Bethune-Cookman University under Leadership of Trudie Kibbe Reed: The Role of the Southern Association of Colleges

To add to what I wrote yesterday about Bethune-Cookman University and the recent resignation/retirement of its president Trudie Kibbe Reed: as the university's accrediting body the Southern Association of Colleges prepared to review the school for reaccreditation in 2010, it invited third-party comments from members of the public.  I submitted a third-party comment to SACS as someone who had served as the school's highest academic officer, its vice-president for academic affairs.

In Higher Education News: Bethune-Cookman University President Trudie Kibbe Reed Resigns/Retires

In the world of higher education, a very strange story now coming out of Bethune-Cookman University in Florida: as Michael Stratford reports  in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday, the university president, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, has retired in the middle of the academic year.  At least, that appears to be the story.  But getting a clear picture of whether this is a resignation or a retirement or why it's taking place: that's another story altogether.

Dr. Rekers' Bogus Claims to Cure the Gay: Questions for the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities

Back in June, when the story of Kirk Murphy and Dr. George Rekers' obscene, soul-wrenching "therapeutic" intervention into Kirk's psyche when Kirk was a boy hit the news, I wrote to note that Rekers enjoys all the rights and privileges of an emeritus professor at the University of South Carolina.  He is ensconced at a university fully accredited by the distinguished academic accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities (SACS).

Peter Daou Hits the Mark: Obama's Presidency Will be Defined by Righting America's Moral Ship

Yes and yes and yes. And yes again.

Peter Daou is absolutely on the mark today with a Huffpo piece about what will define the Obama presidency—if the president finally decides to ditch the “political insiderism, Rahm-style deal-making, image-management and perpetual campaigning the Obama team is so adept at” and return to the moral foundation of the platform for which he campaigned.

Daou maintains,

In the end, Barack Obama's presidency will be defined by the extent to which he attempts to right America's (badly adrift) moral ship. Providing universal quality affordable health care is only a part of that process, albeit a significant one (emphasis in original).

He defines the moral center of Obama’s platform (which is the moral center of participatory democracy itself)—what so many of us desperately want for our nation after the havoc wreaked by Bush-Cheney (and Rove, Gonzales, Rice, and assorted other criminals)—as follows: “bedrock principles of justice, fairness, and equality of opportunity.” And then he spells out what those principles mean, if we want to retrieve a democratic society and the moral foundations on which it rests:

On health care, it means stating goals clearly and refusing to accept a watered-down compromise that ends up benefiting the very same interests who are gaming the system for profit today.

It means refusing to allow the obscene enrichment of bankers at the expense of everyone else.

It means ceasing, not extending and reinforcing Bush's worst excesses on secrecy and civil liberties and detainee treatment.

It means refusing to allow the continued dismissal of gay rights.

It means refusing to allow further avoidable environmental degradation.

It means seriously re-examining our Afghanistan policy.

It means seriously re-examining our drug laws and gun laws.

It means speaking out forcefully on the widespread abuse of women -- even when it seems inopportune.

And on and on.

We can accept nothing less from this administration, if we care about our imperiled democratic experiment. If we do allow the administration to offer less, to continue its insincere Rahm-style image management techniques, its craven pandering to the wealthiest and most powerful among us, we might as well write finis to that experiment and look elsewhere in the world for societies aspiring to live by bedrock principles of justice, fairness, and equality of opportunity.

That’s what I’ve been saying over and over, and I can’t stop saying it. Because it needs to be said. It's time for the administration to stop making excuses, to cease with the coy refusal to articulate clear goals that are consistent with the progressive platform on which the president campaigned, and to stand by its promises and respect the mandate it has received from millions of Americans fed up with the Bush legacy.

If not, it's over—for all of us, as a democratic society.

Glenn Greenwald on Cronkite's Legacy: Character and Integrity

As a follow-up to my tribute to Walter Cronkite yesterday, I’d like to note Glenn Greenwald’s very fine article “Celebrating Cronkite While Ignoring What He Did.” Greenwald contrasts the craven fawning of contemporary journalists, faced with the lies and unethical behavior of the rich and mighty, with the willing of Walter Cronkite to speak the truth even when it was inconvenient for him to do so—and to search for that truth beneath the mountain of rhetorical garbage that power often heaps atop inconvenient truths in order to make those truths in accessible.

