Educating for Values (Can't Get Away from It)

And speaking of character. And educating people to have sound values and to make informed decisions about values. And the importance of telling the truth and not trying to deceive your constituencies by means of smokescreens of half-truths and downright untruths:

More bad news from the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) this week. This is especially bad news for colleges and universities that tout themselves as highly successful because their ratings have risen in the ranking of colleges in U.S. News & World Report. As I’ve noted in previous postings about UCA, at the very same time it was reporting record jumps in income and students (reports—self-submitted—that are key to claiming a higher rating in U.S. News & World Report), it earned negative scrutiny around the nation due to some serious lapses in ethical judgment on the part of its president Lu Hardin, who has now resigned.

The story breaking this week is that UCA’s financial situation is considerably worse than recent reports had led the public to believe (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/09/ucas_money_woes.aspx#comments). Anticipating a shortfall, the school has been forced to reduce scholarship expenditures by some $3.5 million, as well as to cut operating expenses. The school is now faced with paying out $1 million to Mr. Hardin as part of his severance package.

Again, my primary concern with this story has to do with what seems to me to the very heart and soul of American higher education, in the social contract it has made with the nation: that is, teaching values. And doing so by modeling values. Beginning with the top levels of a college or university.

If, when, boards do not hold presidents accountable to model impeccable values, if boards themselves elide over values questions in evaluating presidents, it is no wonder that students do not graduate with strong skills to make sound values judgments. We simply have to do a better job of focusing on character formation in all of our educational institutions, from primary school to graduate school. And to do so, we need to leave behind once and for all the numbers nonsense.

It’s values that are important, not dollars generated (or dollars we claim we’ve generated). Producing graduates who have strong values and the ability to make value judgments in professional and public life. And modeling those values from the top down, within our educational institutions. So that students know that values truly are paramount, and not just window-dressing as we prepare them to do jobs.

Update of Update: UCA President Resigns

Update of update: University of Central Arkansas president Lu Hardin did resign yesterday (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/its_official_hardin_resigns.aspx#comments, www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08 hardin_resigns_harding_correct.aspx#comments).

As one might have predicted, the UCA board of trustees presented the resignation as something other than a forced resignation of a president who had demonstrated patent lack of integrity: the board chair’s announcement speaks of Mr. Hardin’s health needs, and thanks him for the fine work he’s done for the university. The chair also announced initially that Mr. Hardin would be on sabbatical for a year, then retracted that term, and has now noted that the term does apply.

The buy-out is, as expected, exceedingly generous. Details are in the articles to which I link above. From an educator’s perspective: one cannot help wondering what underpaid, hard-working faculty feel about the plums thrown the way of this values-challenged president, as he resigns.

And about the board’s malfeasance . . . . The board’s lack of courage and immediate sensitivity to the lapse of in value-judgment is evident in the length of time it took the board to respond to this issue, and to the growing public hue and cry for action. The board’s lack of professional acumen (a lack often evident among trustees of universities in many places) seems to me to be evident in the back and forth about whether Mr. Hardin had received a sabbatical.

A UCA insider posting on the Arkansas Times blog reports that that a new board of trustees is now a “done deal,” and that soundings for new board members have been underway for weeks—though “it will all be done and leaked slowly and ‘conservatively’ so as not to give the impression of panicky desperation -- which is what it is.”

And, see, again, this is what I don’t get (though I know full well most university boards act this way). These are values issues. These are leadership issues.

What do board members think they are saying to students about values and leadership when they move “slowly” and “conservatively” to address shocking breaches in values-oriented leadership? Do they think they can continue to speak of their institutions to students and the public as values-laden and interested in producing ethical leaders, when they appear to demonstrate so little sensitivity to values, as trustees?

Well, if nothing else, this little story demonstrates that university presidents and university boards can occasionally be held accountable, when the public demands such accountability. Maybe this will provide hope to those watching other universities where similar questions about the integrity of key leaders are being asked. And—wild hope—maybe this story will provide some lessons for board members of such institutions to ponder, as they sit by in silence, doing the “conservative” thing.

As the current president of Bethune-Cookman University, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, who is an expert in the field of transformative leadership, notes, it is imperative for those leading institutions of higher learning to have in place mechanisms to critique and evaluate failures of the institution to fulfill its mission and to abide by its core values:

Change for the sake of change is never the objective of effective leadership. On the other hand, the lack of a mechanism to critique and evaluate an agency’s mission could be a barrier to that organization’s future. Clarity on philosophy and mission are essential to address our leadership crisis. As our world continues to be more complex, diverse, and divided, the role of education has to concern itself with confronting values that conflict with humanistic goals (“Leadership to Match a New Era: Democratizing Society through Emancipatory Learning,” Journal of Leadership Studies 4,1 [1997], p. 62).

If Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed is correct in this assessment of the role of academic leaders (and I believe she is), boards of trustees have a strong responsibility to assure that the institutions they govern have in place “a mechanism to critique and evaluate an agency’s mission”—particularly when questions are raised about the commitment of key leaders in the institution to the core humanistic values that must drive the mission of any institution of higher learning. As an aside (which is not an aside), if Barack Obama was correct when he noted in his acceptance speech last night that the time is past when American citizens can allow their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters to be discriminated against, it seems incumbent on all U.S. colleges and universities today to have policies in place forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation—and mechanisms to expose and correct such discrimination, when it occurs.

If boards of trustees are not looking at these issues, mandating such policies, and setting in place mechanisms to hold even the top leaders of institutions accountable for lack of integrity, they are failing the institutions they serve—and the public at large.

Power to the People: Citizen Journalism and the UCA Story

Since I’ve blogged a number of times about the unfolding saga at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), I think it’s important to provide updates to that story as they come along. The Arkansas Times reports last evening and again today that UCA president Lu Hardin has chosen to resign with a buy-out contract of $1 million (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/hardin_to_resign.aspx#comments, www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/hardin_to_resign.aspx#comments).

