One reason that Lawrence Bobo’s Harvard Crimson editorial really set me off is that he was flirting around the edges of policies that hold that when a faculty member causes embarrassment to their institution through public criticism, it ought to be possible to fire them, whether or not their criticism has any validity to it.
That’s become a standard justification for firing people in corporate America—sometimes because they have been doing their job just as they should be doing it but what they’ve said or reported irks the upper management, as in the case of Timnit Gebru and Google. Sometimes it’s a person whose behavior on social media or in public culture has been deemed embarrassing or bad for the brand. (I think culture warriors on the left made a big mistake by pressuring for that outcome in many instances, if for no other reason than it opened up a new tactical space for the right in response.)
Sometimes it’s simply because a good, conscientious and productive employee made the mistake of offering constructive feedback or making a reasonable request in the hearing of the CEO or a vice-president. Off with their head! That’s not what we meant by “feedback”.
Most of that is a bad outcome for corporations. It’s a bad outcome for non-profit community groups or other civic organizations, too. In the anatomy of any organizational disaster, you almost always find people who tried to get the higher-ups to see the dangers and were ignored first and then were forced out afterwards.
So it’s the same thing for universities, only doubly so, in the sense that faculty are not just doing the work at the heart of the institution but are often playing a pretty big role in deciding what that work is and how it is to be done. They are going to see a big problem coming down the pike before anybody else does.
This isn’t just about good management in that overall sense. There’s also something ugly at a deep level in any situation about someone with power who cannot stand to hear the least bit of criticism, whether we’re talking about a school bus driver freaking out at fifth graders or the leader of a country. I think it’s the most basic diagnostic I can think of for “this leader is going to fail and is going to hurt people for as long as they’re in charge”.
You are not going to see a more obvious instance of that kind of failure than the case of Ted Roberts, a history instructor at Tarleton State University. The president at Tarleton State was on a “listening tour” and Roberts, a Marine and Army vet who had taught there for more than a decade and was highly regarded by colleagues and students, mentioned that a recent increase in parking fees was causing serious hardship for administrative assistants, facilities personnel and other staff at the university. This apparently constituted “intolerable” behavior that led to Roberts not being renewed. Intolerable because the president was under the impression that the listening tour would not include any complaints or criticism.
One reason among many to get frustrated by the way that the US press focuses on a handful of prominent elite universities and colleges and treats them like bellweathers for all of higher education is that these kinds of pissant administrative leaders at tertiary publics and more obscure private institutions pull this kind of petty stuff and frequently nobody notices or cares. Every once in a while the higher ed press picks up on the especially egregious cases, but not the background noise of egomania. (Not the least because in the end, the higher ed press is an industry publication, and you play to the CEOs first in industry publications.)
The thing is that the numbers of highly qualified and professionally capable faculty nationwide means that almost any university or college can build an excellent faculty, though there are a few disciplines where it may be a struggle to compete with private non-academic employers. I also think that nationwide you can hire from a strong pool of qualified professionals in a number of key staff positions that require some form of specialized administrative expertise. But upper leadership? I think there’s a big gap there. There’s a lot of little people acting like big shots, facing almost no danger of a spotlight on their conduct, even though their institutions may be just as important to their communities as Harvard is to Cambridge. The excuses and the deflections made by the lower ranks of the administration are the same as anywhere else, but there isn’t the sense that a valuable kind of professional—and institutional—dignity is at risk.
So dumb policies get made, good employees get discarded, students get hurt, communities lose out, but at least the wee little man or woman in charge doesn’t have to hear a peep out of place.
You may not be surprised to know that I first observed this behavior in Georgia. I don't consider it misguided. It's a deliberate exercise of power for the worst of all reasons: Because they can.