Greenwald notes,

In fact, within Cronkite's most important moments one finds the essence of journalism that today's modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility.

As he points out, asked in 1996 if he had any regrets following his retirement, he answered,

What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation.

Cronkite was referring here to the journalistic standards that journalists of integrity like himself developed, as they learned to spot and to name the lies hidden in much official government discourse about the Vietnam War—an integrity that vanished from American journalism in the final decades of the 20th century.

And then Greenwald adds,

It's impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite's death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.

Amen. And our country (and world) are much the poorer for the legacy those pompous baritone talking heads are leaving us, when they could have followed in the footsteps of Cronkite instead. Mr. Bush and his criminal cronies could not have come to power and remained in power without the active complicity—and immoral abdication of journalistic integrity—of mainstream American journalists in the final decades of the 20th century, who have traded in the heritage of Walter Cronkite and Molly Ivins for, well, the mess we have now, all glitter and no substance, all spin and little grit.

The true heirs of Walter Cronkite are few and far between in the American media today: Paul Krugman, Leonard Pitts, Bill Moyers, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Bob Herbert, etc. The rest are dross, whose willingness to toe the party line, lazy refusal to delve beneath the surface, cozy self-serving connections to the rich and famous, and blowsy pontifications constitute the antithesis of real journalism.

Walter Cronkite: In Memoriam

We weren’t, God knows, a conventional family. For one thing, we were Southern, and that put us well outside the social mainstream. For another, we might or might not, on any given day, gather for supper without my father mysteriously absent from the table. He was frequently away, off on one of his periodic, unannounced jaunts, holed up drunk in a hotel room somewhere, with or without his woman du jour.

During those times, we ate in total silence, never sharing what any of us felt about the situation, the embarrassment of the calls from the court, saying he had missed a hearing, or calls from his law partner, asking if any of us knew how to contact him. Or, in my case, the relief—relief not to have him in the house, with his glowering, accusing presence that communicated to me without fail what a disappointment I was to him, the sissy son who couldn’t play football or baseball if his life depended on it, but who, strangely (and this was somehow shameful to my father), excelled at fishing and hunting, who could find his way around the woods even at night, when other boys remained lost and helpless on scouting trips designed to teach us self-sufficiency in the wild.

No, we weren’t conventional, so we didn’t always have all the rules that governed the table and television behavior of other families around us. Like one down the street where each person at table was required to say something, anything, in a daily ritual of “sharing” and “conversation-making” that sent me into a panic anytime I was invited to eat with these folks. Just as their habit of giving each person a bowl of popcorn for his- or herself, with a spoon to eat it, sent me into a spin when I spent the night there . . . . Needless to say, in that tightly controlled Calvinist family, with its hypochondriac, exercise-addicted father, television during meals was strictly forbidden.

We didn’t have any specific rule about television during supper, though my father might, depending on the severity of his hangover on a particular evening, jump up and turn off the t.v. set, announcing that civilized people don’t watch television while they eat. Our table rules—and they were legion—were more confined to niceties like posture, or how one held a fork, or whether one offered the last item on a platter to everyone else before taking it for oneself, or whether one chewed with a closed mouth and kept his extra arm in his lap, since strong and able people did not lean their elbows on the table.

In my memory, television began to insinuate itself into our suppers only gradually, during the Civil Rights and Vietnam era. With Walter Cronkite. Before that time, we didn’t watch t.v. as we ate—in part, because we didn’t even have a television set until I was well into grade school, and who would have wanted to try watching those queasy-making black and white splotches and lines when he ate, anyway?

With Walter Cronkite, news became imperative, even when it interrupted our mealtimes. Since the news hour coincided with our supper hour, we had no choice except to watch as we ate, and we did so voraciously—watch the news, that is, as we chewed the meatloaf or tuna casserole, enjoyed the pole beans with new potatoes and fresh-sliced tomatoes. We needed to know about the church bombings in Birmingham, the civil rights activists who had mysteriously disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. We needed to know because these stories were part of our own story.

As white Southerners, we were inextricably involved in the massive social shift underway in our country, with its explosive tension points in places like our neighboring states of Alabama and Mississippi—Alabama, the state in which my mother’s father had been born, Mississippi, the state in which he had grown up. We could not escape these stories, because they were our stories.