The chair of the UCA board of trustees has confirmed that the board will meet today, noting that Hardin has the votes to remain as president if he so chooses. Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, suggests that the board of trustees has been, well, less than scintillating in its handling of a matter in which the president’s integrity appears to patently compromised in a very public way. Brantley writes,

The Board of Trustees has not distinguished itself in this matter. If Hardin resigns in recognition of his inability to credibly lead, would it be wrong to suggest that the Board should make a similar gesture? (emphasis added)

On the whole, bloggers at the Arkansas Times website wholeheartedly agree. Comments of bloggers about the role the board has been playing in the UCA story include the following (emphasis added):

▪The Board, with their handling of this just sent a terrible--really a horrible lesson and message to anyone paying attention to this. Shame on them all. They never got out in front of this. Not once. Even know. I'm sorry, I just have absolutely no respect for their handling of this.

▪If Hardin needs to resign then surely a majority of the board does too.
▪Sad as this is to say, the reality is that what is right and fair is irrelevant. Only the politics of the possible. It is really disturbing to think that the board will pay him the full buyout when he could have, should have been removed for cause.

▪I just sent the governor an e-mail asking him to exercise some control over the BOT.

▪Go back and look how the whole affair has unfolded. Early on the Board was in denial and defensive of the facts. If Hardin is REWARDED for his actions with severance pay, then say adios to the Board for wasting TAXPAYER dollars in awarding severance pay for the SECOND time. The UCA episode has evolved into the likes of a Greek tragedy with Lu Hardin playing lead. It is time to end the tragedy by not only releasing the lead player but the supporting cast as well.

▪The Board still doesn't get that their role is stewardship of the institution. Again, shame on them for blowing it here. Thankfully, and I think this was a large part of it, the ArkTimes Blog kept this in play long enough and to the degree necessary for the issue to be kept alive until the full weight of what happened here was fleshed out. Once again, evidence that the power is shifting from the hands of the mass media to the masses.

As I’ve noted before, I have a twofold interest in this story. One is, of course, that I’m a citizen of Arkansas and my tax dollars help fund this school (to which, by the way, two of my aunts went to do graduate work as they prepared for teaching careers).

But I’m even more intently interested in this story because of the questions I’ve raised in this blog about the significant role higher education plays in imparting to students civic values essential to the successful maintenance of a democratic society. As I’ve noted, when the example set at the top of an educational institution—from the board of trustees and the president—is one that contradicts core values necessary to build a sound participatory democracy, we all have reason to be concerned.

My experience in higher education has been solely in faith-based universities. Though these institutions cannot be held directly accountable by citizens and by state governments in the same way that UCA can, our tax dollars also help to fund church-owned universities. And we therefore have a vested interest—all of us, as citizens—in calling for the tax dollars also help to fund church-owned universities.same degree of public accountability, transparency, and integrity on the part of boards of trustees and presidents of church-owned universities that we expect from state-sponsored ones.

In fact, I would go further and argue that the church sponsorship of church-owned universities gives those institutions an added responsibility to exemplify the highest level of integrity on the part of their leaders—starting with their governing boards and presidents. Precisely because these institutions proclaim that their mission is grounded in the ethical teachings of their sponsoring churches, leaders of church-based universities have an exceptionally strong responsibility

▪to value and speak the truth

▪to be transparent and accountable to the various publics they serve

▪to entertain open discourse about the core values of their institutions by members of those constituencies, even (and especially when) that discourse exposes disparities between the values an institution proclaims and the behavior of its key leaders

▪to defend those most susceptible to abuse within the power dynamics of the university

▪and to refrain from doing harm—as in ignoring the rights of vulnerable minorities who have no legal protections, and then using legal threats to silence members of minority groups who protest such immoral treatment.

As someone who has had the unpleasant experience of watching university boards of trustees operate up-close, I have to say that I have seldom been overwhelmed by the degree of competence and—above all—commitment to core civic or religious values among many members of boards of trustees. As with boards of state institutions, boards of church-sponsored universities too often value impression management and protection from legal action above respect for the core values of their institution (and, in the case of church-sponsored universities, of the sponsoring church). Most will bend over backwards to protect a president even when they have strong reason to suspect that the president is either incompetent or venal, or both. Hardly any will take the trouble to investigate—and to hold open forums—when it is patently obvious from many credible reports that a president’s behavior is dangerously close to violating core ethical principles of the institution.

The blogger who notes (above) that, sad to say, “the reality is that what is right and fair is irrelevant” to many boards of trustees, is right on target. As that blogger concludes, many boards—and I include boards of church-sponsored universities here; my experience has been solely with those—are interested only in the politics of the possible.”

And so what does that communicate to students and to the public constituencies served by any university about its values? That they don’t mean much at all, when push comes to serve. That values are something to be paid lip-service in a classroom, but discarded when students enter the real world.

Holding faith-based institutions accountable for the services they provide the public, and for the ways in which they either exemplify or betray core civic values: this is an exceptionally important task of the American public, since we are a nation with the soul of a church that invests billions of dollars in these institutions precisely because we believe they serve the common good.

And as long as church leaders, and the leaders of church-owned institutions, resist transparency and public accountability (as they often do)—and as long as they use their financial clout and institutional image-management capital to resist transparency and accountability and attack those who call for integrity on the part of their leaders (as they continue to do)—the most significant tool we have today to accomplish this task is, as one of the comments cited above note, the ability of citizen journalists to keep significant issues in the public eye.

