The Myth of Administrative Capability and "Hard Choices"

I ran across this story in today's higher education press, which caught my eye:

Female provost is accused of repeatedly touching her male colleagues

I was initially intrigued since this turns the usual sexual-harassment dynamic on its head. We are apparently progressive enough now that it's just as OK for women to harass men as it is for men to harass women (which is to say, not).

Actually, that turns out to be the least interesting part of the story. Slightly more interesting is that this particular administrator, hired to be provost at Montana State University-Northern, had left her previous position under a cloud after stirring up trouble there. That, too, is not much of a surprise although it's a sad story. Senior-level search processes seem incapable of figuring out that the reason why a given candidate is on the market may also be a reason why you don't want to hire them. I once worked for a provost hired after having reportedly been ousted from a previous position (and under circumstances that were, at the least, obviously suspicious). It didn't go well.

So I could turn this into an appeal for universities to do their darned homework on senior candidates and stop hiring other people's problems. But by itself that, too, would be old news.

What really interested me in the story linked above was not that MSU-Northern had hired a bad apple, which they probably shouldn't have. It's that both the provost's lawyer and (more importantly) the university's senior administration defended their hiring decision on the grounds that really good administrators often piss people off. Here are a couple of good quotes from the article:

Kevin McRae, a spokesman for the Montana State University system, said it’s not unusual to hire administrators who have “distinguished themselves with tough decision-making in the past."
“Through the advent of Google, just about any time a recruitment is done, people can come to us with controversies,” McRae said.

Templeton’s lawyer said provosts make hard choices and people naturally don’t like someone who comes in and makes hard decisions.

I've heard this "tough decision-maker" defense before. It is, of course, patent nonsense: there is no necessary correlation between having to make sometimes difficult trade-off decisions and alienating people. What matters is how the decisions are made and what the relationship is between those making those decisions and those being affected by them. Genuinely good administrators do this all the time - they make tough calls in an inclusive and transparent way, and although people sometimes don't like the outcome they don't turn on the administrator who led the process.

I call this the "hard-ass school of administration". It's a theory propounded by people who don't actually have any political or diplomatic skills, or any desire to share control with others, as an excuse for bad behavior. Or, as in this case, it's often brought up to justify past bad decisions, a sort of CYA exercise. The statement that since "the advent of Google" everyone is dogged by controversy is ridiculous on its face.

Tragedies occur when universities only find out about these power-hungry tendencies after the hire is made. If you're on a campus doing a senior administrative search, demand transparency and accountability. Research the candidates thoroughly. Be fair about it - I have colleagues whose past is deemed "controversial" even though a thorough examination shows they did nothing wrong. Don't jump to conclusions either way - research, and research, and research, until you get as close to the truth as you can. And don't take the "tough decision-maker" argument at face value.

In other words, we should apply the same diligence to our administrative search processes that we do to our academic careers. Shame that there are universities that can't seem to make that connection.