Academia: Values or Nothing, Compliance Is Dead

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

For much of the past two decades, critics of the managerial trend in academic administration in the United States have argued that academic institutions were losing sight of the foundational values that ought to inform their policies, rules and tacit understandings and were instead increasingly driven by two other motivations. First, a desire to maximize revenue, protect all assets from liability, and control costs. Though as many have noted, applications of austerity have been remarkably uneven: the people in charge often don’t seem to care much if money flies out the window to pay consultants or if administrative positions get added by the bucketful. Second, the logic of policy-making has often been compliance, either with federal, state and municipal laws or with rules and standards set by accreditation agencies and other associations. (Though again, not always evenly: rules put forward by the American Association of University Professors get ignored or circumvented whereas accreditation bodies have been treated since the George W. Bush administration as if they have statutory power.)

I’ve written many times about some of the bad consequences of the alignment of these two motivational imperatives. Legalistic thinking drives both of them, and that in turn has driven an across-the-board retreat from transparency, clarity and consultation, with consequent rise in mistrust and adversarial relationships between faculty and administrative leadership. A deeper problem, however, is that these ways of thinking about policy have robbed many administrative offices of any meaningful reference to values, to the deeper moral or ethical reasons for adopting a particular approach or procedure.

Sure, every policy and process at most academic institutions has a sort of splash page associated with it that sounds, usually vaguely, like there are values somewhere in the mix. Every carefully-crafted communication from on high will somewhere say something about values, in the most generic and non-committal way. But in the practice of making and enforcing policies, values are at best an afterthought, a way you message a decision, not a structure of reason that produces that decision. Trying to introduce values during a decision-making process, especially to debate or discuss potentially rivalrous or divergent values, is often regarded impatiently, as a distraction, as a kind of weird compulsion or kink that some faculty can’t get away from.

I’ve mentioned one personal experience of this quite a few times in my blogging, because it really stuck with me. I was part of a strategic planning process more than a decade ago where leadership asked us to foreground values as the central focus of the work of planning, rather than to make specific recommendations about concrete actions or choices. In the end, we didn’t really do either—the final report didn’t read to me as articulating values with prescriptive clarity and we did make some specific recommendations for implementation. But even the vague value declarations had absolutely zero authority to direct administrative work from that point onward. I found myself on one committee that dealt with a very specific domain of policy that affected scholarly research and the administrator assigned to that work was pushing an extreme approach that flatly and obviously contradicted one of the major planks of the just-adopted strategic plan. When I pointed that out in the committee, the administrator said, “Those values don’t apply to me or the work I do. What I do is about compliance, and the rules we have to comply with are set by the federal government. Our values don’t enter into it.” (It also didn’t change anything when I pointed out that the rules we were complying with originated from scholarly work and that the administrator was very seriously misinterpreting those rules even in terms of explicit guidance from federal regulators.)

This week, that entire way of thinking just got blown to hell. Compliance at this point either means change almost everything about your administrative polices and procedures or it means find some values that drive what you do and really, genuinely make your decisions from those values.

In some states, I fully expect that academic administrations both public and private are going to rapidly shift to obedient compliance with the new rules coming from Washington and the obedient state governments that are going to goosestep right behind those rules. Which will mean that all that insincere boilerplate on the webpages and in the official communications is going to be replaced by vague declarations of some other set of under-enunciated values while a lot of offices and administrators disappear and others manifest. From DEI vice-presidents to vice-presidents in charge of Mandatory Viewpoint Inclusion, from associate provosts to loyalty-oath supervisors.

In many other cases, however, I think public and private institutions are going to slow-roll any shifts in their policies and in the process they’re going to have to abandon compliance as the predominant logic of policy-making. That is not just a change for administrations. It’s also a necessary, maybe even overdue, change in how campus progressives and liberals (students, faculty and staff) think about their institutions. The long intertwining of left-liberal goals and regulatory activity (whether governmental regulations or institutional rules) has made most of us unaccustomed to articulating our motivating values in clear and transparent ways and in trying to tie those values to our voluntary practices and our persuasively-articulated expectations for others. We’ve all fallen into the habit of demanding a policy for this and a policy for that, of insisting that we restrain and restrict, that we require and sanction.

But as administrations have rested on compliance most, they will feel the shock of its loss most intensely. The articulation of values has become unfamiliar for some of us, but for many administrators, it has wholly atrophied into oblivion except as a strategy for placating or as a component of crisis communication.

If your university has a Title IX office, it’s going to need to be an office that acts on complaints of sexual misconduct whether or not there is a Department of Education with an Office of Civil Rights. Potentially even whether there is a Title IX. You will need an office that acts against sexual misconduct that’s an abiding commitment about values. Because it’s the right thing to do. If you have had policies aimed at equal opportunity, if you have had policies to support students who matriculate with different preparations and life experiences at the time of admission, if you have policies driving the curriculum towards representing new fields of knowledge, if you have had policies that require students to learn how to write or to acquire quantitative skills, if you have had policies governing conflict-of-interest, if you have policies governing confidentiality or transparency, if you have had policies mandating accommodations and accessibility, you will need to instead say, “We do these things because they are the right thing to do”, not because you are complying with regulations and laws.

You will need that especially because you may soon face demands that you abandon all of those policies in order to comply with vague, contradictory or crudely ideological directives coming from all levels of government. You may decide that obeying the law is also the right thing to do as well as the necessary thing, but that’s been the problem with the kind of unthoughtful way many administrations use compliance as the driver of their actions. What has hidden inside many compliance regimes is the misuse of compliance to justify voluntary, values-driven, sometimes blatantly ideological interpretations of legal and regulatory requirements and to shield those decisions from any questioning. Most of what universities and colleges have had to comply with has left them a lot of room for discretion, which many administrators have chosen to pretend doesn’t exist so that they don’t have to justify what they are doing. That’s why so many of them are unpracticed in articulating values.

But if you want to keep doing any of the things you’re doing now, you’d better practice up quickly, because now you’re going to need every ounce of discretionary room left to you and a community behind you that deeply and abidingly believes in what you’re doing. You’re going to need values that really reside in you, in everyone within the institution, in the decision-making processes you follow, values that persist and resist. Compliance has never been the right reason to do the right thing, but it’s about to become the road to doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

Image credit: "When your compliance efforts haven't fully s쳮ded yet" by Lars Plougmann is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.