Robert E. Sherwood's classic study, Roosevelt and Hopkins (Harper and Brothers, 1948), tells of the remarkable relationship between the patrician President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a social worker of modest Midwestern roots, Harry Hopkins. Roosevelt once told Wendell Wilkie, the defeated 1940 Republican candidate, that should he become president, "you'll be looking at that door over there and knowing that practically everybody who walks through wants something out of you. You'll learn what a lonely job this is, and you'll discover the need for someone like Harry Hopkins who asks for nothing but to serve you."
Few of us in higher-education administration will have the good fortune of having a Harry Hopkins to lean on, but all of us need the advice of others. Indeed, the more responsibility you have, the more dependent you become. You will have no shortage of advice but you will have a shortage of neutral or trusted advisers. Good advice may emerge from knowledgeable, neutral sources (such as a lawyer or consultant) but trusted advice can come only from someone who cares about the consequences for you and understands the root of the matter.
There are various kinds of advice, and with each type you need to keep in mind the source and the motivation of the advisers. I suggest the following categories of advice: required, expert, legal, moral, contrarian, unsolicited, and political. Lets consider each in turn.
Required advice: This one is familiar to academics. Typically, this is the advice required under university regulations from academic senates, search committees, or from promotion and tenure committees. Technically (and you hear this often) such advice is "only advisory" and you are free to disregard it. It is perilous to do so, but you can do it if it does not become a pattern. But remember that following bad advice is no excuse for unintended consequences, and forgiveness will not be granted by trustees for pleading, "I followed the faculty recommendation."
There is a certain ridiculous charm to required advice inasmuch as the faculty are neither neutral parties to the issues they advise on nor are they held responsible for the results. In a search, for example, the board or the president may want someone who'll shake things up while the faculty may want a defender of the faith. And rarely will the faculty recommendations on the budget or program review be selfless.
Expert advice: Here we are mainly talking about contracted consulting arrangements. It is not unusual for an executive to seek such advice as a way of eluding sparring interests on campus. Search consultants, for example, serve this objective perfectly and are often hired to help carry out controversial changes like reorganization plans. Of course, there are instances where you really do need the advice of experts on technical matters such as computers or finances, but even here, you risk offending those on campus who consider themselves to be the appropriate experts.
It is important to remember that a consultant is not responsible for the consequences of the advice given or taken. Much of the advice given is strictly boilerplate -- made to look tailor-made for your institution. You should also keep in mind the advice of old administrative hands -- never engage a consultant unless you know what the recommendations will be.
Legal advice: Like death and taxes, legal advice is always with us. Our litigious society makes lawyers parties to every important decision. Who would now reject a tenure recommendation without consulting a lawyer or reorganize without making sure that some antidiscrimination law or regulation is not abused? Whatever the issue, legal advice informs what you can or cannot do under the law or campus regulations. It is commonplace now for a campus to have its own in-house legal office.
Here too, it is important to remember that a lawyer is not responsible for the consequences of the advice given or taken. Given a choice, I prefer outside counsel to in-house lawyers because the latter are more apt to develop their own campus relationships and agenda. Still, legal advice is usually reliable, disinterested, and trustworthy, and the higher-education legal fraternity is generally impressive. I have rarely met a good higher-education lawyer who was not charmed, amused, challenged, and bewildered by what goes on in the supposedly innocent ivory tower. "It is the world in a nutshell," said one lawyer friend, amazed at the never-ending supply of legal issues and the ease with which students, parents, professors, staff members, and campus neighbors threaten lawsuits.
