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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

October 30, 2008

Farewell

When I stepped up from the presidency of George Washington University to become a professor, people asked me what new adventures I was considering. First and foremost, I replied, is a return to the classroom, to engage with graduate students about policy issues of higher education, my professional passion. (I have been doing that.) Second is to write a book, an activity that will move me away from the immediacy of daily decision making toward the more reflective world of analysis. (In 2008 two have been published: BMOC, Simon and Schuster and Letters to the Next President of the United States, Korn Ferry Institute). After that, I’m open, I said to the inquiring minds.

I’ve been fortunate to invest my time in many activities: some local engagements with civic organizations; and others with a broader reach — working with Korn Ferry International searching for the next generation of academic leadership. And, yes, one of the great pleasures of the past year has been to be part of the debut of Brainstorm. It has been a privilege to work with an interesting group of scholars, thinkers, and practitioners, to write on a broad range of issues, mostly educational in theme, although not always. I’ve heard from many — sometimes in the form of comments put up online, but also through private, one-on-one emails. From these exchanges, I’ve renewed old friendships, met new colleagues and in several cases, used the ideas to develop future projects.

If I’ve had a mantra, it has been that higher education is one of the most significant activities in the nation. It continually creates intellectual capital to lead the future; preserves the values of free inquiry; propels research and scholarship; discovers solutions to academic and social problems; and, more often than not, encourages the thoughtful exchange of ideas. In the best of situations, higher education is a safe harbor for history; an investigator of what came before as well as a harbinger of what is yet to occur. The thrill of uncovering the past is matched only by discovering a clue to the future. Whether one’s eye is scanning a microscope or following political polls, developing knowledge is key to learning how to live well and wisely. What could be more exciting than to work among tribes of teachers and students, spending one’s time making sure they remain free to interact?

But higher education is a challenged enterprise, one that needs to be rethought and rebuilt. The current economic meltdown is altering the stakes for all constituencies. From automobile plants to investment banks, companies are looking at new ways to build products and deliver services, to economize when possible and to demonstrate prudent uses of resources. Colleges and universities must do the same. In simple terms, it is necessary to acknowledge the worth of a dollar: to fairly compensate faculty and staff for their work; and be confident that value is provided. Tenure guarantees academic freedom, not freedom from the academic.

No longer content to be put through the hazing of the academy, students are reminding administrators and faculty that they are the consumers of services that need to be designed for both practicality and refinement: preparing for careers and life. And somewhere along the way, universities must instill within students the appreciation that with their formal education and their symbolic sheepskins comes the obligation to return the favor — to give back.

I’d like to believe that I helped move the higher education dialogue forward, but frankly, I’m not always sure. I am concerned that at times the nature of the Brainstorm comment section brought forth the same half-dozen people relentlessly (passionately?) in a way that narrowed the scope of the discussion and prevented the big picture from taking form. We must guard against the conversation becoming shrill or myopic, for a strongly held opinion is worthwhile only as long as the speaker opens his ears as well as his mouth.

I look forward to continuing a dialogue with those who wish to engage in one — either in person or online. Write to me at: trachtenberg@gwu.edu.

Shalom. As Edward R. Murrow liked to say, “Good night and good luck.” And don’t forget to vote.

Comment [10]

October 15, 2008

Rethinking Choices



The dire economic picture is forcing campus constituencies to rethink their choices — all constituencies, all choices. Assumptions are being thrown out the door.

Let’s start with the largest group — the students. This is shopping season, the time of year when students and their families complete their campus visits and begin filling out applications to the colleges of their choice. But what are their choices and how do they pick them? By location (near or far from home), type (Ivy League, Big Ten, elite, boutique, rural, urban), disciplines of study (liberal arts, engineering, technology, health sciences, education), and of course, price (tuition, room and board, fees, living expenses).

Price appears to be the trump card this year. Families are shopping for discounts — both on the list price and on financial aid. In a recent survey quoted in USA Today, 50 percent of families report “limiting their children’s college choices to less expensive options.” College savings accounts are spiraling down in value. Home equity is decreasing by more than anyone could have imagined. Family savings for retirement are now being shifted to use for their children’s education. A mitigating circumstance: Several of the richest colleges in the nation have recently announced they are opening up their financial-aid coffers to provide generous packets of aid to students who come from families that make less than $200,000 (which is most of America). But if you add up all the students those few well-endowed schools can handle, the figure is a small drop in the admissions bucket and most families realize they must adjust their priorities and personal choices.