And because they were our stories, we needed to discuss them as we listened to Mr. Cronkite around our supper table. What to do? How to handle the demand to change—seemingly overnight—everything we had been taught to believe about race, about social rank and order, about God’s arrangement of the world? Was it possible to call Beulah Mrs. Jameson without sounding like a fool when the insincere words fell out of our mouth?

And, increasingly, as I began to think with an adult mind about what was happening around me and dared to challenge my father during these dinner-table confabs: why were the roads in our neighborhood paved, when those in the black community next to us were unpaved? Why did we insist on believing that God had consigned Ham’s descendants to perpetual servitude, rather than believing that we ought to do to others what we hoped to have done to ourselves? What did the bible mean, when it was full of so many contradictory passages? Which ones demanded attention, and which belonged to bygone cultural eras?

Through it all, the reassuring voice of Walter Cronkite droned on in the background, assuring us that, no matter how horrific the events we saw that night on the t.v. screen—the bombed-out church, the Vietnamese village on fire with napalm—the world turned upside down still had some meaning. Some sanity prevailed somewhere, perhaps someplace like his native Missouri, our neighboring state to the north, which managed to remain down-home and quasi-Southern without the violent baggage of places like Mississippi and Alabama, and, we feared, our own state of Arkansas.

This was a voice we could trust. It was a version of our own voice, with its laid-back cadences and its air of gentle, unassuming authority. It was the kind of voice my mother characterized as gentlemanly—a trait she knew when she saw it, though it was becoming rarer and rarer in the world in which we lived. Walter Cronkite had it, as did Adlai Stevenson. Lyndon Baines Johnson didn’t, though Lady Bird was a real lady. Bill Fulbright counted for a gentleman. Orval Faubus decidedly did not.

So Walter Cronkite did more than inform me, during those crucial formative years of adolescence in a sleepy Southern state far from the social mainstream, when the news was always from outside, always essential, if I wanted to find connections between my own small, closed world and the bigger world around me. He also molded me as a person, as a truth-seeker. As a gentleman. He functioned as an important role model, one to which I was told to aspire.

He was what a gentleman ought always to be. He refused to compromise, when it came to telling the truth. We admired that, even when we resisted the truth he wanted to bring to our dinner table on any given evening. And he was courteous to others, even to those with whom he obviously disagreed—qualities we ought to cultivate and practice in a world in which the rules seemed to be slipping, so that people seemed inclined to behave like animals towards each other, and not with humanity.

He never condescended. He put everyone at his ease. A gentleman can talk with equal composure to a president or a street sweeper. In the final analysis, a person’s social status doesn’t matter. What matters is the quality of that person’s character, something Rev. King kept stressing in every speech he gave, and how could we disagree, even when we knew he wanted to use that rubric to crack our social world wide open?

A man of integrity who was not afraid to go where his pursuit of the truth led him, even when that pursuit led him to speak out against his own friends, against those with whom he rubbed shoulders, those who sat with him at the tables of power. A journalist par excellence. And a human being par excellence.

That’s who Walter Cronkite was to me. That’s the man to whom my mother taught me to listen carefully as he delivered the nightly news in the 1960s, the man she encouraged me to become, no matter what vocation I chose in my adult life.

A man—a type of man—whose absence will leave a definite hole in the heart of our society. A man to remember, celebrate, and admire. And, insofar as possible, even in a postmodern world very different from the one in which he came of age, a man to emulate, who leaves behind a legacy to be carried on by other truth-tellers, since the challenge of seeking and telling the truth never goes away, no matter how seismic the shifts in the world around us.

Thought for the Day: Audre Lorde on Courage to Tell Truth

And I wonder what I may be risking as I become more and more committed to telling whatever truth comes across my eyes my tongue my pen—no matter how difficult—the world as I see it, people as I feel them.

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988) (pp. 51-2).

Thought for the Day: Yevgeny Yevtushenko on Corrupt Societies (and Churches?)

How sharply our children will be ashamed
taking at last their vengeance for these horrors
remembering how in so strange a time
common integrity could look like courage.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “Talk,” trans. Robin Milner-Galland and Peter Levi, in Selected Poems (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1962).

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?