If readers will forgive my citing once again something I have written (but collaboratively so, with a leading scholar in the field of values-based education and transformative leadership, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed), I would like to conclude with several reflections from the document I cited earlier this week on transformative leadership, which is used as an introductory text the master's program in leadership at Bethune-Cookman University:

▪Abundant literature suggests that a key challenge facing higher education in the 21st century is to produce leaders for a rapidly changing postmodern cultural context. The cultural context within which students are now growing up and in which they will pursue careers is marked by change (technological, social, political, and economic) of an ever increasing pace, a communications and information explosion, new fusions of regional cultures throughout the world, increasing interaction of people from various cultural backgrounds due to advances in transportation technologies and migrations of people, and profound ethical shifts concomitant with the preceding developments.

▪If educational institutions fail to assist students in dealing with these developments—above all, to assist them to acquire the ability to think critically about and respond with ethical sensitivity to them—they will abdicate one of their chief responsibilities. This is to shape leaders who help to promote civic cultures in which more and more constituencies are drawn into participation, and in which the voices of groups historically marginalized (and those presently marginalized through lack of access to information) are heard and valued in processes of participatory democracy.

▪Because they are often looking solely at economic trends and focusing only on skills rather than internal and affective ethical change, organizations that fail are usually entrenched in maintenance forms of leadership that value preservation of the status quo above responding creatively to change.

To my way of thinking, this says it all: educational institutions, including (and perhaps particularly) church-owned ones, which value maintenance of the status quo and entrenched forms of leadership above the imperatives of mission, which ignore the centrality of values to the educational process, which abdicate their responsibility to inculcate values that build participatory democracy, are failing—even when, as at UCA, the numbers game allows them to claim that their "brand" is appreciating in value in publications such as US News & World Report.

Assuring Integrity in Academic Leaders

Thinking these days about integrity. And about its connection to leadership. The backdrop of my reflections is the current federal election cycle, in which it is often difficult to judge precisely where truth lies, and whether leaders possess sterling integrity.

And integrity and truth are connected—intrinsically so. They are connected because the root meaning of the word “integrity” is “wholeness.” No person or organization can be whole when there is a split between what the person or organization says, and what the person or organization does. Dishonesty cleaves a person to the core of her or his being.

The integrity of rock-solid honesty is essential on the part of leaders, because the institutions a leader heads founder when the leader lacks integrity, and the virtue of truth-telling. When the leader of an organization (especially a values-drive one—one that at least claims to be driven by values) is routinely dishonest and is permitted to trade in lies, the culture of the institution she or he leads becomes similarly split. It can be so cloven at its very core by the disconnect between what is professed and what is practiced, that it begins actively to promote those who lack integrity, producing a culture dominated by what Scott Peck calls “the people of the lie.” As a companion piece I intend to post today on this blog notes, when people of the lie begin to control and institution, that institution’s fate is sealed.

I’m afraid we live in such a culture now in the U.S. And I am not sure we can climb out of the pit into which we have dug ourselves, by our willingness to hear lies for so long now, and not challenge them. The endemic nature of the assault on basic truth in our culture is so deep that determining the integrity of a prospective leader is now exceedingly difficult. Even the very sources that purport to seek unvarnished truth in our political process, and to purvey it to the rest of us—the media—are seldom characterized by a strong regard for integrity. Or dominated by people whose integrity is self-evident—people willing to pay the price to tell uncomfortable truth that we don’t want to hear.

As an educator, I can say (sadly) of my own profession that it, too, often fails today in its responsibility to serve the public by fostering the values necessary for civil society to work effectively, by producing leaders with a strong sense of integrity, and by offering students leaders of integrity as role models. This is a motif emerging in analysis of the ongoing problems at the University of Central Arkansas, which I’ve previously discussed on this blog.

Those problems increasingly center on the president and board of trustees of UCA. That is, people’s awareness of where the problems at UCA lie is now focused squarely on the top leaders of the university.

And on the issue of integrity. As journalist and political commentator John Brummett notes in a piece about UCA published today for the Arkansas News Bureau, though the numbers look good at UCA (a rise in US News & World Report rankings, more students, increased revenue), serious questions about the integrity of president Lu Hardin now threaten to undermine his effectiveness and credibility, and thus of the institution itself (http://arkansasnews.com/archive/2008/08/26/JohnBrummett/347650.html).

Brummett sees Hardin’s damning sin not as lying to the media, creating his own little fiefdom at UCA, or violating state FIA laws. In Brummett’s view, the action that most radically calls into question Hardin’s integrity (and, implicitly, the board of trustees’, if they fail to act decisively) is his having created a memo arguing for secrecy in a board-approved pay raise, and then having typed the names of three vice-presidents at the bottom of the memo.

Brummett’s analysis focuses squarely on Hardin’s egregious lapse of integrity, then, and what it is going to do to the university he leads, if the board of trustees does not act. In Brummett’s view, the outcome that will serve UCA’s best interests and place it back on track as an effective (which is to say, values-oriented) institution of higher learning is the board’s insistence that Hardin step down.

These are issues I’ve long thought about in my own work in higher education—and written about. At one of the institutions at which I have served as academic vice-president, I wrote a guide to effective academic leadership. The list of attributes begins with integrity.

I began my analysis of academic leadership with integrity because, in my view, it is the foundational virtue for effective leadership. Without integrity, everything a leader does is vitiated from the outset. If a leader lacks integrity—in particular, if a leader deliberately deceives those she or he leads—everything the leader does will be undermined by the lack of conformity between what is professed and what is acted out. As my document “Leadership in Academic Life” notes,

Integrity is about making our example conform to the message we preach. It is about harmony between the words we say and the actions we take. Leaders of high integrity stand by their words. They do not make promises they are unable to keep. They do not make statements that fail to conform to the truth. In cases in which not every piece of information is able to be disclosed, leaders exercise critical judgment about when to speak and when not to speak: leaders do not disclose information that violates the confidentiality of others, or that might potentially damage the College. At the same time, when they do choose to speak, they back up their words with appropriate action that illustrates conformity of behavior to words.