The administration. Strategic plans traditionally look ahead five to ten years, carefully laying out institutional goals and mission, putting building blocks in place, charting the course for the future. Every sound administrator expects to make mid-course adjustments, to tweak the strategic model, to respond to small bumps in the road. Very few, however, could have predicted the perfect storm: horrendous loses in endowments; the tightening of credit for capital projects; lack of liquidity available for short-term loans; possible reduction of personal and foundation philanthropic gifts; and the potential loss of student applicants.

This is the time for reinvention. As the president of the University of Arizona recently said, “We cannot achieve our aspirations with either our current funding or operational models.” How this is accomplished will depend on how quickly colleges and universities (and the rest of the world) sense that a stable floor has returned to the economy. If the markets continue to tumble, some decisions — and possible draconian ones — will need to be made quickly, and if the markets take a deep breath and appear to return to a calm, then decisions can be made with greater deliberation. To paraphrase the old education expression — here are the new 3-Rs for these troubled times: Reorganizing, Restructuring, and Reformatting how the business of higher education is accomplished.

On the surface, tenured faculty have the least need to worry — for their jobs are secure for ever and a day: There is no legal retirement age. Nontenured junior faculty and contingent faculty do have cause for concern. If the senior faculty feel the need to stay in their jobs longer than previously anticipated (in order to build back up their retirement funds), fewer jobs will be available for the younger professors. If student enrollment falls, there will be few positions for adjunct faculty. If students flock away from the liberal arts and go toward preprofessional training (as often happens in hard economic times), then there may need for some retrenchment in the size and shape of departments. All of that, however, is nuts and bolts.

Let’s consider the bigger picture. The senior members of the faculty are the backbone of the academy. They represent the most important line of interface with students. They are the mentors to the next generation of scholars. They are the discoverers of what is new and the interpreters of what is old. They are the guardians of tradition. And so they should be leading the discussion about the Three R’s. The faculty should be offering up ideas for reinvention: for — dare I say it — cost savings in the delivery of educational services, for new models of pedagogy, for redesign of curriculum, for rethinking major fields of study, for refocusing on what is “needed” to complete degree requirements, for how they interact with their fellow professors — who is hired, promoted, tenured, and when in the career path this all happens. The faculty should lead the discussion on change.

Traditionally, faculty are not “first responders” — they rarely rush toward decisions. They most often are defenders of the status quo, and question why change is necessary. They deliberate and study all sides, evaluate and re-evaluate, and craft solutions that are at times elegant and at other times muddled — but rarely do they decide swiftly.

So where does that leave us in these difficult times? Good leadership rises to the top. First-rate administrators will instill a sense of confidence and take bold actions. First-rate faculty will offer thoughtful commentary and participate in change. Students will vote with their pocketbooks. And time will tell if all the parties acted wisely.


(Headscratcher photo from Photobucket.com)

Comment [8]

October 12, 2008

Opportunity

When I was a boy there were a couple of truths we were taught we could rely on. One was that New York City water was the best in the world. No one would have thought of buying bottled water unless perhaps it was carbonated, in which case it wasn’t water exactly; it was seltzer. The second was that the New York City public schools were as good as it gets, and they were. The neighborhood schools that didn’t have names but had numbers (I myself was privileged to go to P.S. 254) and the local high school, and the examination high schools like Stuyvesant, Music and Art, and Bronx High School of Science — which we all knew with certainty were the crucibles of genius.

Comment on the water I will leave to others. But I believe the schools were as good as they were because the teachers were extraordinary. Back in those days, women of ambition and capacity had four choices: they could become religious; they could become nurses or librarians; or they could become schoolteachers. I will defer to the feminists on the remarkable transformation that the liberation of women has had in the last 30 years, but I fear that once the door opened to medicine, law, university professorships, and business, women who otherwise would have become schoolteachers didn’t pursue that path.

And, of course, schools in my day were the beneficiaries of the Great Depression. In grade school I had teachers who were lawyers, teachers with Ph.D.‘s, people who were unable to find work in their chosen fields who took the option they had to become civil servants and have the reassurance of a government check on a regular basis.

The economic drama that is being played out all around us these days is depressing and gloomy; beyond that, it is frightening. I find myself searching for a silver lining even as I am reassured by economists and pundits that “this can’t go on forever and history teaches us that what goes down must go up.” Some years ago, during one of the periodic budget crisis that are part of the life of a university president, when I was trying to find a way to economize, my oldest son — then at business school earning an MBA — gave me some advice one evening. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t cut the placement office.” Austerity may be applied to all aspects of the university except for the placement office. He told me that his classmates at business school almost uniformly had matriculated for one reason: to get a job. If during the course of their two years they achieved some competencies, learned some moves, and developed some skills, that was all very well, but if it didn’t result in a job at the end of the process they would be disillusioned and embittered. And they would make you pay.

