College administrators have a way of becoming the stuff of legend, both those who serve long enough to accrue some serious mythology, and those who serve only a short time but go down in flames. My department once had a chairman, hired from another institution, who lasted only a year. The department drove Miles Archer away, I was told, "because he had ideas and a temper" (as usual, the names in this column are fictitious and cinematic, though the stories are true).
No one actually remembered what those ideas of Archer's were, but they were troubling enough that whenever the headship turned over, the battle cry for those who opposed an outside candidate was, "Remember Miles Archer." Of course the department subsequently drove out an "inside" chairwoman after only two years because she had both ideas and a temper, but that, for some inexplicable reason, was different, and 30 years passed before the department again hired a head from another institution.
There are notorious deans as well as infamous department heads. The legendary Dean Sternwood was once asked how to deal with a group of obstreperous faculty members. "Treat 'em like mushrooms," was Sternwood's reply. Asked what that meant, he replied, "Keep 'em in the dark and feed them plenty of" -- well, the polite word would be "fertilizer."
Guy Sternwood kept his faculty in the dark literally as well as figuratively. Said to be a thrifty dean, he routinely strode the corridors of the buildings of the quadrangle, turning off lights in empty classrooms. But Sternwood proved a poor accountant, and when he retired, we heard that he'd run the college hopelessly into debt. It was said that he just forgot to write things down and had no idea where the money had gone.
But this column isn't about money -- I'll deal later with the problem of keeping the lights on in the face of an incredible shrinking budget. Rather, it's about information management, about keeping people in the dark or telling all.
Ideally, getting things out in the open is a good thing for administrators to do, and keeping things under wraps is not. Perhaps if Dean Sternwood had been more open in his record-keeping, someone would have noticed his fuzzy accounting before he ran up such a big bill. In addition to letting mistakes go unchecked, secrecy breeds paranoia. Mushrooms aren't suspicious about the dark, but people kept out of the loop will begin to see that loop as a noose being prepared especially for them.
In contrast, openness inspires trust. Usually. Openness in job searches protects against discrimination, broadens the base for decision making, and gives job candidates a better view of the institution. But sometimes discretion may be wiser: Let the name of a candidate for a high-level university post get out prematurely, and that person may withdraw from consideration.
Similarly, while announcing a plan before it's a done deal gives concerned parties a chance to comment, shape, and track a process that could significantly affect their academic lives, such openness may backfire. Many plans come to naught, and if disappointed beneficiaries see such a plan as a broken promise, then it's the administrator behind the failed plan who gets the necktie party.
Let's look at two actual cases that raise questions about what we should know, and when we should know it.
Case 1: Three faculty members in the department of metaphysical chemistry (not its real name) quietly develop a dossier recommending an appointment for Marie Browning, the partner of Harry Morgan, a distinguished senior professor unhappy over his weekly commute to the city where Browning works. Eventually the hiring plans reach the stage where they need to become public. That's when all hell breaks loose.
What started as an attempt to retain a distinguished senior professor comes to be viewed by those who were not in the know as the efforts of a cabal to play favorites, lower standards, and pervert public morality (Morgan and Browning aren't married). The department divides along serious fault lines, with unpleasant e-mail screeds and outbursts in once-quiet hallways. Morgan leaves in a huff. So does a junior faculty member blamed by both sides for his part in the preliminary evaluation of Browning. And people do not speak to one another for a long time.
Would it have been better to proceed differently in this failed partner hire? Even in retrospect, the answer isn't clear.
Making the initiative public from the start might have pre-empted the sense of exclusion that many people felt. On the other hand, if the preliminary inquiries of the hush-hush review committee determined that Browning wasn't a suitable job candidate, letting the case die a quiet death wouldn't have led to dashed hopes. True, Morgan might still have left, and there might still be grumbling over the department's inability to retain him, but the unit might have avoided the kind of major fracture that takes years to overcome.