I address these issues, as well, in a document I had the privilege of writing collaboratively several years ago with the current president of Bethune-Cookman University in Florida, Trudie Kibbe Reed, when she hired me to co-author a document to be used in creating a master’s program in leadership for BCU. In that document, entitled “Transformative Leadership: A Conceptual Framework and Application,” Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed and I note that values must be front and center for leaders, because many recent studies demonstrate that a lapse of values on the part of an institution’s leader impairs the effectiveness of the entire institution. Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed and I state:

Recent developments in many organizations demonstrate that the inability of an organization and its leaders to meet ethical challenges forthrightly undermines the organization’s effectiveness. Lack of ethical sensitivity and practice results in lost income and courts legal penalties that deplete an organization’s resources.

Whether in the non-profit or for-profit sector, organizations are by their very nature mission-driven and mission-oriented . . . . Accrediting bodies for institutions of higher learning are increasingly emphasizing an institution’s conformity to its mission statement, as accreditation or re-accreditation is considered.

Along with the increasing emphasis on the centrality of a mission to both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations has come an understandable emphasis on the need to develop institutional leaders who have strong values and the ability to understand and implement the mission of their organization. Unfortunately, the ability of institutions of higher learning to adapt to the challenge of producing values-oriented leaders of strong character has not always kept apace with the demand for such leaders. Some educational analysts have suggested that perhaps both undergraduate general education core curricula and the professional-training components of undergraduate programs have been too narrowly devoted to preparing graduates to meet the demands of a specific job. Too little attention is paid to character development and inculcation of leadership skills—though these should be strongly embedded across the curriculum in institutions of higher learning.

I am delighted that this document is now used as an introductory text in the master’s program for leadership at Bethune-Cookman University.

In another (unpublished) text I wrote at an institution at which I previously did administrative work in the field of academic affairs, I put the point this way:

A respect for basic human dignity—particularly in a faith-based institution—demands that people be told the truth. It is demeaning in the extreme to communicate untruths to others. Such behavior objectifies a human being, turning that person into an object rather than a human subject with human dignity and rights.

The preceding statement was a reflection on something I myself experienced in the institution in question. I made the statement in a letter I chose for various reasons not to send. As the letter itself notes, in the polity of this church-owned university, administrators work at the good pleasure of the president, so there is no appeals process for administrators who find themselves subject to discriminatory treatment—though, when administrators also have faculty appointments, as I myself did, and are not given written evaluations (as I was not) or recourse to an academic grievance process, the university is violating key academic freedom stipulations of accrediting bodies.

In my case, the situation to which I was struggling to respond was this: an outside consultant had been brought in to work with my division. Prior to the interview, I was told by an administrator who is second in the chain of command at the university that the consultant would meet only with me, my associate, and the person heading our accreditation preparation committee.

When I met with the consultant, I discovered that he had been told to meet with the entire academic team reporting to me, to do an "evaluation" of my work (one I was never allowed to see). Though that "evaluation" was about an hour in length, and the consultant had never met me and showed abysmal ignorance of my career (and of the accrediting standards he was supposedly expert in), the "evaluation" was used to remove me from my position and eventually to terminate me.

Here is how my unsent letter described the effect of having been lied to on me and my work:

Because the disparity between what I was told prior to the interview process and what actually occurred in it is so stark, and because the process itself violated my human dignity by subjecting me to a performance evaluation without informing me in advance of any shortcomings in my performance or allowing me to prepare a defense against allegations based on false information, I find myself challenged to know how to represent this faith-based university in any public setting.

I am strongly committed to the values of this [name of owning church omitted] Church university. In my view, how I have been treated in recent weeks violates those values in a very egregious way. As a result, I am deeply divided inside myself about appearing as a public representative of an institution that violates the core values of the church communion and university community it represents. I do not know how to participate now in public ceremonies until it has been made clear to me why I have been demeaned, and why core principles of honesty, integrity, and respect for fundamental human rights have been contravened in my case.

To add insult to injury, when I reported to the two top administrators of this university something the consultant told me in the interview, they accused me of distorting the truth, and informed me that they had called the consultant and verified that he did not tell me what I reported what he had said. When I refused to back down and insisted (in writing) that we both be given a lie-detector test to determine who was telling the truth, they informed me they had called the consultant again, who now admitted having said what I maintained, but who qualified the statement as saying something to the “effect of” what I was repeating. Again, a written request for a lie detector test did not result in any action on the part of the two top administrators of the university.

Discovering that someone who heads a church-based university will lie to you is devastating. Perhaps I am naïve. But I care about the truth. Caring about truth is, ostensibly at least, what brings anyone to the field of teaching. As a theologian, if I am not dedicated to truth-seeking, then what possibly motivates me in my vocation?

And because I care, I keep repeating my bottom lines. Bottom line: institutions of higher learning absolutely cannot produce students with a keen sense of values unless they are led by presidents and boards of trustees who model the values the institution seeks to impart to students. And second bottom line: under the social contract governing the role of higher education in American culture at large, a core responsibility of higher education is to produce citizens and professionals with solid values and the ability to make sound ethical judgments.

Unfortunately, for those of us who are (openly) gay, it is an uphill battle, in conflict situations in which the leader of a church or a church-based institution denies the validity of what we report, when the report is inconvenient. Churches and their constituents still all too often automatically give the benefit of the doubt to anyone other than the employee who is (openly) gay. They all too often automatically assume that gay people are malicious, bent on undermining Christian institutions, and unable to be truthful.

They are also all too often willing to use their financial and public-relations clout, as well as ugly, immoral tricks, to "neutralize" a gay person who raises questions about their integrity as leaders. Churches and the institutions they sponsor have incredible power to do damage control to disguise the lack of integrity of their leaders, and to vilify those who come up against these leaders, particularly when the employee who is proving to be a thorn in the side for corrupt leaders is (openly) gay.