I witnessed this myself, once, most dramatically, when through a technical oversight — the inadvertent reporting of inaccurate data to U.S. News and World Report, our law school’s ratings plummeted. We explained the error to the students, to no avail. We pointed out that no law school could drop 20 places in the rankings in one year unless it was consumed by fire. We were talking to ourselves. All the students knew was they were graduating from a school that a magazine had deemed inferior to what it had been when they enrolled and that would result in a more challenging environment for them when they went into the marketplace. And they made me pay.

What are the business-school placement officers going to do now that the firms that hired so many of their fresh alumni are no longer there to embrace them? The newly minted MBA looking forward to big bucks with Lehman Brothers has got to be scratching her head and wondering at life’s cruel sense of humor. What can or should universities, who Lord knows have their own problems these days (witness announcements by the presidents of Boston University and Emory University that they are putting building plans and new hires on hold until things sort themselves out), do for their students? Many have been reaching out to their older graduates, people in their 30s and 40s, who suddenly find themselves unemployed, offering the service of, yes, as my son pointed out, the all-important placement office.

But what about those who were just minted? Might it make sense to see an opportunity here to redirect them to alternative careers altogether? Our elementary and secondary schools are still in need of teachers. If a few junior “masters of the universe” were to go into teaching, would that be so bad? There is an opportunity here for Teach for America and our universities to join forces. Our schools of education need to provide incentive plans: loans, grants, and scholarships induce people to think about teaching. Likewise, our schools of public administration and public policy to assist young people in considering careers in public service on the federal, state, and local levels. And also with NGOs and various non-profit alternatives, domestic and international: let’s double the size of the Peace Corps.

We’ve got a presidential debate coming up. Wouldn’t it be nice if the candidates were to talk about issues like this, or variations that no doubt could be crafted by my betters, instead of giving us rehearsed little speeches unresponsive to the questions put to them by the moderator?

I have read that the students at our best colleges and universities are confident that there is a positive future ahead even for those interested in finance. Perhaps they are right. But meanwhile, while the world sorts itself out, let’s get school superintendents, governors, and mayors thinking about how to make lemonade out of lemons. Let’s engage Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee in this conversation.

Comment

October 10, 2008

Under Pressure



I don’t mean to minimize the concerns of adjunct faculty but it occurs to me that almost every time I post about any one of a whole range of subjects the responses are all interpreted from the point of view of a part-time professor. So when I raise a question about the pros and cons of the doctor of arts degrees the response is, “is it good or bad for contingent faculty?” The concerns of contingent faculty, however real, have got to take second place to the survival of the university itself.

This morning’s mail brought a letter from TIAA-CREF commenting on the state of the economic market: it is meant to reassure those of us who have our pensions invested with this entity. Important, of course, and what about university endowments? Not to mention the ability of parents and students to pay tuition.

Robert Brown, the president of Boston University, has called for an immediate hiring freeze and a moratorium on all construction projects. He is the first to do this but surely not the last. My own university, George Washington, has posted its first annual endowment loss in years. Its endowment had grown sharply in the recent past but lost 3 percent. As you can imagine, my former colleagues are concerned.

Meanwhile, the ability of college students to get financial aid is taking a licking. Pell Grants are reported to face a $6-billion shortfall. Obviously, this will affect students and the institutions they hope to attend.

While the ill fortunes of the global economy are reaching all aspects of campus life, the general economic model that propels the traditional university must be rethought. We cannot survive new threats with old techniques.

One hesitates to point out that some of these issues and proposals for what to do about them — how to make the academy more accountable and resource efficient — have been in the wind for a while. But when one suggests that perhaps we ought to think about making changes in the way we do business, we get lectures about “selling out.” For example, the notion of a three-calendar year B.A. degree earlier raised in this space was dismissed as academically unsound. Meanwhile, of course, students who don’t pay much attention to The Chronicle of Higher Education go their own way. Thus, while for many students college continues to be a four-year experience, a growing number are going on to do their undergraduate degrees in three years, even without the planning assistance of their institutions. They save money, get on to work or graduate school a year earlier, and it is reasonable to expect that more will go in this direction. Perhaps the students will lead the institution down the fast track.

