All in the Game

The Golden Rule

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

After two-and-a-half years as a dean and 17 years as an administrator of one kind or another, I have learned that, as with most activities, there is a golden rule. The golden rule of administration is at once simple and complex, and it comes in three parts. Part one is, always tell the truth. Part two is, always tell more of the truth than you have to. And part three is, always tell the truth before anyone asks you to.

This may sound like moral counsel (and at some level, of course, it is), but I offer it to you as a piece of strategy. Like any strategy, it takes its shape from the characteristics of its target audience, and for deans, the primary audience is the faculty.

You tell the truth to your faculty, first of all, because they don't expect it. Faculty members live in, and on, perpetual distrust, in part because they believe administrators to be either burnt-out or never-ignited researchers, or promising researchers who, for reasons that will not bear examination, put themselves on the administrative path in search of advancement and riches.

By and large faculty distrust of administrators is based on a history of past performance. (That is why as a general, as opposed to a golden, rule, the longer tenured your faculty, the more resentment and suspicion it will display.) That history will include, among other things: hiring freezes; across-the-board cutbacks; noncompetitive salaries; favoritism in promotions and/or rewards; the withdrawal of financing from projects already under way; the peremptory and unexplained removal of some department heads and the unwillingness to remove others; inconsistent and intermittent enforcement of academic responsibilities; unfair distribution of resources; inattention to deficiencies (some of them health and safety hazards) of the physical plant; the substitution of bottom-line considerations for academic considerations; failure to represent faculty concerns in meetings with trustees, legislators, and the press; and a lack of understanding of, or commitment to, the academic mission of the college or university.

However just or unjust any of these complaints may be, they will be fed and nourished by that most ill-considered of administrative practices -- the practice of withholding information. Administrators do this because they believe (quite correctly) that information is power, but they do not always see that it is a power best exercised when it is expended, not hoarded.

I am not recommending the solicitation of "faculty input" -- that is almost always a recipe for paralysis and inaction -- just that professors be fully and repeatedly informed about what has already happened, what is happening at the moment, and what is about to happen. Bad news is better than no news; faculty imagination, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of information the faculty will fabricate it, moving easily and imperceptibly from rumor to conjecture to hypothesis to undoubted (and completely unsubstantiated) fact.

Even when the real facts are finally reported and turn out to be less distressing than was feared, the damage done will not be reversed, and many will remember as gospel not what actually happened but what they imagined to have happened in dimly lit rooms to which they were denied access by powers indifferent to their interests. Everything changes when all is revealed, even if the revelations are the cause of head-shakings, murmurings (in the biblical sense), and endless conversations in the halls. Because you will have initiated these conversations, you will be included in them as a colleague and will not so readily become their target.

The strategy of telling the truth and of telling more of it than is required is especially important when the subject is money. Most academics haven't the slightest sense of how the finances of a college or university work. The one thing they know (and it is false) is that if someone else has been given something, it is (literally) at their expense. It's a zero-sum game, a pie of which my piece gets smaller if yours gets larger.

The truth is that in most institutions of higher learning, the money is in pots labeled for this or that purpose on a spread sheet. Because there are almost always surplus dollars in some pots, there is always the possibility of shifting surpluses into pots now depleted or empty. To be sure, this is often "against the rules," but the rules can be stretched and bent by resourceful accountants (they should be courted at every opportunity) especially if there are categories labeled "discretionary funds," "reserve funds," or "contingency funds."

The real rule of educational finance is that there is always money if you can come up with a way to persuade those who control it that it is in their interests to support your interests.

Faculty members will not understand this if they don't understand how the money works in the first place; how much comes in annually and from what sources; how much is already targeted for fixed expenses; how much remains to be divided between new programs, new hires, new facilities, deferred maintenance, start-up costs, lecture series, and materials and supplies; how much debt can be incurred without triggering a regime of strict scrutiny; how much you can mortgage against the expectation of future resignations and retirements; how much help you can reasonably expect from a program of fund raising, and so on.

These are complicated matters, but surely not too complicated for persons with advanced degrees. Faculty members who have become familiar with the basic facts will certainly have a lot to think about, but they won't be thinking about conspiracies of which they are the victims and you the devisers.

But the benefits of providing accurate and full information will be dissipated if you act only in response to the pressure of a crisis, real or imagined. For then you are on the defensive. If you give people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth before they ask for it, you occupy the higher ground and can to some extent shape the discussions that follow. Relinquishing your hold on information does not mean relinquishing control, but the enhancement of control (of course for purposes wholly benevolent). The nice thing about this strategy is that you can announce it and explain it, and it will still work.

But not with everyone.

Some who have come to terms with being left out of the loop will have learned to love it and will have made of it a sign of their virtue. They don't want to believe that things might be getting better, for they would then be deprived of the posture of martyrdom and presented with challenges they would rather not rise to. They will say things like, "This is just a smokescreen; there's more we're not being told," or "Nothing will really change," or "How long before these flash-in-the-pan truth-tellers flee to greener pastures and leave us worse off than we were before?"

There's not much you can say to persuade these people. All you can do is keep trying in the hope that after a while they can be turned around. And in the meantime (and before you flee to greener pastures), continue to tell the truth (good and bad), and tell a lot of it, and tell it to everyone you meet, stopping more than the Ancient Mariner.