The deeply upsetting news that Temple University’s interim president JoAnne Epps died on stage during a ceremony reverberated all around American academia this week. For academics in the Philadelphia area, perhaps even more so, because many of them knew and respected her and also hoped that she’d be able to help position Temple, her longtime professional home, for a successful rebound from its recent difficulties. She had planned to retire and only reluctantly agreed to step into this role while Temple’s board searched for a new long-term leader.
After hearing the news, I went to re-read an article from earlier this month about Temple’s problems in Philadelphia Magazine. It has an extra poignancy now, at one point noting that Epps saw her main work in the interim role in terms of healing wounds not just from the recent presidency of Jason Wingard but perhaps also in the longer-term relationships between Temple’s board, its administrative leaders, its faculty, its graduate students, and the surrounding community. Nobody was better positioned to do that because of the depth of her relationships in all those groups and her knowledge of the institution.
David Murrell’s article is a genuinely excellent look at Temple’s recent past. I’ve talked once or twice before about my low opinion from my relatively distant perch of Jason Wingard’s approach: I think he embodied almost every bad idea and trend in higher ed leadership. I appreciate the courage of the current board chair, Mitchell Morgan, in speaking at length with Murrell (after first declining to do so) but I don’t really buy the assertion that Temple’s board was surprised when Wingard’s inaugural address laid out most of those bad ideas. I unfortunately feel certain that some other board is going to hire him in the near future because of those bad ideas (unless they can get Gordon Gee). They’re the kind of bad ideas that flourish in big investment firms and fester in business schools like Wharton and Stanford.
One of the bad ideas that Wingard didn’t underscore in his address but that did characterize his presidency is the notion that relationships are not just unnecessary but an impediment to strong leadership. This managerial nostrum has been making the rounds for a while in higher ed (and the corporate world): you can view a substantial version of it in one of the scenes in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary At Berkeley, where an administrative leader proudly talks about how he got rid of relationships in the part of the university he managed. Relationships, he concludes, are just about maintenance of the status quo. You can’t make changes—you can’t disrupt—if your authority depends on relationships, he asserts. “They’re the piece we can’t control.” Perhaps worse, you’re dependent on the people you have relationships with. Everything you accomplish is tied up in those relationships. If someone leaves, it all falls apart. So what he’s done, he explains, is shift towards rules. Procedures. Things written down. Processes. Formalisms. When he moves on, it will all stand intact, a managerial machine. (Even Robert Birgeneau, the then-Chancellor at Berkeley, looks alternatively bemused and annoyed at his underling’s disdain for relationships and his managerial enthusiasm for sanitizing all procedures to clean out all the relationships.)
That idea hasn’t just been confined to Berkeley, at any rate. You find versions of this doctrine all over the place in higher ed management, sometimes couched in softer or more evasive terms. It threads through a fair amount of DEI management in the academy, for example: relationships are sometimes seen as synonymous with fit, with old-boy networks, a sign of a closed culture that is preserving some form of discriminatory exclusion.
There’s actually something to that point. Relationships that precede the entry of a new person into an institution, a department, a project, can be exclusionary, either be design or by just by inertia. Relationships do tend towards the maintenance of status quo sociality. Relationships are opaque by their nature: hard to read if you’re not inside them, and frankly often hard to read even if you are. All of us have worked with colleagues that we thought we were on solid ground with only to have the rug yanked out from under us, and at the same time discovered we had common purpose with people we didn’t even know until some happenchance revealed an alignment.
But it’s a mistake to take relationships as a whole as synonymous with the problems that some forms of relationships can pose. You could do it as a Goofus and Gallant chart:
Goofus:
Using relationships to gate off resources or rewards that are supposed to be equally available to everyone.
Using relationships to protect people from the consequences of misconduct and to conceal the real reasons why decisions were made.
Using relationships to freeze someone out of a consultative process that is vitally important to their interests or needs.
Using relationships to coordinate bullying, isolating or mistreating a colleague.
Gallant:
Using relationships to get an honest, human, fully situated reading of a possible decision or situation.
Using relationships to understand what professional work or training really means to people and to understand what they really need or want in their work.
Using relationships to explore and express real values and underlying commitments, as opposing to writing empty mission statements that have nothing to do with what people actually do or believe in.
Using relationships to create meaning, direct attention, and endure difficult and challenging moments, to make real community and genuine solidarity because that is a value in and of itself.
That humanity, those relationships, are what Epps brought to her work and what she was poised to underline for Temple’s board as as a priority as they thought about what to do next. I have to hope that this will still be her legacy for her colleagues, her institution, and the leadership to come.
I don’t really care in a sense whether relationships are the right managerial technique. On some level, to imagine that they need that kind of instrumental justification is already to be on the Goofus side of leadership. I am sure that substituting formal proceduralism for relationships is neither reparative nor restorative, that leadership which cultivates its own remoteness leads poorly. That leaves everyone in a worse situation when it’s gone: it does not stand as a well-oiled machine of dispassionate justice when its operator moves on, but as a prison, or a Colossal wreck, boundless and bare.
Leadership that disdains relationships typically disdains the idea (if they have considered it all) that there is such a thing as tacit knowledge within an institution, and that it matters. "Rationalism".
My son is at Temple, so this is of interest, and deeply upsetting.