limited to 3,000 characters or less. The mission statement will be available to the public on College Navigator.")
8. vfichera - August 21, 2009 at 02:15 pm
This summary sentence from the main article itself is perhaps the kernel of the affair: "Only six of 100 colleges submitted an official mission statement to USNews.com, while 52 submitted a document that we classified as entirely dissimilar to the official mission statement."
"Entirely dissimilar"? Should a request decribed by the following purpose, "U.S. News would like to feature a brief description of the school's mission and unique qualities," result in statements described as "entirely dissimilar"?
The point is that the administrations of the institutions surveyed know that this is a high stakes game, so some/many stack the dice before the roll. If that means that their own mission statement, compared to what they submit, would appear to refer to an entirely different institution, well, "all's fair in love and war" -- and this is definitely the "recruitment and reputation war."
So what's a little "exaggeration" and "padding" among friends?
9. vfichera - August 21, 2009 at 02:32 pm
@ the article and @vfichera
Otherwise stated:
Six of the 100 colleges (6%), when asked for a "brief description of the school's mission and unique qualities" submitted "an official mission statement." (entirely congruent with, because identical to, the official statement)
52% (52 institutions) "submitted a document that [the article authors] classified as entirely dissimilar to the official mission statement." (potentially if not actually incongruent with, and not identical to, the official statement)
By extrapolation, 48% submitted a document that was similar to their mission statement. (congruent with, though not identical to, the mission statement)
That's "similar to" vs. "entirely dissimlar to" the "official" mission statement.
I request that the authors of the article correct me if this paraphrase is incorrect.
10. joelkline - August 21, 2009 at 04:09 pm
Yes. The earlier posts point to the sloppiness of this methodology and research. Once again we have endure shoddy research so the Chronicle (or the authors) can get a great headline like "Colleges lie about mission" or something.
To add to the criticism, the authors state "Mission statements are effective recruitment tools precisely because they carry connotations of institutional legitimacy." I have not met a student or parent in 12 years of teaching/recruiting who asked me about the mission statement. Where is the author's data to back up this claim? If their logic is correct, then the "mission" for US News is imperative, but the actual posted "mission statement" is not all that important, regardless of the dozens of anal-retentive wordsmiths who labor over it every few years.
11. vfichera - August 21, 2009 at 04:57 pm
I'm waiting for an author to reply with clarification on their methodology.
If all that was done was a check for exact sentence duplication, then there would be no real subject for an article. On the other hand, the article implies that there were inconsistencies with the information that a mission statement contains, that the institutions appeared to be fundamentally different in the mission statement from the "U.S. News" submission.
Recall that the article clearly states its dictum: "they [institutional leaders] are not supposed to represent their essential natures differently when communicating with different audiences."
With that last sentence, we should all concur.
12. vfichera - August 21, 2009 at 05:01 pm
@vfichera
Correction "they [colleges and universities] are not supposed to represent their essential natures differently when communicating with different audiences."
The fact that the administratations, the institutional leaders, prepare and submit the representations is, of course, understood.
13. vfichera - August 21, 2009 at 05:01 pm
@vfichera
Correction: "they [colleges and universities] are not supposed to represent their essential natures differently when communicating with different audiences."
The fact that the administratations, the institutional leaders, prepare and submit the representations is, of course, understood.
14. 11194291 - August 21, 2009 at 11:07 pm
I'm one of the authors of this study. A complete version of the study, including methods and more examples, will be available in in an forthcoming version of Research in Higher Education. The paper explains how we compared the two statements -- for each institution -- our theoretical framework, which helped us to better understand the nature and utility of the terms employed in both statements.
Thanks for the comments.
15. goxewu - August 23, 2009 at 08:59 am
Why did it take two people to write this essay?
What's "leadership studies"?
What's the difference between "method" and "methodology"?
16. locutus - August 23, 2009 at 10:10 am
So is what colleges submit to USNews conflicting with the mission statements or orthognonal?
17. vfichera - August 23, 2009 at 10:48 am
@ locutus
And "backward compatible"? ;-)
18. kingericred4ever - August 28, 2009 at 03:19 pm
So if a college's mission statment on their website says something like "We prepare our studens for the 21st century by teaching them how to eat breakfast cereal underwater whilst translating from Sanskrit to Greek last weekends Premiership scores." when their blurb on US News's website says "We prepare our students for the 21st century by herding them into pens and shoving large amounts of macaroni and cheese down their throat" then what? Well that college has just proven their mission statement doesn't matter. This is a serious crime indeed. (I thought this sort of thing was unconstitutional and strictly in violation of the Geneva Convention which cleary stresses the abuse of mission statements during times of war.) How shall we punish these violators? Public shaming and flogging? Loss of accreditation? Execution of the Communications department? The President being cross-examined on the Daily show whilst your men's basketball team plays their season opener against North Carolina? (That last one's probably too cruel.)
19. vfichera - September 04, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Seems at least one university is tampering with the full-time faculty reporting measures, hiding adjuncts (and graduate students who teach full courses) to inflate their image and their U.S. News survey ranking:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/03/usnews
Hmmm....