Similarly, at Northwestern University the conventional three-year law degree is now being proffered in a compressed five-semester program. Northwestern is the only law school among the nation’s leaders to offer this option. But if it succeeds, as I expect it will, to attract some of the best and most motivated law students, how will others resist following? And, it is probably appropriate to point out that they have packaged all the ABA requirements for the degree into 2/3 of the time by introducing some summer classes and having everybody work a little harder during the rest of the program. Other law schools are being cautious, viewing this experiment with skepticism, but trust me, in a year or two, if they start getting letters from over-the-top college seniors thanking them for their admission but explaining that they prefer to go to Northwestern, the others will come around.

Lest you think that all is gloomy, I can’t help but note the name inflation that seems to be cheerfully spreading across academia. College after college, given almost any excuse whatsoever, is changing its name. The most recent that I’m aware of is Bentley College, which has always had my respect and regard. Located in Waltham, Mass., it’s been a first-rate business school and attracted some genuinely outstanding faculty and very good students. But who can resist gilding the lily? They are about to reinvent themselves as Bentley University. They are not alone in this exercise. I can only wonder what effect it has on reality, or perhaps, perception. Is a rose a rose by whatever name? And will we ever see Dartmouth University?

This morning’s Washington Post has a Blondie cartoon by Dean Young, in which Dagwood seated at his favorite greasy spoon reading the menu says, “Hey these prices have doubled since yesterday.” The counterman replies, “I know, I wanna run a more upscale dinner.” Dagwood says, “Well, there’s more to it than doubling the price of everything on the menu!” The counterman answers, “Oh, I know, I’ll get around to improving the food later on.” And then he concludes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.” And that is surely true.

If you want to see Rome, you have to look at Cambridge, Mass., where Harvard’s endowment earned 8 percent in the last fiscal year, taking them from $34.9-billion to $36.9-billion dollars. The previous year, their return was 23 percent. Lest you think that in the face of such returns benefactors have been deterred, I conclude with the observation that a Harvard Business School graduate gave Harvard $125-million last week to start a bio-engineering institute. And I confess, upon thinking about it, I feel it probably is a virtuous thing to have done. I’ll bet in the years to come we are going to hear great things resulting from this investment that will bring together experts from robotics, biology, and surgery.

So, what’s the take-away? We need to exclude Harvard from our discussion, and probably Yale, but everybody else really, really needs to think about what the state of the economy means to universities. If we want our universities to stay the same, then things have got to change.

Comment [3]

October 7, 2008

Campus Polling Centers

This election season, George Washington University’s bipartisan Battleground Tracking Poll is in full spring, measuring the electorate, issues, and the various responses to specific candidates running for office; it also houses research archives for academic study. In Connecticut, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research is located in Storrs at the University of Connecticut and a few miles further south the Quinnipiac University Polling Center routinely queries people about national and local matters. Moving to the midwest, we can find the Big Ten Battleground Poll, directed by folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying issues of the day. These are but some of the analytical institutes housed at colleges and universities around the country, academically rigorous and bipartisan centers, making important contributions not only to the social sciences but also to the image and visibility of their respective schools.

At Hofstra University, Lawrence C. Levy is the Executive Director of the National Center for Suburban Studies and his organization recently released a fascinating poll about — you guessed it — the suburbs and the election. Levy, a former student of mine at BU, spent an important part of his career at New York’s Newsday, “the voice of Long Island,” where, before joining Hofstra, he most recently served as senior editorial writer, member of the editorial board, and columnist the paper.

Levy is quoted as saying, “Suburban voters have decided not only the victors of the last five presidential contests but control of Congress and state houses.” He goes on to report, “These voters tend to be more ideologically moderate than the typical voter. They aren’t owned by any political party and now there are more voters in suburbia than any where else in the country.

“…[W]hile suburbanites once voted strongly for Republicans, today their preferences are shifting. The change has been driven both by shifting demographics and political preferences. More minorities are moving to suburbia and bringing their Democratic voting tastes with them. And the increasingly conservative image of the Republican Party at the national level has alienated many suburban voters. They tend to be socially liberal, fiscally conservative, and averse to extremism from the right or the left.”

Over the years, much has been written about the changing character of American cities, as the population of the country underwent a profound shift from urban to rural communities. For many years, cities have been considered Democratic havens and the suburbs Republican bastions. According to this new NCSS poll, the stereotypes are not as monolithic as they were previously believed to be.

As we near election day, it will be fascinating to watch the trend lines. First the race question appeared in the media as a deciding factor, followed closely by the gender issue — beginning with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and concentrating now on Sarah Palin’s nomination. Then there was a shift from concern over the war in Iraq as the pivotal question to worry over the sour economic picture. And all along simmering in the background are the swing voters: the battle of the urbanites vs. suburbanites for control of electoral votes.

