For what it's worth, speaking as someone who has written compliance policies (although not for educational institutions), compliance has always been impossible to do without values. There are a small number of rules that you can apply by doing formal operations like math if you're doing things like figuring out your tax obligations or your employee benefits. But no real-world compliance regime (including, to be clear, a tax or employee-benefit regime) can avoid issues about what's fair or reasonable or practical. You can't make decisions about issues like those without deciding what matters to you as the decisionmaker and why. You can somewhat outsource those issues to your lawyer or other compliance advisor (or to your advisor's idea about what an enforcement authority would think, which is usually impossible to separate from what your advisor thinks) but it's not really a good way to do things, and someone still winds up making the value judgments anyway.
This is not to disagree with (what I take to be) the post's argument that you have to take a different approach when you have enforcement authorities who either are not interested in enforcing rules that embody values that matter to you or are interested in enforcing rules that actively contradict values that matter to you.
I mean, I think you can *act* as if values aren't figuring into it, but of course there are at least judgments that are value-driven that do always have a place at the table. Unfortunately, I think they're often not the ones that reference the specific substance of the practices or policies but instead are evaluative critieria that stand outside of and transcend specific cases of compliance and that act as if they are self-explanatory--affordability, practicality, trade-offs, institutional autonomy, sustainability. So, for example, you might look at employee benefits and ask, "What are we legally obliged to do in terms of benefits we must supply, what are we contractually obliged to provide to employees, what can be practically continue to do in terms of benefit providers and third-party services, what can we afford to do within the current operational budget?" Those all have values embedded in them. But putting most of that in the language of compliance (statutory obligations, contractual obligations, marketplace norms) means that it's very hard to find a moment where you can ask, "Do some of these benefits imply that we want to improve the well-being of our employees because that's a good thing in its own right, because we believe in contributing to human flourishing even if it doesn't directly benefit the institution itself?" I don't think the answer to that has to be "yes" (and it might also be that the institution favors human flourishing but doesn't think that comes from specific benefits paid or provided to employees). But I think we ought to be having those conversations because that provides a better foundation for deciding what the institution wants to do rather than what it has to do.
This is so very trenchant. Over the 18-year period I was a university bureaucrat, "compliance, compliance, compliance" became a nearly unimpeachable explanation for any decision, often serving as a mask for what some bureaucrat wanted to do to extend their control over some academic process. I learned early to ask for a review of whatever statute or regulation was being interpreted as the reason for someone's preferred outcome.
I sincerely hope that one outcome of the troubled times we are living will be a revival of the values that made the awkward marriage of the German research university and elite colonial colleges such a wonderful experiment in creating and disseminating knowledge. I fear those values are no longer in the hearts and minds of those who will resist.
For what it's worth, speaking as someone who has written compliance policies (although not for educational institutions), compliance has always been impossible to do without values. There are a small number of rules that you can apply by doing formal operations like math if you're doing things like figuring out your tax obligations or your employee benefits. But no real-world compliance regime (including, to be clear, a tax or employee-benefit regime) can avoid issues about what's fair or reasonable or practical. You can't make decisions about issues like those without deciding what matters to you as the decisionmaker and why. You can somewhat outsource those issues to your lawyer or other compliance advisor (or to your advisor's idea about what an enforcement authority would think, which is usually impossible to separate from what your advisor thinks) but it's not really a good way to do things, and someone still winds up making the value judgments anyway.
This is not to disagree with (what I take to be) the post's argument that you have to take a different approach when you have enforcement authorities who either are not interested in enforcing rules that embody values that matter to you or are interested in enforcing rules that actively contradict values that matter to you.
I mean, I think you can *act* as if values aren't figuring into it, but of course there are at least judgments that are value-driven that do always have a place at the table. Unfortunately, I think they're often not the ones that reference the specific substance of the practices or policies but instead are evaluative critieria that stand outside of and transcend specific cases of compliance and that act as if they are self-explanatory--affordability, practicality, trade-offs, institutional autonomy, sustainability. So, for example, you might look at employee benefits and ask, "What are we legally obliged to do in terms of benefits we must supply, what are we contractually obliged to provide to employees, what can be practically continue to do in terms of benefit providers and third-party services, what can we afford to do within the current operational budget?" Those all have values embedded in them. But putting most of that in the language of compliance (statutory obligations, contractual obligations, marketplace norms) means that it's very hard to find a moment where you can ask, "Do some of these benefits imply that we want to improve the well-being of our employees because that's a good thing in its own right, because we believe in contributing to human flourishing even if it doesn't directly benefit the institution itself?" I don't think the answer to that has to be "yes" (and it might also be that the institution favors human flourishing but doesn't think that comes from specific benefits paid or provided to employees). But I think we ought to be having those conversations because that provides a better foundation for deciding what the institution wants to do rather than what it has to do.
This is so very trenchant. Over the 18-year period I was a university bureaucrat, "compliance, compliance, compliance" became a nearly unimpeachable explanation for any decision, often serving as a mask for what some bureaucrat wanted to do to extend their control over some academic process. I learned early to ask for a review of whatever statute or regulation was being interpreted as the reason for someone's preferred outcome.
I sincerely hope that one outcome of the troubled times we are living will be a revival of the values that made the awkward marriage of the German research university and elite colonial colleges such a wonderful experiment in creating and disseminating knowledge. I fear those values are no longer in the hearts and minds of those who will resist.