College Deans Need Better Training
What a really, really dumb op-ed reveals about (some) college administrators.
Earlier this month Ben Krauss wrote about the college presidency crisis over at Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias’ Substack. Among Krauss’ suggestions was that college presidents offload some of their responsibilities to their immediate reports:
In his opinion piece, Drezner says that the testimony of the university presidents before Congress was “overly lawyered” in part because of all the competing interest groups that are in the president’s ear. The competing interest groups extend from all the different responsibilities that a president must answer for.
Providing clear campus leadership on these issues matters. Ensuring the university continues to be financially viable matters. However, maybe presidents shouldn’t have to answer for the academic success of the school or the quality [of] student life. Those issues are, of course, important, but maybe the provost and other deans can act as the highest executive for those matters.
The unstated premise of Krauss’ proposal is that deans and provosts and department chairs can handle this division of labor and administer campus life. I wonder, however, if that premise is entirely accurate.
While college presidents are not always full-time academics, almost all provosts, deans and chairs are professors promoted up the food chain. And the dirty secret of being a professor is that we are trained in our discipline and the methodologies needed to perform our research and pretty much nothing else. Sure, we pick up teaching skills through osmosis. Some of us might learn how to write for a lay audience. How to manage, to lead, to delegate? The polite way to describe how this happens is learning-by-doing. The more blunt way to put it is that students, professors, and staff must hope that academia’s middle management cares enough to put in the work and learn on their own.
If you want some evidence that sometimes these administrators have a lot of learning to do, let me point you all to Lawrence Bobo’s op-ed in the Harvard Crimson from this past weekend. Bobo is Harvard University’s Dean of Social Science as well as the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences. His academic bona fides are rock solid, so it is no surprise that he has been promoted to administration. His op-ed, however, was entitled, “Faculty Speech Must Have Limits,” and suggests Bobo has a lot of learning to do before he demonstrates that he is up to the task of leading a university:
Having witnessed the appallingly rough manner in which prominent affiliates, including one former University president, publicly denounced Harvard’s students and present leadership, this first question must be answered: Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?
Yes it is and yes it does.
Vigorous debate is to be expected and encouraged at any University interested in promoting freedom of expression. But here is the rub: As the events of the past year evidence, sharply critical speech from faculty, prominent ones especially, can attract outside attention that directly impedes the University’s function.
A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.
If you read the whole thing, what is clear is that Bobo fears the ability of academics with outsized public profiles — “figures such as Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore, or Steven A. Pinker” — to use their platforms to call outside attention to university policies they dislike, or to call on students to resist such policies.
To be honest, it is difficult to believe that Bobo wrote this with a straight face. His sentiments flatly contradict how universities and professors have thought about academic freedom for, well, decades. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Princeton professor of politics Keith Whittington needed only three paragraphs to obliterate Bobo’s argument:
Bobo’s views were conventional wisdom among university officials and trustees in 1900. They are shocking in 2024. Shocking, but unfortunately no longer surprising. The Harvard dean’s arguments resonate with a growing movement of those who wish to muzzle the faculty. Professors are to be free to speak, so long as they do not say anything that might disturb the powers that be. Those in power may not want the faculty to march to the same tune, but they do all like giving the faculty their marching orders and expecting them not to step out of line.
The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, issued jointly by the American Association of University Professors and what was then called the Association of American Colleges, established the now widely adopted rules regarding faculty speech. It specifies that when professors “speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.” The statement does suggest that professors have some “special obligations” when speaking in public, though the AAUP has long urged that those be treated as suggestive rather than obligatory. Even so, the statement merely urged professors to “be accurate” and “exercise appropriate restraint.” They “should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances,” and thus they should avoid embarrassing themselves in public by being rude or ignorant. But there was no suggestion that they should avoid airing the university’s dirty laundry.
Harvard’s own free-expression policy, first adopted in the Vietnam era, is if anything even more emphatic about the need for officials to tolerate dissent and critique. It notes that “reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part” in the university’s existence and that all members of the university community have the right to “advocate and publicize opinion by print, sign, and voice.” Dissenters are not to obstruct “the essential processes of the university” or interfere “with the ability of members of the university to perform their normal activities,” but they are free to “press for action” and “constructive change” by organizing, advocating, and persuading. Bobo’s ideas about where the limits of faculty speech are to be found are plainly at odds with both AAUP principles and common university policies, not to mention First Amendment principles that would bind officials at state universities.