But, if we believe in truth, we keep on telling it, in season, out of season, until enough people who both cares and can do something to make a difference listen.

Don't we?

Numbers Game or Values: The Heart and Soul of Higher Education

And speaking of the numbers racket in higher education (see my posting earlier today on this): US News & World Report has just released its latest ranking of American colleges and universities.

As the influential journal Inside Higher Education reports, this year, more than half of American institutions of higher learning chose to participate in this particular numbers game (www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/22/usnews). The rate of participation this year is, in fact, only 46%.

Participation by liberal arts colleges and universities has, in particular, declined significantly this year. As the Inside Higher Education report also notes, an organization called Education Conservancy has challenged the validity of the (self-reported) data on which US News & World Report bases its yearly ranking of colleges/universities, as well as the usefulness of this revenue-making survey as a means of choosing a good liberals arts college or university (on the Education Conservancy and its critique of the ranking system, see www.educationconservancy.org/presidents_letter.html).

In response to Education Conservancy’s critique of the US News & World Report ranking system, a significant number of university presidents have pledged to work with the organization. Presidents signing represent quite a few institutions of higher education with church roots, including Drew, Hendrix, and Philander Smith (all Methodist schools), as well as St. Mary’s College and Holy Cross (Catholic).

As an educator who has seen up close the mechanisms by which colleges groom themselves to rank well in this numbers game, the most significant question I would raise about this survey is in what way it measures the heart and soul of liberal education: that is, the extent to which a college or university inculcates values in its students. As a contributor to a discussion of these issues on the Arkansas Times blog notes today, the university now attracting so much attention in our state, about which I blogged earlier—UCA—announced today that it has risen two points in the report’s rankings of America’s best colleges (see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/bloom_off_college_rankings.aspx#comments and www.uca.edu/web/weblog/index.php?itemid=2045&catid=10).

When a school can have serious publicly evident problems with leadership, problems centered on questions of values, and still rise in the rankings of America’s best colleges, one has to wonder . . . .

Nonetheless, as Inside Higher Education notes, university presidents of participating institutions began releasing press releases at 12:01 today, as the rankings came out. As the report also observes, “Generally, those releases don’t come from those on the top of the lists, but from those wanting reporters to know that the colleges were at the top of some subcategory or made a top 100 list.”

Numbers game or values? Which is really the heart and soul of American higher education? It’s well worth asking.

Walking the Walk: Values Education, In Memory of Stephanie Tubbs Jones

TGIF. One of those weeks (I feel sure many of us have them) when you ask, at the end, how you got through. No real reason for the despondency, and no major crises—just (but a big “just”!) the noonday devil, which for me, seems to prance all the more through the dog days of summer.

I was thinking earlier in the week of some of my methods of powering through, when spirit flags. Increasingly, I find spiritual sustenance less in scripture (in any of the officially sanctioned holy books of the world religions) than in things like poems.

Poems reach places inside that scripture can’t, sometimes. The words of holy books are so familiar, so overworn and overused, that they have lost their potent surprise. Their coinage has been so debased by those who sling them around like formulaic answers to complex questions or weapons to decapitate others with, that it’s hard not to read bibles some days without seeing the faces of those who debase their words—and being repulsed at the very thought that these words can be holy, misused as they are by some believers.

So I turn to poetry. Which condenses complex thought into few words. Words that evoke rather than dictate, that lead outward (to the natural world and the world of human community) or inward, to self-examination. Words that fire rather than cripple imagination, as so many scriptures do, given how they have been abused.

In times like this, I read (as if they are scripture: and they are) Rumi. Emily Dickinson. Mary Oliver. Rilke and Garcia Lorca. I do have to admit that reading Emily Dickinson often makes me ask, “What the hell did she just say?” Then I read the same poem again—and perhaps another time—and ask again, “Now what the hell did she just say?”

A wonderful e-friend of mine, the emerita dean of a Methodist seminary, who is also an ordained Presbyterian minister, sent me a clipping this week from the Christian Century, in which John M. Buchanan notes how psalm-like Mary Oliver’s poems are, in their minute observation of nature, where Oliver never fails to find revelatory possibility. It gave me heart to learn 1) that somehow my dog-day doldrums were evoking a thoughtful response in the heart of a friend with whom I haven’t really discussed them, and 2) that I’m not the only person in the world who sits down in a rocker early in the morning to read Mary Oliver side by side with a psalm from scripture.

(I also learn from Buchanan that, after the death of her partner of 40 years, Molly Malone Cook, Oliver published a collection of Cook’s photos. I have now added Our World to my must-read list).

And now for a continuation of yesterday’s end-of-week news summary, catching up on items about which I’ve previously blogged.

Continuing the Florida Story

Yesterday’s posting alludes to my reasons for following news from Florida with particular keenness. Besides seeking to work out the traumatic experiences we had in our period of work in Florida, and to integrate those into our professional and spiritual lives, Steve and I also have a house in Florida. Which we bought as a result of promises made to us by a devout Methodist who then broke those promises, and who has never sought to repair the breach of friendship and mere humanity she effected when she did this.

As an aside (but it’s not really an aside, is it?—it’s the marrow of gay life lived in the shadow of the churches), it strikes me as interesting that gay human beings are among the only people the churches feel no obligation to apologize to, when they abuse us. When they break promises to us. When they lie to us. When they lie about us. When they issue statements of “teachings” that they know full well will result in terrible suffering for gay human beings and anyone who loves us. When they make glib statements about justice, equality, and welcome, that obviously apply to everyone but us.

What’s going on with this dynamic, I wonder? I do have some ideas, lots of them . . . .

So, with a house in Florida, we follow Florida news. We don’t have any other choice, as responsible citizens and unwilling owners of Florida property.