Case 2: The department of deconstructive and postmolecular biology wanted to hire Gaye Dawn, a rising young star. Her husband, John Rocco, was a specialist in Juvenal, the Roman satirist, but the department of pyrrhics had just hired a junior Juvenalian. To secure the deal, the dean offered Pyrrhics an extra slot for Rocco, and the department head, happy to get two good hires instead of one, said yes. But when the other satirists in Pyrrhics found out, they complained loudly about bypassing the normal search process. When it came time to consider Rocco for tenure, several of the senior satirists, still resentful over the circumstances of his hire, voted against him, claiming that their objections were substantive, not personal. The rest of the faculty supported Rocco. The chair then had to report a positive but split vote to the college.
Rose Sayer, the recently appointed chairwoman of Pyrrhics, hadn't been in on the original hire, but she hoped she might be able to use her new position to get everyone to put the past behind them. So far, it wasn't working. Because I was both a department chairman and a member of the college promotions committee at the time, Sayer asked me whether she should explain the circumstances behind the split vote when she wrote up Rocco's tenure dossier.
Sayer's urge to get it all out into the open had to be tempered by a consideration of what the promotion committee needed to know. The committee needed an assessment of the candidate's accomplishments and potential. It also needed an explanation of any negatives in the record, and that included any no votes from the department.
But I told Sayer that the college committee was not the place to work out the Rocco feud. It's not a good idea to allege bias in a vote at this point if you can't really prove that the negative votes were personal. So Sayer wrote that the department had seriously considered the objections of the candidate's departmental critics, but found in the end that Rocco deserved promotion. The college agreed, and once the promotion was approved, the feud died down.
This tenure case was only part of a broader concern that Sayer raised. Used to telling the truth -- all sunlight, all the time -- Sayer worried that her new job often required her to keep people in the dark. She wasn't comfortable staying quiet, whether it was a case of injustice or just day-to-day decision making.
So the final case I want to consider is what Sayer said about the information-processing pressures of the chair's job:
"People tell me things now that they never would have told me before, when I was just a faculty member. It's like I'm back in junior high school, everyone gossiping and tattling, with 'He said this' and 'She said that.' I sit there and go, 'Really?' and 'No!' and 'You're kidding!' But I'm not really supposed to do anything, just listen and be supportive. Or, they don't tell me something they would have told me before, because since I'm the boss, everything is on the record. I used to speak my mind all the time. Now I can't even crack a joke without somebody putting it in the minutes. As chair, anything I say can and will be used against me."
Sayer was angry and frustrated, but she was also right. When Alan Greenspan hiccups, the market tumbles. It's not as bad with department heads, but I, too, have found that talking can get me into as much trouble as keeping quiet.
Sayer is also right that not everybody gets to know what the chair knows, and that a lot of what people bring to the chair's office, stays there. Information is a commodity that administrators need in order to do their jobs. Sometimes they get it by asking; other times, by listening. Information is also something that administrators disseminate, so that others can do their jobs. Administrators aren't paid to lie (sometimes faculty members and students don't believe this), but as a chair, there are times to speak up, times to keep quiet, and times to work behind the scenes.
That doesn't mean treating people like mushrooms so they don't know what they're missing. Nor does it mean flooding them with data just so they can't complain they were kept in the dark. In my experience, administrators up and down the line release information on a need-to-know basis. The trick is defining "need to know" broadly enough.
I've often told what I thought was too much to too many people, only to have them complain that I haven't told them nearly enough, or that I've left out the one person who really did need to know. Faculty members and students may not believe this either, but it's sometimes difficult for chairs to get the information they need from deans. And deans may have to wait a long time to hear from provosts, as well.
Paranoids may see this as stonewalling. But usually it's just a case of not having enough information to decide. I'm not ready to recommend setting up departmental Webcams to broadcast every administrivial detail, but I'd like to think that freedom of information -- even if it turns out to be a glut of information -- has got to be better than freedom from information.