Moral advice: Those who offer moral advice give it in the spirit of "this is the right thing to do." It is not often that you are privileged to be faced with an issue of conscience, for example, an academic-freedom challenge or an issue of discrimination based on race or sex. A strongly held position based on a perceived moral stance is always worthy of consideration, especially from advisers whom you have reason to trust. If you do make an unpopular decision based on moral principle, the campus community will best receive it if they have trust and confidence that you come to the table with clean hands. Machiavelli reminds us that "glory ... is acquired by having been one against many in counseling an enterprise which success has justified." You often find yourself knowing what you would do if you could honestly deal with an issue (eliminate a program, terminate a faculty member, give true merit pay, modify the athletics program) and then end up compromising your conscience.
Whether a campus community has a higher moral stance than other enterprises is dubious, but students and faculty members do find it easy to speak and "advise" in moral tones. This is no doubt because of their unlimited freedom to speak on the campus, their lack of responsibility for decisions, and a firm belief in the immorality of the administration that allegedly thinks only about money. A colleague told me early in my administrative career that administration is easy if you just do the right thing. He then laughed and added "but life, people, and situations tend to get in the way."
Contrarian advice: This is the sort of advice that you know you are unlikely to take but see value in soliciting. If you are lucky, you will be able to identify individuals for whom you have respect but whose views you rarely share. In effect, when you ask for their advice, you are saying, "Tell me what you would do so that I am sure not to do that."
Frequently contrarians arrive at their recommendations through moral routes or honestly held but naïve beliefs about the nature of academe, assuming that it is more like a monastery than like the unruly marketplace. Other useful contrarians tend to represent views of organizations with specific social, political, or curricular objectives. Such advice can prepare you for negative consequences of a decision among important elements of the campus that you do not want to alienate but whose views may be counterproductive to your responsibilities.
Seeking contrarian advice assures opponents that their views have actually been solicited and heard. A word of caution: Some contrarian advice may be deliberately misleading -- designed to sandbag or blindside you into a poor decision for reasons that are personal, political, or even venal. Trusted confidants can assist you around such shoals. But it is worth emphasizing that when you receive what you believe to be sound and thoughtful advice, the source is irrelevant.
Unsolicited advice: It can and indeed will come from a variety of sources, enhanced exponentially by the advent of e-mail. Ordinarily you get it walking across campus: "You know, I have been thinking about ..." It often takes the form of a statement following the close of a meeting when you are approached with a "by the way ..." The best kind is that received in writing (if anonymous, ignore it) from someone who cares enough to draft a reasoned argument about an issue meriting attention. If you have sound advisers at your disposal, it will be rare that unsolicited advice will be novel. Nevertheless, it is always wise to listen graciously and express appreciation but unwise to argue.
The Talmud warns us to "beware of unsolicited advice," which is a good piece of advice. Unsolicited advice is often moral in tone or contrarian because formal routes to giving advice are not readily available to those holding such positions. You cannot avoid receiving it, but recall the words of Henry David Thoreau that "there are few men who do not love better to give advice than to give assistance."
Political advice: At its best, political advice presumes that all other avenues of advice have been considered. Most decisions of consequence are political in nature because (in political-science terms) they allocate values that reward or benefit some and not others. Therefore, your most trusted associates and advisers must share your values and, like Harry Hopkins, recognize the root of the matter and have a commitment to your success in meeting your objectives. They must understand the differences among what you want to do, what you can do, and what you, under the circumstances, have to do. Because most important decisions are made in crises or divisive situations, having advisers who share your instincts and preconceptions can make the difference.
Politics is a way of thinking rather than a matter of objective reality, so you have to pick your political advisers with unusual care. Rarely are they idealists or wishful thinkers. It is said that politics is the art of the possible, meaning that a given decision may not be the best route to follow, but it might be the next best thing.
When in doubt, turn to Shakespeare and the superb advice he has Polonius give to Laertes in Hamlet. Polonius admonishes Laertes to be careful about expressing his thoughts or acting without weighing alternatives, to speak forcefully when in debate, to hold tight to his friends and be wary of new comrades, to "give every man thine ear, but few thy voice," to take criticism but reserve judgment, and "This above all: to thine own self be true. ... Thou canst not then be false to any man."
