A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a longtime college president found himself suspended and locked out of his office, obviously about to be fired after more than a year of controversy over the hiring and firing of a number of top administrators, including a few who blew the whistle on clear violations of academic standards (such as allowing theater classes to substitute for business classes). ((I know that some might argue that high finance is very close to stagecraft, but mixing up the classes is going too far.)) A number of observers concluded that the soon-to-be-ex-president of Edison State College in Florida was the autovictim of hubris, and that is almost certainly the case, but there is something else going on: college and university administrators have to balance their “inside” and “outside” roles, and longtime leaders can often neglect their on-campus responsibilities in spending time off campus.
My guess is that Kenneth Walker (Edison State College’s almost-ex) had become too comfortable in the political, local-connection part of his job and did not pay nearly enough attention to the details of administering a community college, let alone one that had recently been promoted to state-college status and the additional burdens of running four-year programs side by side with associate degrees and vocational programs. So he hired a former K-12 superintendent, who promptly screwed up the job, and ignored and then tried to fire the central administrator who seemed the most competent and had the best working relationship with faculty.
Managing the inside-outside split is an inherent stretch. Despite appearances, a large educational enterprise is not a Klein bottle. ((A Klein bottle is the 3-D object that is like a Moebius strip, in the Klein bottle case having no inside or outside.)) It is hard enough mastering the gap between faculty, student affairs, physical plant, and the business back-end of a campus. The skills required to run a college or university’s academic programs are at least aligned with tracking revenues and spending, paying bills, and staying legal. Going beyond that to fundraising and maintaining political connections is generally seen as part of the job, and good administrators have skills on both sides: if things work out, engaging in the connections to raise private or public funding is like running a very small, informal tutorial on what your college or university is doing, so thinking of it is as education is at least possible. But it’s not identical, and in a practical sense it requires commitment of time and logistics.
… and therein lies the dilemma. If I sometimes moan as a faculty member about the limits of a 24-hour day, and some of my colleagues and friends seem to be spending as much time in travel to and from academic meetings and research sites, I’m not flying or driving all over the universe meeting with alumni, municipal leaders, legislators, and others, many of whom are trying to take the pulse of an institution through me, and then turning around to figure out what on-campus issues I need to pay immediate attention to. I’ve had to do the split-level gig in different ways with union activism, but it’s easier to compartmentalize roles there, and a faculty member always gets credit for understanding big-picture issues. ((There is the equivalent to the inside-outside problem when a tenure-track professor tries to do too much and ignores essential features of a job, but most full-time faculty can acquire the broader institutional knowledge on a leisurely pace, unlike the “hi, here’s this bundle of stuff you’re responsible for” sometimes handed to administrators.))
At public institutions with local ties, part of what is behind many on-campus controversies is a top administrator who lavished time on the outside role and ignored her or his inside, on-campus responsibilities, leaving faculty, staff, or students (or all of them) disgusted with what they see as incompetence while local politicians and community leaders see someone who understands the campus-community relationship. If you are a county commissioner, a local business leader, or a state legislator who has become very close to President X, your view or President X may be very different from the student-affairs administrator who needs several questions answered, faculty whom President X has ignored, the accreditation paperwork that’s languishing, or student government leaders who never see President X. And that’s because President X has been spending time on her or his relationship with you, ignoring the on-campus part of the job. The reality is that President X may need to leave for the college-community relationship to be what her or his lip service has claimed is the ideal… because the reality of that has to exist on campus, not just in the head of President X.
That is why Kenneth Walker eventually had to leave Edison State College. His leaving won’t solve all its problems, but his leadership was a DAW, dead administration walking. It took a while (and some new trustees) for the college’s governing board to see that: his relationship with the board and local community in southwest Florida was probably part of the problem.
The problems you describe pertain to sclerotic bureaucracies that feed on themselves in ways similar to one-sided Klein bottles, and end up believing in their self-created realities.
Several years ago I warned the legislature about these kinds of problems when they decided to wave the magic wand over FL’s community colleges, turning pumpkins into carriages. James Wattenbarger, the grandfather of our community college system was adamantly opposed to this, and for good reason, as it turns out.
FL State Colleges are not required to be accredited (this was repealed), and the lack of oversight by the state accounts for at least some of Walker’s administrative drift. But any president that ignores accreditation the way that he did, even though it is a meaningless charade, lacks fundamental legitimacy. Here is another paradox not unlike that of the Klein bottle — the topological separation of space is both illusory and real, simultaneously.
But you would be surprised at how little oversight — particularly when it comes to accreditation — Tallahassee exercises over local institutions such as Edison State. Frankly, Tallahassee deserves just what it got in this case, but taypayers deserve far more in terms of quality assurance.
Accreditation is only a charade until you lose it. What struck me in that article, apart from bogus academic decisions, was that his pay cut was bigger than the total salary of most Presidents of similar institutions. What did this guy make?
I saw $837,000 when I googled it. Somewhere there is a database link to all of the college presidents’ pay levels.
Accreditation, I think, is a hoax. The question is, what will replace it — IF federal subsidies for higher ed don’t end any time soon.