Comment

Working by Degrees

The education column in the October 2, 2008 Washington Post is worth your attention. It raises some interesting questions about credentials and degrees held by local area school superintendents.

Having myself taught courses in law and education at Boston University and sat in on doctoral committees at GW’s School of Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I know that it is not sound to say that “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Doctorates in education are as useful and lame as the schools and the students that offer them and take them. Like so many other things in life, you get out of them what you put into them.

About a year ago, the Council of Graduate Schools asked me to address their annual gathering in Seattle, and I gave a talk in which I raise the question of whether or not degrees — not only doctorates in education but academic doctorates as well — were crafted to prepare people for the jobs they were actually going to perform after they left school.

Recently, I met a man who had done a Ph.D. in biology at Boston University when I was the dean of arts and sciences (nearly 35 years ago). After we talked about old professor so and so, I asked him what he was up to. He told me he was at a local liberal-arts college where he taught biology. He’d been there ever since he left Boston, had a wonderful life, loved his career, he said, referring to himself as the campus Mr. Chips,

After finishing his dissertation he never published a thing or did much research but apparently kept up with continuing education in his discipline. He’d gotten tenure on the basis of his teaching, colleagueship, and his service. I asked him how long it had taken to get his doctorate. Not surprisingly, he said about seven years. I wondered, under the circumstances, whether he wound have been better served with a doctor of arts degree, something that could have been earned in about 4 years and prepared him for the position he devoted himself to pursuing.

I think we need to take another look at the way we make ready teaching faculty, and also at the doctorate of arts degree that rose and fell a few years ago, all too quickly, in my view. It was a promising idea that needs further consideration now as at least one way we can become more resource attentive in the challenging days that I anticipate lie ahead for all institutions of higher education.

Are there any doctor of arts people out there who can talk about the quality of their experience?

Comment [15]

September 29, 2008

L'Shana Tova

Happy New Year to our readers, Jewish and otherwise. May 5769 be a sweet year for everybody of all faiths and even those of you without a religious persuasion. May it bring peace, health, and fulfillment.

Comment [2]

September 27, 2008

ROTC and Relativity



During the early 1970s, the school I was at experienced a surge in enrollment. The yield that year — percentage of students accepts to those who enrolled — was extremely high, too high, in fact, in relation to the number of dormitory rooms available to house incoming students. Thus, what was great for the university’s bottom line created a problem. Where were we going to put these students? One option that appeared was an off-campus dormitory at a local theological seminary that had the opposite problem: not enough students to fill its quarters. However, when the students on my own campus heard about the off-campus alternative, they “requested” (a.k.a. protested) the administration to create triples out of the resident halls’ doubles and keep everyone around the quad. We obliged, converted student lounges into rooms, put bunk beds in the doubles and the extra students were in residence on site.

Fast forward eight years, two complete academic cycles, and the undergraduates came to the administration and protested (a.k.a requested) that the triples on campus be re-converted into doubles because the overcrowding was creating too many social problems: long lines for bathrooms, too noisy, difficulties in the dining halls, etc. We obliged, opened up the lounges, took out the bunk beds and extra closet units, and reduced occupancy. We found an off-campus dormitory at the local theological seminary that still had unused rooms. No joke. Not a single student from Protest No. 2 had any memory of Protest No. 1. Tabula rasa.

From the September 15, 2008 Columbia Daily Spectator:

“Columbia has not allowed ROTC programs to operate on campus for over 40 years, when the military training groups were banned as a statement of opposition to the Vietnam War. More recently, the University Senate — the highest body of administrative, faculty, and student representatives which makes recommendations to the University’s Board of Trustees — has reaffirmed the ban, citing opposition to the U.S. military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Final decisions on university policy rest with the board of trustees. Students who are interested in ROTC can join programs at other schools.”

Policy decisions are affected by current environment. Columbia’s administration responded to the anti-war fervor on campus with a policy change — no more ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) on campus. They reacted once again, to affirm the no-ROTC policy, when the military’s position on homosexuality and the campus community’s position were in conflict. But the issues surrounding ROTC have changed once again, and now there is a movement to reinstate the military’s presence on campus.

ROTC on non-military campus (distinguished from the service academies) accomplishes several things: educates students who will become officers in the military with supplemental skills beyond traditional academic disciplines, such as leadership, personal and professional codes of conduct, strategic problem solving, military tactics, and others areas. Enrollment in the ROTC program comes with financial assistance and military service obligations.

