Academia: Precedents

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I’ve been going through old piles of materials stored in my campus office that I took out of a former filing cabinet when it was replaced by new much-needed bookshelves.

I wasn’t very careful in organizing them as I took them out and piled them into my office closet, so there have been some pleasant surprises. Some archival material I collected in several visits that I frankly forgot I had, which I have now been working into some writing. Some old photocopied material from courses that I haven’t taught for a while, some preprints sent by friends. Also some baffling layers in my personal archaeological deposits. For some reason very early in my dissertation work I worked through a massive number of Africanist and comparative journal articles on food, food markets and nutrition. I think that’s because I was asking myself how distinctive or different particular kinds of consumer practices were in relationship to different sorts of commodities. I never referred to any of these essays in what I wrote, but I can reconstruct how it clarified my thinking.

I’m also finding old memos and other communications from my administration. I think I threw out a fair number of these after initial reading, but I’m something of a packrat, as historians often are. Along with these I also found some notes from meetings, which I often still take long-hand, though I’ve gone through periods of using tablets, phones, laptops and other devices. Mostly it is the act of taking notes that helps me to remember, so it doesn’t matter that much where the notes end up.

One theme that interests me is the frequency of discussions about whether a decision or policy we were contemplating would set a precedent. Those are almost as common as discussions of whether we should break with precedent and do something new, either because it seems like a good idea or because what we have been doing is dysfunctional.

I’m happy to find evidence of both of those discussions, because I feel across academia that one of the managerial perspectives that has swept through most institutions is that existing precedents are bad, irrelevant or a kind of shared delusion, that tacit knowledge is without value, and that from this point forth, if it’s not written down exhaustively, it’s not real or binding. (And therefore, what gets written is subjected to intense legal and administrative scrutiny, because it is presumed that it is going to be precedent.)

There’s some validity to that perspective. In those old conversations, when we were talking about what was precedent, if you had a group of ten faculty, staff and alumni in the room, you’d likely have ten different claims about existing practice. Those claims mostly would be based on direct personal experience or on direct communications from older faculty and staff with deeper memories, which only helped at a minimum to remind us all that the differences in our disciplines, divisions and seniority meant we were experiencing seriously divergent working realities both in our own institution and across higher education, even before you got to personal perspectives.

I can see also that there were times where particular individuals were inclined to cite “invented traditions” that were purely self-aggrandizing—that they would take a position that they had forcefully introduced in their own institutional situation (often against determined resistance) and convert that into a precedent that was supposedly shared by many others. Especially as a younger faculty member, I had no basis for challenging that kind of aggressive posturing—only with time did I discover that there was more to what some people represented as a tradition in their department or discipline.

My colleagues Ken Sharpe and Betsy Bolton introduced the work of Atul Gawande to a group of us who were meeting about pedagogy over a decade ago, focusing in particular on Gawande’s interventions into institutional medicine around the idea of “checklists”. Gawande helped popularize the idea that every medical procedure should require participants to fill out a checklist attesting to their preparation: had they washed their hands according to an exacting standard, had they checked and double-checked that there was a match between what the patient’s charts said and what they were about to undertake, and so on. Part of what Gawande was pointing to is that “we’ve always done it this way”, certain kinds of embedded attitudes towards process and precedent, not only involved forgetting changes and reforms but also led to preventable errors through a lack of mindfulness.

Equally, I’m kind of amused at all those conversations we had about whether we would be setting a precedent by making a one-time ad hoc decision to do something sensible to handle an immediate issue. The answer is nope, never, or nearly so. An ad hoc decision reacting to a genuine problem that solves the problem is forgotten almost as soon as it is accomplished. Occasionally, that’s a shame, because the ad hoc solution ought to be a precedent, and you wish someone would remember it and do it that way henceforth. If the short-term problem happens often enough, eventually the repetition of the same common-sense resolution sometimes evolves into a policy just through recurrence.