Florida continues in the news as a battleground state for gay rights, in part, due to polls that indicate Florida may be shifting away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats in the upcoming elections, and in part, because, once again, vicious right-wing Christian special interest groups who have found it useful to demonize gays in previous elections, in order to bring out “Christian” voters for the Republican ticket, are trying to amend the Florida constitution to “protect” marriage.

A reflection of the keen interest with which many voters (including those of us in the gay community) are following Florida stories today is the choice of the Bilerico blog to add a Florida-specific blog to its site. The new blog is at http://florida.bilerico.com.

Today’s Florida Bilerico contains a wonderful posting by Bishop Mahee entitled “What Are Black Conservatives Conserving?” Mahee does an outstanding job of exposing the vicious politics of right-wing “Christians” who are now trying to exploit tensions between African Americans and gays in battleground states like Florida. She also calls onto the carpet those African Americans who are willing to participate in this politics of demonization and hatred. She asks,

When did we as Black folk get the revelation of homosexuality as the new sin and join forces with the same people who just yesterday wanted to keep their race pure and made intercultural marriages illegal? Now they come to our churches, developed in part because we could not even sit next to them in their churches, spewing more divisive politics.

Florida remains in the news as well because of a story about which I blogged some time ago—the attempt of David Davis, principal of Ponce de Leon High School, to outlaw any show of solidarity with gay people on the part of the school’s students (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/democracy-ongoing-battle-shifting-faces.html). Davis’s ban against solidarity extended even to a ban on display of rainbows, which, he maintains, lead students automatically to think of dirty sex.

The ACLU sued the school district on behalf of student Heather Gillman, who was specifically targeted by Principal Davis. At the end of July, Judge Richard Smoak of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of FL handed down an order in this case (see www.aclu.org/lgbt/youth/36150lgl20080724.html). Smoak finds that Davis engaged in a “witch hunt” and “relentless crusade” against gay students at the school, holding “morality assemblies” to try to enforce conformity to his own religiously based moral views about homosexuality. The ruling protects the rights of students to engage in free speech and assembly, even when a principal has peculiar religious views that contest this right in cases such as Gillman’s.

Subsequent news reports indicate that Davis has widespread support in Ponce de Leon (see http://florida.bilerico.com/2008/08/remember_the_anti-gay_florida_principle.php). Citizens interviewed about the controversy stress their religious views that homosexuality is morally wrong, and depict the community as gentle, peaceful, and Christian—that is, for those who aren’t openly gay, it would appear.

As I’ve noted before, Florida is clearly a place where churches like the United Methodist Church—which claims many influential adherents in Florida and has prestigious educational institutions there—have their work cut out (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/07/hate-crime-in-daytona-beach-continuing.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/democracy-ongoing-battle-shifting-faces.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/holy-conferencing-as-love-building.html). Something seems awry when a community sees itself as gentle, peaceful, and Christian, but targets a despised minority group in witch hunts and crusades.

With its policy of non-discrimination against gay persons, with its stress on churches that have open doors, open minds, and open hearts, the United Methodist Church could make an important pastoral impact on Florida. And, since teaching people in a pluralistic democratic society to respect the fundamental rights of others is also clearly an educational challenge, the important United Methodist institutions of higher learning in Florida have the opportunity to make a significant educational contribution to the state by addressing these issues.

I’ve noted previously that the premier accrediting body for teacher-preparation programs, the National Council of Accreditation for Teacher Education (NCATE), has added to its accrediting expectations stipulations that teacher education programs must address issues of sexual orientation in the formation of prospective teachers, and that NCATE-accredited colleges must demonstrate respect for diversity around issues of sexual orientation in their institutional life (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/05/umc-university-senate-historic.html, http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/03/teaching-youth-not-to-hate.html). With its highly regarded universities in Florida and its Social Principles forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, the United Methodist Church can do much to address social divisions that are resulting in outright violence against gay and lesbian human beings in this state.

Once again, I call on Bishop Timothy Whitaker of the Florida United Methodist Conference to consider very seriously the ways in which his church and his educational institutions can address this important social issue in Florida. Silence is not sufficient.

Continuing the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) Story

Since I have also blogged previously (see http://bilgrimage.blogspot.com/2008/08/spin-spin-spin-citizen-blogging-and.html) about a story from Arkansas higher education that has attracted national attention—a controversy surrounding the current president of the University of Central Arkansas (UCA)—I want to update readers about the latest developments in this story.

Yesterday, our statewide free weekly Arkansas Times reported that the faculty senate at UCA has met to address the issues, which include allegations that UCA President Lu Hardin has acted imperiously as president, that he and his board of trustees inappropriately awarded him pay raises without sufficient public notice, and that Hardin has produced documents with the electronic signatures of vice-presidents who did not write or sign the documents (see www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/post_22.aspx#comments).

As an educator with a particular interest in values education, I’m most interested in two aspects of this story. As I noted in my previous posting about the story, higher education is driven these days all too often by numbers. It has become a numbers game, a game in which presidents who can produce higher figures (showing increasing numbers of students and increased revenue) are rewarded by boards of trustees.

Many boards of trustees in higher education today give the impression that the numbers game is all they care about. The ethical lapses, the moral corners-cutting of presidents, seem too often to be winked at, as long as the figures look good.

That is, until something breaks open—as has happened at UCA—and the underbelly of the numbers-driven institution begins to appear for public inspection.

As the lively discussion on the Arkansas Times blog to which I link above demonstrates, citizens are intently interested in the disparity between the values that institutions of higher learning profess, and the values they actually live. There is a strong awareness among the educated public that colleges and universities exist to serve the common good of civil society, by inculcating the core values needed for good citizenship in civil society.

Two aspects of the UCA story—and its dissection by citizen bloggers at the Arkansas Times website—interest me, therefore. One is the disservice boards of trustees do to the institutions they govern when they ignore the values questions and focus solely on the numbers game.