While I believe that keeping gay people from serving the country is wrong and foolish, unsound and un-American, I found the actions directed against ROTC to be unpersuasive and unproductive. They did not get the job done. Our military is under civilian authority: Policies put in place by the military are subject to approval by a chain of command that goes through the secretary of defense to the commander-in-chief. Each of the branches of the military has a non-military leader, Secretary of the Army, Navy, Air Force, etc. Congress and the administration control the military; or, to put it another way, the military takes orders from “we the people.” And our military needs all the talent it can get.

Yet the ROTC programs became lightening rods for anti-war and equal-rights policies. Students who effectively shut down ROTC programs were denying their fellow students the right of freedom of choice, to be engaged in public service, and here is where the past meets the present.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain recently spoke at a forum on public service held at Columbia University. Both men proclaimed their support for the encouragement of public service by many sectors of the population: college students and beyond, in many fields of endeavor — education, health, social service — in urban and rural communities — full time, part time, for pay, or as volunteers. The tone of the meetings was to invigorate a spirit of service into the national consciousness, a subject many will recall I have addressed in the past.

But in their remarks, both Obama and McCain also voiced support for the reintroduction of ROTC to campus in order to give students the right to select the military as an avenue to engage in public service. They pointed out the irony of holding a public service conference on a campus that has limited the rights of its students to support the military. Obama put it into context when he said, “I recognize that there are students here who have differences in terms of military policy … But the notion that young people here at Columbia … aren’t offered the choice, the option of participating in military service, I think is a mistake.” And McCain pointed out, “the attractiveness of serving in the military, particularly as an officer.”

As an aside, in an odd “compromise,” Columbia and Harvard allow their students to enroll in ROTC on other campuses! Is this the campus equivalent of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy?

The Columbia campus is gearing up for a referendum on the subject, most likely to take place after the presidential election in November. As a Columbia alumnus of the Class of 1959, I vote for the return of ROTC and for fair treatment of all who seek to serve their country without regard for their sexual orientation. Patriots come in all forms.

For more information on public service see:
Time Magazine, “A Sense of Community,” September 22, 2008
Brainstorm “Uncle Sam Needs You,” February 2, 2008


(Photo from sodiersmediacenter at flickr.com)

Comment [14]

September 22, 2008

SAT Exams

It may be time to throw in the towel on the conventional application of the SAT and ACT tests. The report recently released by the National Association of College Admission Counseling is only the most current criticism of the exams (or, more precisely, the application of the scores) that have been excessively relied on in decisions made by college admissions officers. In some ways, the simplest thing to do is to use the exams we’ve got more intelligently, sensitively and with greater restraint. But that has been suggested in the past, to no avail.

The new proposal talks about dropping the use of the test and putting greater emphasis on evidence more likely to determine a student’s capacity for academic success. William R. Fitzsimmons, who in real life is the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, chaired the NACAC study. He points out that inevitably standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT measure socio-economic opportunities, the qualities of secondary schools attended, and a host of things that may not tell us as much as we’d like to know, as equitably as we’d like to know it, about individual students. But, alas, typically there are two frustrating conclusions:

One is we ought to develop “a new test” that would predict college grades better than the ones we’ve got. Easier said than done. I wouldn’t mind seeing the new test before I completely turn my back on the old ones.

Second is the observation that the current exams induce people to spend a lot of time and money trying to game the system, as if exactly the same wouldn’t happen if you had a new test. We have to be honest with ourselves. So long as there are more people who want to go to colleges, or other distinctive institutions, than a place like Harvard can or wants to admit, people are going to try and figure out how to achieve their goals, new test or not.

And Harvard has made that competition even more ferocious by providing ever more generous financial aid opportunities, making attendance more available to an expanded universe. Distributive justice is not something that is going to be achieved simply by doing away with or rewriting the SAT exam. Moreover, we can be confident that whatever new schemes are developed in due course they will be revealed to have shortcomings and another commission will propose yet another innovation.

The commission believes that if the SAT is dropped three results will occur: (a) the “substitute” criteria will make the admissions process more equitable; (b) students might put more attention on their academic training if they were focused less heavily on the SAT exam; and © dropping the SAT’s might also “encourage high schools to broaden and improve curricula.” This presumes that high schools will have the resources for these additional courses offerings, something I am less confident of than is the commission.

It is worth remembering that today’s problem, the SAT exams, were yesterday’s solutions. The exams were created to introduce a form of meritocracy and to fight bias in the admissions arrangements of institutions like Harvard.