However, now that I’ve mentioned Ken Sharpe, I should mention something else I learned from him and his co-author Barry Schwartz, which is that people who’ve done a particular professional or skilled job for a long time have “practical wisdom” that really matters, a wisdom that contemporary managerial approaches in higher education are prone to override, ignore or scribble over. It’s not quite precedent in that legal-formal sense. It’s more like memory. In those old committees, even when our sense of the relevant history diverged, we could usually find the Venn overlaps easily enough (and they were often quite substantial). This had happened, that had happened, people concluded that we should decide to make a shift to handle it, or that we shouldn’t change because there was some other principle at stake. Or we’d tried a new approach and it had failed badly, so let’s not do that again. The conversations about precedent were often pattern-seeking, looking for recurrences.

Not long ago, I worked with some folks in our student mental-health services office to set up a couple of reading-group sessions on the history of mental-health services in higher education. For me at least, the discover was the surprise (which was then on reflection not so surprising) that some of the issues we struggle with now—the affordability and scale of services, the question of whether 18-22 year olds who go into higher education are experiencing common stresses on their mental health against the wider backdrop of the society, and the issue of whether the coursework or extracurricular activities of most students produce distinctive pressures on their mental health—were there from the beginning. That meant that the issues which are newer (the scale of the problems, the range of the diagnoses, the compliance landscape, the perceived agency of students themselves, etc.) stood out more sharply as well.

There is so much about academia that is premised on the accumulation of knowledge and expertise, both within academic disciplines and in the teaching of students. Treating this moment in time as the first moment for setting precedents, and setting precedents in a way that is aggressively non-consultative, that rejects past experience, and that is highly compartmentalized, doesn’t just seem unwise in the narrow sense of ignoring relevant expertise. When faculty at many institutions complain that the people in charge don’t seem focused on the values of higher education, they’re really talking about the exercise of setting precedent as if it was for the first time. Perhaps without meaning to, the people setting about that work end up saying, “Everything we do here is useless”. If disciplines aren’t teaching from what they know, if teaching isn’t working from considerable expertise and artfulness, if curricula aren’t designed (and constantly adjusted) to mix deep foundations and mutable surfaces, then what is the point? More than at any other moment, that erasure of precedent in order to write precedent anew is where the suspicion among students, families and employers takes hold that the new managers know they are just selling one service—the provision of credentials—where the substance of the service is immaterial. They have it, you have to have it, so sign on the dotted line.

This is, in many ways, what similar managerial approaches have wrought in other professions. I can spot an MBA-designed restaurant in a minute where no effort has been spared to make the concept invulnerable to the actual professional skill of the chefs in the kitchen. All the recipes have been tested and they’re all assembled from pre-made food service supplies, according to a checklist that is not to be varied ever. No tacit knowledge, no variation between the cooks. The auditing firms that run through a checklist with clients and then never audit, the consulting firms that deliver the same product to the same clients with the same slidedecks that pretend that they’re actually listening to and adapting the report, the ER nurse who is momentarily tempted to engage a patient in real human terms but then mechanically goes back into the approved discharge approach.

In this, skeptics of Gawande’s rewriting of procedure may have had a point—that writing down and formalizing procedure as the first and only precedent can be a process that ruthlessly discards what people already know, and worse yet, favors outcomes that are measurable over processes that work, over values that are embedded in what people have learned through long practice. I wish I thought this was just a strategy for taking power away from some and giving it to others in a zero-sum environment, because then it would be rational in terms of self-interest if not in terms of executing an actual mission for the benefit of clients, customers, or communities. I think it’s not even that, most of the time. I think in a lot of cases it’s about the creation of a managerial elite who do not come from the particular institutions they work with, about attempting to graft one body of self-referential experience from outside of a particular habitus onto a foreign host. It is about people who are highly mobile from place to place, situation to situation, who fundamentally distrust what people who have stayed in place know and think. Perhaps even to the point of thinking that people who stay do so only because they’re bad at what they do. A healthy institution needs new people coming into authority who ask “But why do you do it like this?” who don’t settle for “Because we always have.” But it also needs people who are patient enough to listen and trust, and to understand that core values reside in what has been done more than what is being written now for the first time.