I have been following an effort begun by three outstanding academic psychologists to think about the relationship between ethics and accomplishment in professional lives. The scholars involved are Howard Gardner (Harvard School of Education), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University), and William Damon (Stanford School of Education). They call their effort the “Good Work Project,” and it has already resulted in several books, including Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon’s Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001). A helpful descriptive paper can be found online here. Howard Gardner is currently editing a new volume of essays to be published in several months as Good Work: Theory and Practice. He has shared with me Bill Damon’s piece “Mission Creep and Bad Work in Higher Places,” which I think brilliantly exposes the tension that the Good Work Project is exploring between excellence and ethics, between professional accomplishments and professional goals.
The title of this essay tells the reader where Damon is going. He argues that “mission creep” is capable of producing bad, rather than good, work, using two examples of professionalism gone astray. The first wayward profession is higher finance and the second is higher education. His account of “low times in high finance” is that the financial industry has abandoned its appropriate mission “to deploy capital so that enterprises can produce goods and services in a profitable manner.” Over the past couple of decades the industry has “departed from its ethical moorings” by, among other things, producing new financial instruments (derivatives) that cannot be properly valued—and that their holders discovered had little value. The problem here Damon contends, is that the financial industry lost sight of its “traditional public mission” as its leaders “gambled away the investments that they were responsible for, thereby creating “a lasting ‘moral hazard’ by signaling future generations of investment officers that irresponsible gambling pays off.”
The second profession gone wrong is higher education, for Damon believes our great (mostly private) universities have prioritized the rapid growth of their endowments over the fulfillment of their proper mission, which is “the formulation and preservation of knowledge through scholarship, and the transmission of that knowledge to its students and to the broader society.” Damon questions whether what he sees as currently the “major preoccupation” of university leaders as “the competitive ‘arms race’ for high-achieving students” aligns with the proper mission of higher education. He argues that “it seems likely that these misaligned goals undermined that mission by requiring vast and possibly unsustainable resources.” That is, “winning the arms race has certainly been one of the driving forces behind the frenetic fund-raising and investment activities on campuses in recent years.”
Thus mission drift in high finance disastrously coincided with mission drift in higher education not just to destroy endowment value through risky investments (think Harvard, though Damon does not mention specific institutions). Damon stresses “the problem of retaining a commitment to essential public mission amidst pressures and temptations to pursue more ‘rewarding’ goals.” He focuses on his preference for stability over growth, though he acknowledges the need for growth. But in the end, professionalism requires adherence to mission—or stated a little differently, growth limited by ethics.
He concludes that “the public mission of higher education is a noble one, and if growth means opening up greater access to populations of students who have not yet benefited, I certainly applaud it. But I see no useful purpose to the arms race; and I would hope that growth would not be pursued in such a reckless way that it harms the stability that educational institutions need in order to do their good work”.
I find Damon’s essay powerful and provocative, and I hope it will be widely read when it is published. I disagree with his interpretation of the “arms race”, which I take to be not so much about the quest for “high-achieving students” as for institutional prestige and growth for its own sake. But I think his criticism of elite higher education is on the mark, although in this essay he deals mainly with our financial shortcomings—mission creep has affected the professoriate as well. For these reasons, the concepts that drive the Good Work Project deserve consideration by both academic administrators and the professoriate. We ought to give more thought to doing good rather than doing well.
6 Responses to Mission Creep in Higher Education
rmalekof - May 28, 2010 at 6:17 am
And is there some sort of relationship between these alleged wayward ways of higher finance and higher education? Almost every time I read an article about some sort of Wall Street scandal, the primary “characters” are graduates of thought to be “elite” universities. Perhaps “mission creep” is quite the understatement.
optimysticynic - May 28, 2010 at 5:22 pm
The non-elite institutions also pursue growth for growth’s sake, with a taken-for-granted mission of improving the economic climate of the state, in the case of public universities, by vastly increasing the number of graduates, nevermind the quality of their education, the corners that must be cut to jump the numbers and the problems created by admitting students who are neither capable of nor interested in a college education. We are coming dangerously close to giving away our degrees, in order to placate the state budgeteers. Is this the “best use” of the limited funds we have? Why is it assumed that economic development is the purpose of the public university? Perhaps this is the best we can do, since our leadership is also capable only of understanding business/economic models, rather than academic/scholarly ones.
honore - May 28, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Mission Creep is epidemic, but more so at the larger institutions and especially at those with majority state-funding. Today, this mission slithering is most obvious in the lack of regard paid to the residents of the state, their economic and educational problems.Look at some of these schools with very distinguished schools of ED and yet with deplorable K-12 performance in the VERY communities outside their campus.Then check out schools with distinguished schools of Urban Planning and then look at the slums outside their windows.This mission “disconnect” is due primarily to misguided empire building top administration more concerned with leaving behind visible and physical testaments to their “leadership” than their concern for the original and constantly evolving “mission” that NOW have state constituencies and their lives as a long-forgotten priority…Madison,WI
goxewu - May 29, 2010 at 9:44 am
While honore’s sentiments in #3 are laudable, one should remember that university schools of education aren’t charter schools themselves, that schools of architecture aren’t urban renewal agencies, or that English departments aren’t local literacy programs. While it would be nice if–and often happens that–university schools and departments run public clinics and social-service internships, the purpose of higher education is, well, higher education. The very fact that something excellent and priviliged (e.g., college students studying poetry or architecture) is happening right down the block from where people who can barely read are living in buildings with multiple code violations should not be reflexively regarded as “mission disconnect.” (Honore and I are typing our comments on the sort of fancy computers to which some of our poorer local neighbors have little access. Should we quit all this privileged blathering and dedicate ourselves instead to handing out laptops to the disadvantaged?)
honore - May 29, 2010 at 10:48 am
goxewu…thanks…I needed that.I would just like to see more action around some of the issues affecting local and statewide communities that would make a real difference to the very peopel we drive our BMWs past everyday…and perhaps less show-casing at national fora about the most recent significnt statistical model or findings…thanks again, i can always count on you to shake up the snow globe and help us see Rudolph’s nose a bit more vividly…no go get those steaks on the grill!
goxewu - May 29, 2010 at 11:15 am
honore’s equanimity, above, is refreshing. It’s even more refreshing when he/she goes on a rhetorical rant like nobody else’s: unfraid to call ‘em like he/she sees ‘em in those gestalts that most of us have and know in our kishkas are true. (Granted, the rightwing yahoos on these threads have gestalts, too. But their kishkas are as dried up and shriveled as old tea bags.)But, no steaks (not a vegetarian, but don’t like meat much), no grille, no picnic guests. Sequestered with my significant other, indulging in my addiction to my own version of Internet porn, which is “Brainstorm,” and putting off getting to work on that chapter near the end of a book that seriously needs getting done. Happy Memorial Day to honore, and how ’bout dem Badgers!