Trustees have an important responsibility to ask whether a president, in her or his leadership of a college, embodies and encourages the core values the institution seeks to teach students. Trustees have a weighty charge to look behind the veil of the numbers and see what is really going on at the institution they govern—not to mention whether the glowing figures presented to them are accurate and not cooked.

UCA has been booming: more students, more income, new this and that. Now the boom looks, well . . . otherwise . . . given what this story is revealing about apparent lapses of ethical and managerial responsibility on the part of the institution’s board of trustees.

The other aspect of the story that interests me is something I discuss above, when I look at the potential contribution of church-related institutions of higher learning in Florida, to that state’s cultural and political life. This is the significant role colleges play through teaching values.

In the social contract institutions of higher learning have traditionally made with the public at large in American society, values are right at the core of a liberal arts education. Within the framework of that social contract, it is impossible to claim to be educated unless one has been educated to understand and embody values. Among the core values that drive both our institutions of higher learning and society at large are concern for the common good, respect for diversity, understanding of and willingness to dialogue with those deemed other than ourselves, concern to reach out to those marginalized within the structures of participatory democracy—and, of course, those solid core values necessary for any society to function well, including fidelity to one’s word, fair play, a sense of justice, and so on.

When leaders of higher institutions—including presidents and governing boards—do not seem conspicuously to care about these core values, to embody them, to inculcate them throughout the curriculum (and the life) of the institutions they lead, then it is impossible to teach these values to students. We teach what we live, first and foremost.

UCA is a public institution. Citizens hold it to accountability because our tax dollars support it. We have a vested interest in seeing it fulfill its part of the social contract—educating students who respect and live core values essential to civil society—because our money translates into its mission.

Even though church-related colleges and universities do not rely wholly on public funding, they, too, benefit largely from tax dollars. And because American higher education is blessed with an abundance of faith-based colleges and universities, citizens have another reason to look to these institutions to fulfill their part of the social contract to produce values-oriented graduates. So many of our citizens are educated in these institutions, that we all suffer if these institutions fail to do their job.

Unfortunately, while public institutions are held legally accountable by state and federal laws to teach (and embody) core values such as respect for diversity, many church colleges and universities still seek to claim religiously-based exemption, when the particular form of diversity at stake is respect for gay and lesbian persons. In the interest of the common good, of building a viable participatory democracy, it seems to me imperative that church-affiliated colleges and universities no longer be permitted to engage in discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.

How do we produce citizens who serve the common good and build a participatory democracy when we allow church-affiliated institutions of higher learning to betray such a core value of pluralistic society as respect for diversity? What happens at places like Ponce de Leon high school—and there are many such places throughout the nation—is an illustration of the kind of society we are building, when we do not inculcate the celebration of difference and otherness, across the board, through our educational institutions and in our churches.

And because I often carp, I want to end this posting with praise. I want to praise an outstanding citizen who demonstrates what we can accomplish when we reach across the barriers that separate us by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation.

This week, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, the first African-American woman to represent Ohio in Congress, died suddenly. Though Jones was not a member of the LGBT community, gay internet news and blog sites are overflowing this week with statements of praise of Jones for her consistent stands in support of gay rights, and for her willingness to defend gay persons even when such support might have endangered her professional career and when it drew fire from other African Americans.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a great American, one who exemplified the core values of the civil society we claim we want. In her willingness to reach across social barriers, and in her concern to bring everybody to the table of participatory democracy, she has often reminded me of Mary McLeod Bethune. I hope (and believe) that she will be remembered with as much gratitude as Dr. Bethune is now remembered for her contributions to building a better society and living the values necessary to make democracy work.

Spin. Spin, Spin: Citizen Blogging and the Failure of American Higher Education

I’ve noted frequently on this blog, my work in higher education has given me an intent concern for the future of higher education in the United States. In my view, the shift to a corporate management model in higher education—a shift that has been going on for some time now—is yielding bitter fruits.

This shift all too often assures that presidents of colleges and universities today have little understanding of education itself, or of the central goals of liberal education. Far too many college and university presidents now either come to education out of the corporate world, or have adopted draconian management models from the corporate sector and applied them ruthlessly to institutions of higher learning and to the faculty of those institutions.

And as academic “leaders” move in this direction, they almost always do so with the active complicity of governing boards that are heavily skewed in the direction of the corporate world. Boards of most colleges and universities, including church-affiliated ones, are stacked with captains of industry and business who do not understand or value liberal education, but who value above all balanced budgets, glitzy image management campaigns, and beefed-up enrollment figures.

Because I lament how the move to a corporate leadership model is selling out the fundamental values of American higher education and is hindering the ability of our colleges and universities to produce leaders with strong values and the keen critical insight and integrity necessary to lead, I have been following a sordid little story in Arkansas with great interest lately. This story concerns Lu Hardin, the president of the University of Central Arkansas.

It is a story that would not be worth mentioning on this blog, except that it has now gained national attention, through a 16 July article in the Chronicle for Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/news/article/4843/u-of-central-arkansas-president-to-repay-300000-bonus). As this account and others indicate, among the elements of this sordid story are cushy augmentations to a president’s salary, awarded by the university board of trustees without the public notice required in a state institution; executive meetings of the board of trustees held without notice of their purpose in contravention of state law; memos prepared by the president to justify his salary increase, “signed” by employees who did not see or sign the memos before they were given to the governing board; misleading statements to the press; lavish special privileges provided by the president to friends and supporters; and a craven refusal on the part of the board of trustees to address these problems forthrightly, transparently, with accountability to the public (http://nwaonline.com/articles/2008/07/23/news/072408lrhardinbonus.txt; www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2008/07/24/JohnBrummett/347198.html; http://arkansasnews.com/archive/2008/08/09/JohnBrummett/347359.html;
www2.arkansasonline.com/news/2008/jul/12/hardin-bonus-07-broke-law-20080712/?subscriber/national; www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/07/breaking_hardin_to_pay_back_30.aspx).