Comment [6]

September 21, 2008

Business-School Ethics



We all know the old joke about the city slicker who asks the farmer how much milk does that cow of yours give? And is told, “she don’t give any. You’ve got to go take it away from her.”

That has been my experience over three decades as a university president. Neither milk nor money wander in on their own. If you raise money, it is because you are out there soliciting it. But once, a gentleman visited me proffering a check for $1-million. He said that he wanted to give it to the university in honor of two of its graduates. He had been a business partner of theirs and they’d gone bust. He had the deeper pocket and had ended up having to pay off all of their collective debt. Ten years had passed. Things had turned around for his two associates and one afternoon they showed up saying that they wanted to hold him harmless for their share of what they had lost, with interest.

He took the money, but on reflection he realized that he had long ago written off the loss, and so much time had passed that it was largely a memory. He had prospered and wanted to acknowledge the ethical behavior of his two associates by turning the money over to GW to celebrate their integrity. They had acted without prompting or any reminder from him. He attributed their virtue to the fact that they were both GW graduates. He said they must have learned such in their classes in Foggy Bottom. I was privately dubious; I myself attributed the behavior to their parents, but it didn’t seem sound to contradict him. So I accepted his offer, with gratitude, enhanced it from funds I had raised to be used at the president’s discretion and created a chair in honor of Serge Gambel and Tad Lindner at GW’s Business School, a Chair in Ethics, to which we attracted a distinguished scholar. I believe the appointment added value to the already strong faculty at the university. And I’m in favor of teaching ethics across the curriculum. We all need to be ethical and instruction and role modeling should come whenever an appropriate opportunity presents itself, from pre-K up, from churches, mosques, and synagogues, in almost all circumstances. Surely that is what parents, other adults, and institutions are supposed to provide for their children. It takes a village, as a friend of mine used to say.

I don’t want to seem too tedious about this. So I recall the story about the shopkeeper who gave a customer change from what they thought was a $10 bill on a $2 purchase. After the transaction was completed and the client was departing, the clerk realized that he had been given a $20 bill. Now comes the two-part ethical question. Does he return the $10 difference to the customer or does he put it in his pocket — and later on, the truly hard decision — does he tell his partner? That this tale is so yesterday that many of you will read it and groan makes me wonder if a discussion about ethics and business education can be made fresh. Is there more to say? And yet an effort seems to be underway.

How did the study of business earn the reputation for not caring about ethics?
I ask this because lately I’ve seen press releases about the teaching of ethics presented as a new component for business-school degrees. They emphasize the profound change this brings to the curriculum. When I took the Bar Review course in New York, the instructor said, “There will be an ethics question on the Bar Exam. Whatever the lawyer did, he was wrong. Answer in that way and you can’t be wrong!” He moved on to torts.

An article in the Washington Post reports about my own GW: “The school … is transforming its curriculum with its current first-year graduate students, emphasizing ethical business practices and globalization. Such trends have been growing throughout U.S. business education. But GW administrators say they are taking it further than any other school, not adding a course or a workshop but infusing the entire curriculum with these principles. ‘We really took a huge risk,’ said Murat Tarimcilar, associate dean for graduate programs. “When we say we really would like people who are committed to be ethical leaders, we may be making the applicant pool very small. For many MBA students, the driving factor is the money. But we thought we had a responsibility, as a university, to really work on their character, as well.”

But now its ethics vs. money: Somehow I fail to see how one conflicts with the other. But perhaps that shows naiveté and parochialism. I always had a healthy respect for money. It is neither good nor bad. Value neutral. I think one sanctifies it with its use. Show me a man’s check register and I will tell you his values.

Let’s go back a step. Personal character is developed way before a student gets to graduate school. I believe most students come to college as ethical human beings, honest and respectful members of a community. Yes, it true that schools have their own list of rules — dos and don’ts — for students to follow: Thou must not cheat; thou shall not plagiarize; thou shall respect one’s roommates and classmates; etc. But these are similar to the body of laws all societies have had since Hammurabi or Moses. We understand that occasionally someone — even a Ph.D. — strays from the code of behavior and there are consequences and due process. Likewise, most faculty come to campus as ethical human beings, honest and upstanding colleagues. And similarly, there are rules for them, too, set out in the faculty manual. So start with an ethical student body and an ethical faculty. How does a transformation to the dark side take place? How do these ethical faculty members convert these ethical students into people who do unethical things once they enter the workplace? That there are transgressions in society is no surprise: Read the Bible, Shakespeare, and writers before, after, and in-between.