Former Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier makes similar points in the Atlantic:
Bobo didn’t identify the nature of the sanctions he had in mind. But any sanction for the speech he referenced would be a frontal assault on academic freedom. The speech he proposed to target doesn’t trigger any of the well-recognized exceptions to free-speech protection, such as extortion, bribery, libel, and sexual harassment; violation of time, place, and manner restrictions; and dereliction of professional duties. That a leader of Harvard would sanction a faculty member—with or without a large platform—for criticizing the actions of other members of the Harvard community or the university itself is outrageous. That would be true even if a faculty member really did speak with the intent to encourage what Bobo identified as “external actors”—media, alumni, donors, and government—to “intervene” in Harvard affairs….
So, how strong are the cases Bobo made for restricting faculty speech? His first category—speech publicly critical of the university by a prominent member of the faculty—should be fully protected, never sanctioned or threatened with sanctions. He provided no cogent argument to the contrary consistent with the core principles of academic freedom. His second category—sanctioning a faculty member for encouraging students to violate campus rules—involves conduct that it seems no one has actually documented. Regrettably, though, the essay is likely both to chill faculty speech and to suppress appropriate advisory interactions between faculty and students, not least because Bobo failed to stipulate that the views were his own and not a statement of policy for the division he administers.
To take an optimistic view, the current moment seems to have stimulated a valuable reaffirmation of the crucial importance of protecting campus speech and academic freedom. But Bobo’s essay is a reminder that there is much work still to be done, and that the price of academic freedom is eternal vigilance.
To repeat a theme: Bobo’s op-ed is so badly reasoned that it is difficult to reconcile it with his scholarship.
I can think of two possible reasons that might be behind Bobo’s op-ed. The first is banal but revealing: by publishing this in the Harvard Crimson, maybe Bobo believed that he was keeping his argument limited to a Harvard audience. But this has not been true for well over a decade now. College papers are fertile ground for really stupid arguments that the national press can use to highlight how ivory tower residents are really out of touch. If this is what Bobo believed then the reaction to this op-ed will set him straight.
The other possibility is that, as an administrator, Bobo resents the ability of his subordinates to take actions outside his chain of command if they want to foment change. And that is understandable! As I noted last December:
Professors are a bunch of know-it-alls who never speak for five minutes when fifty will do. Our comparative advantage in the university system is that we complain longer and stronger than everyone else about the most picayune shit imaginable. We demand to be the primary governors of our institutions. At the same time, compared to the students most of us possess only a marginally better understanding of how our institutions are run. Most professors believe that they can do most things better than the administrators in their university, and most of them are quite blinkered in this belief. Can you imagine how awful it must be for a president, provost, or dean to ride herd on us? We are complete assholes!
If Bobo was a corporate executive, or a government official, cracking down on going public strategies would make perfect sense. But this is not how universities work, and Bobo should know this already.
University administration is a difficult task for even the best academics. To inculcate future university leaders, however, the folks at Bobo’s level are in desperate need of more robust leadership training. They need to know the best techniques of managing difficult people that by and large cannot be fired. They need to better understand how to manage the myriad cantankerous stakeholders that comprise a university. They need to learn to think deeper thoughts before publishing galactically stupid op-eds.
Until this training gets better, we are going to continue to see really smart academics wind up being really dumb university administrators.
Bobo got it exactly backwards. It’s the senior administrators who need to pipe down, and the senior faculty who need to speak out. Bobo’s implied threats though, will ensure that all but the very most secure, and I mean way more secure than simply having tenure, will not speak out except in support of buffoons like Bobo.
One of the things going on in modern academia is an overt attempt to change facts on the ground with regard to power dynamics. Deans (provosts too) have always needed the senior faculty to some degree in no small part because the higher up the ladder a faculty member is, the less power those administrators have over them. A dean can basically tell a lecturer or an adjunct what to do. junior faculty are wise to listen to their deans and take their requests/demands seriously, though even by that point, there might be tenured faculty and especially senior faculty members willing to run interference. By the time someone is tenured, and in particular by the time someone is a full professor, the dean and provost become akin to what some political scientists say about the American president: That their power is basically the power to persuade. A dean can tell a full professor to do something, point blank. But in all but the most narrow cases, the full professor can say "I'm not doing that; good luck." Because the implicit follow-up is "or what?"
But administration across the country is trying to change that. Now, whether they can at a place like Harvard is very much up for debate. If Jill Lepore asks her dean, "or what?" there is likely to be a whole lot of stammering and walking back from that dean. But increasingly at state universities, there can be real consequences for things that used to be up to faculty. I know as well as anyone that many of us can be difficult. But these efforts to ride herd are usually about wanting to apply authoritarian structure in the face of ANY opposition, not just the most (and frankly relatively few) brazen cases that most of us would say "yeah, that's a problem."