The preceding sources (and others easily found on the internet) provide a detailed account of the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) story. The statewide free weekly Arkansas Times deserves high praise for pursuing this story vigorously, and for continuing to foster blog discussion of it, right up to the present. Because the details of the story are readily available in the articles I cite above and others accessible online, I want to focus here not on what has happened at UCA, but on its implications for higher education.

What is happening at UCA is a clear indicator of what’s wrong with many of our institutions of higher learning, at the most fundamental level possible—at the level of values. Increasingly, university presidents expect (and receive) big bucks for their success in mounting slick, empty impression-management campaigns, rather than for their success at inculcating values and producing leaders. Higher education is increasingly a numbers game—a game of showing (or giving the impression of) higher numbers of students enrolled, and a game of showing (or giving the impression of) more dollars flowing into the university coffers.

Sadly, amidst the glitz and crude, empty commercialism underlying these empty shows, the heart of higher education is being eviscerated: the core values of American higher education, the social contract universities once made to produce values-oriented leaders for the next generation of society, the humanistic focus of liberal education, are being undermined by the show-and-tell numbers game that drives higher education today. If the current generation of “leaders” who dominate higher education today represent what leadership is all about, we are in serious trouble, as a society.

We are in trouble because far too many leaders of higher education are, quite simply, willing to cut moral corners to make fast bucks. Far too many educational leaders are willing to put image and money above ethics—and are permitted, even encouraged, by governing boards to do this.

At an institution at which I once worked, I once had the unhappy duty of having to inform the president of the university that I found her/his leadership lacking in integrity. Because my input was explicitly solicited by the president and I was a member of the university’s leadership team, I asked that the board of trustees be given some data I had compiled about how the president’s lack of integrity had translated into mismanagement that threatened the future of the school over which he/she presided.

The president’s response was telling. It speaks volumes about what is wrong with American higher education today. The president informed me in no uncertain terms that boards of trustees don’t care about ethics or about the fidelity of a university to the values proclaimed in its mission statement (in this case, the school is church-affiliated). She/he laughed off my suggestion that the board would be interested in the data I had compiled.

Those data were never provided to the board. And why should they have been? Presidents alone customarily communicate with the board. This is all the more the case in many church-affiliated institutions where the college or university does not have to adhere to laws that require transparency and open meetings, as they do for public institutions.

Mere hirelings are presumptuous when they expect boards of trustees to listen to them. The adroit image management for which boards commonly reward presidents almost always extends to spin control when an employee who has the potential to reveal a president’s actions as morally dubious is peremptorily silenced and expelled by the president. No matter how draconian a president’s tactics in such situations, most boards willingly choose to believe the president rather than the whistle-blowing employee, to trust the spin control rather than to hear the truth.

Mind you, boards do know very well when something is not right at a school—as many board members did at UCA before the stuff hit the fan. The problem is, far too few boards are willing to bite the bullet and investigate, take clear action, uphold core values, discipline or fire leaders who have betrayed an institution’s core values. Faced with potential revelations that might undermine a school’s glitzy image, most boards behave precisely as the UCA board has been behaving: duck, dodge, support the leader at all cost, no matter how vacuous the values of that leader appear as the public gains insight into how she or he is actually leading.

Boards of trustees that permit presidents egregiously to betray core ethical values of institutions of higher learning are just as guilty as the presidents whose misbehavior they enable. Boards that do not create mechanisms by which the voice of faculty and of campus leaders may be heard—independently of manipulation and spin control on the part of the president—create the conditions by which a president can so spectacularly mismanage an institution, that the institution ends up with mud on its face in the media, as in the case of UCA.

Boards that have strong reason to suspect that critics with insight and integrity have been smeared by a president whose word they are willing to take when that word is clearly not trustworthy lay the groundwork for failure in the institutions they govern—for the failure of the institution to be what it is supposed to be about, producing broadly educated leaders with sound values.

When presidents and governing boards patently lack the strong commitment to values that the mission statements of our institutions of higher learning proclaim, is it any wonder that those institutions are so often failing to inculcate civic virtues and humanistic values in graduates? Students are not deaf; they are not blind. They see clearly the disparity between what institutional leaders say and what they actually do. They hear the tinny emptiness of the rhetoric about service, tolerance, respect for dialogue, concern to foster critical thinking and transformative leadership, and so on.

Fortunately, where our traditional institutions are refusing to provide venues for the kind of open values-laden exchange and critical discourse necessary to sustain a vibrant democracy, other new institutions are developing to provide such venues. As I’ve noted previously on this blog, I’m strongly impressed by the ability of citizen blogging to hold the feet of institutions and their leaders to the fire nowadays.

This certainly seems to be happening with the UCA story. As a poster on an Arkansas Times blog about UCA notes yesterday, the single most important factor in forcing the board of that university to reconsider the duck and dodge game it has been playing has been the ongoing discussion of the story on the Arkansas Times blog (www.arktimes.com/blogs/arkansasblog/2008/08/the_question_about_lu_hardin.aspx#comments).

Citizen bloggers are now providing a service to our democratic society that universities used to provide, but have often stopped providing, insofar as they have bought into the ethos of the corporate world. The kind of open, free, dialogic discussion about civic virtue and the values underlying vibrant democracies that should be taking place in college classrooms is now taking place on internet blogs instead . . .

while far too many college presidents crunch numbers, spin data, and demand bigger salaries, and while far too many boards of trustees promote and protect these ethically vacuous leaders as they crush any attempt by mere hirelings to engage the board in critical discourse about the dubious directions in which leaders are taking their schools.