Come into college ethical, go out a scoundrel: it just doesn’t wash. No, something else is going on. What is it?

Some believe that success in business is achieved with hard work assisted by dubious behavior. Increasingly, people wonder when a company posts strong returns, has it somehow cut corners, turned a blind eye and/or is teetering on the edge of legal propriety. “Behind every great fortune” it is said, “lays a great crime.” Even before the era of the “robber barons,” when business earned a deserved black eye, there have been those pesky skeptics of commercial enterprise.

And all too often, a contemporary example of corporate greed reminds the public of this unhappy history.

For many years, links were developed between principles of ethics and the principles of accounting. If you “pushed” the accounting and/or tax laws to the margin, you were thought to have entered a gray area — the extreme of which would be “cooking the books” and lack of honesty. Others would say that the tax laws (like all laws) are open to interpretation, and innovatively interpreting the laws is exactly what one asks an accountant to do — pay taxes that are due, not a single penny more. And from the accounting, we move to a broader range of business practices — how one conducts oneself with clients, suppliers, agents, partners, colleagues, workers, etc. Like life itself, the “conduct” of business is rich in its complexity. It is not for nothing that law schools offer classes on contracts. A handshake is not generally sufficient. And when it comes to real estate, well that’s a whole other matter.

Today, we have added dimensions beyond accounting and fiduciary practices. The fashionable on campus link ethics with the environment: the greener the company, the more “ethical” it appears. Being concerned about the world’s welfare in general, and one’s neighbors in particular, demonstrates good, and good equates to ethical. Darth Vader is the polluter, dumping harmful matter into water, soil or air.

But the ethics picture has expanded even further as people have become aware of the connections between us all: the treatment of the earth; handling of scarce resources; the interdependence of what we grow / mine / manufacture; how we plant / irrigate / dig / market / sell / use / discard / remake / discard again — all blends into a portrait of ethical behavior that was inconceivable as recently as 25 years ago.

Unless, perhaps, you were in the American labor movement, when issues such as the exploitation of child and women laborers in the U.S. was being addressed.

Ethics aren’t seasonal; they are always in fashion. But emphases do change as society addresses new concerns. We sometimes make trade-offs that we later regret. For example, chemicals such as DDT protect us from insects carrying deadly diseases and reduce death by significant numbers, but at a cost. Some products were introduced to the market prematurely without understanding potential harmful effects. Think asbestos. In an overzealous manner, the fire retardant industry neglected to acknowledge the ramifications of its product, or did it? Are the behaviors negligence, greed, and the lack of ethics, or part of all of the above? Some needs were satisfied while other problems were created. Does this mean that business is a constant cost-benefit analysis: dollars and cents and dollars and sense? Do we see the law of unintended consequences at work?

And what about those companies that don’t make a product, such as the financial-services industry, comprised of entities that grow capital, lend resources to some, hold funds for others and that persuade people that investing today promises a better future tomorrow? The assumption of risk has a price. But how much risk and how big a price? And, for whom? When a Certificate of Deposit earns 13 percent interest the holder is thrilled. When a credit card charges 19 percent interest, the holder is aghast.

Returning now to the business-school curriculum. “Ethical leadership” is a phrase used in the GW press release to describe changes in the M.B.A. degree, another of those compound descriptions that both elaborates and obscures the understanding. We are seeking ways to enrich the curriculum with values, as if they have been missing; now, at last, we hope to send forth a class of business people charged to recognize corruption, abuse of power and insensitivity to human concerns when they see them. And do something!

As a society we have indulged behaviors that have given us extraordinary rewards. America, even in these days of highly troubled financial markets, is an economic engine of profound depth and resiliency, propelled by a business world composed of a diversity of companies that create, produce, market, service, transport, study, fuel and communicate. There are as many differences among industries as similarities. But in the end, for the entire system to work, there needs to be an acknowledgment that if you continually step on your neighbor’s toes, she’s likely to get aggravated: if you push around others, you’re a bully; if you “liberate” what is not yours, you’re a thief; if you ignore a regulation you’re dishonest; if you create a Ponzi scheme, you’re a manipulating fraud; if you strip the earth bare, you’ve robbed the future.

Maybe we need business-school ethics classes. Perhaps we need an entire revamp of human behavior. It cannot be that only the young, Al Gore, and Pete Seeger believe in tomorrow. Do we want to wait for graduate school to raise these issues? At P.S. 254 in Brooklyn, they started in the first grade. They did their best. Nevertheless, some of my classmates ended up in the slammer.

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