Monthly Archives: January 2016

In this column two weeks ago I wrote about the numerous leadership failures in higher education. I heard from some readers who were surprised that institutions filled with so many “intelligent people,” as someone put it, could be so prone to so many fiascoes. While they understand that when you hire people from outside academia those newcomers may find themselves at a disadvantage in trying to understand the unique undertakings of colleges and universities, they cannot comprehend why that is the case for people who have spent years in higher education.

The reality is that despite their insularity, campuses show many of the same management problems of other human organizations. No matter how intelligent some people may seem, the lack of training and good role models to learn from, as well as ignorance about good management practices and leadership skills in higher education, usually results in bad outcomes. Not only that, but we also have to contend with the fact that many of those mediocre leaders do not realize what a bad job they are doing. As Charles Darwin suggested in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, “ignorance begets confidence.”

But this passage is much more than a mere quote. In fact, this organizational problem has been studied for some time now and is well known among management and labor psychologists. It even has a name: The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

In 1999 David Dunning and Justin Kruger, psychology professors at Cornell University, published the results of their work studying why some people make so many bad mistakes. Based on a series of experiments they suggested that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. Although, as the saying goes, to err is human, ignorance is at the bottom of what really separates good quality decisions from poor ones. And they are the result of the lack of appropriate criteria.

These circumstances result from people remaining unaware of their incompetence and, as a result, failing to take any measures that might remediate their ineptitude. Actually, a lot of the performance review processes we see in many organizations are aimed precisely at establishing these performance expectations to avoid managerial failure.

One of the experiments these researchers conducted was with a group of undergraduate students who were asked just as they walked out of a final exam to rate their performance for the class they had just completed. The researchers then compared those students’ self-evaluations with their tests results. What they found was that the worst students grossly overestimated their own performance (by roughly 30 percent), while top students somewhat underestimated their performance. No wonder so many weak students always complain about their grades. These results have also been the same in other studies about other tasks such as logical reasoning, playing chess or tennis, reading comprehension, or operating a motor vehicle.

Thus, Dunning and Kruger concluded that in addition to poor performers overestimating their own skills, they also fail to recognize their inadequacy compared to the genuine skills in others. In other words, they were not only grossly unaware of how incompetent they were, but also unaware of how competent other people could be.

A direct result is that in addition to their own incompetence, poor performers will likely surround themselves with people like them, not with better people who could help to improve their performance. To make things worse, subsequent studies suggested that poor performers do not like to hear from others that they need to improve. Therefore, the person who is incompetent does not want to hear criticism. This leads the incompetent to fall into a vicious cycle by not recognizing their own incompetence and not taking measures to correct their failings.

Because of lack of training and good examples to follow, good management practices and leadership skills in academia tend to be exception and not the rule. And that is when the DunningKruger Effect kicks in, making those people who are incompetent at what they do not recognize their weaknesses, surround themselves with other incompetent people and respond negatively to any criticism about their performance. Another typical reaction is for those individuals to eliminate anyone who may make them look bad. This behavior serves to institutionalize mediocrity.

Although this conclusion seems a logical conclusion, what a lot of people do not understand is that there is a multiplying effect of incompetence in any organization. In order to ensure that an institution will work well, one needs to ensure that at the very top of it there are competent individuals who will have little patience for incompetence down the line of command. This idea seems simple, but given the numerous examples of leadership failures in academia what we see is the opposite.

One of the consequences of this situation is that competent individuals have to report to incompetent ones. They either leave the organization, or, in order to survive for either personal or labor reasons, adapt to the inadequacies of the leadership, resulting in the deterioration of the organization. At the end of the day it is the institution that pays the price for their incompetence.

If we really want the best for our institutions of higher education, we need to hire people who are better than us. And that is a message that has to be understood by boards of trustees when selecting campus presidents, because that leader will be the one who will either be or will tolerate incompetence.

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When Ignorance Begets Confidence In Higher Ed

The issue of race in higher education has once again become a topic of public discussion, this time provoked by a statement made by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia during the hearing over a case on affirmative action at the University of Texas early last December.

During the hearing Scalia asked whether it might be better for black students to go to “a slower-track school where they do well” than to go to a highly selective college like The University of Texas with the help of affirmative action.

The argument is based on an educational idea known as the “mismatch theory of college admissions.”

According to this theory beneficiaries of affirmative action who are admitted to very competitive colleges may do worse academically and socially than if they enrolled at less selective colleges that wouldn’t have considered their race or ethnicity.

In other words, affirmative action can be bad for minorities. Supporters of this theory also claim that allowing certain minorities into selective schools will damage the quality of the education in general for those institutions.

This topic is the kind that generates a lot of discussion and debate, one in which facts oftentimes get lost in the fog of politics.

So let’s take a look at what we know.

To begin with, there is a vast body of research showing that minority students who benefit from affirmative action get higher grades at the institutions they attend, leave school at lower rates than others and are generally more satisfied in higher education.

Attendance at a selective institution is also associated with higher earnings and higher college completion rates.

This contradicts the tenets of the mismatch theory.

For example, according to researchers at the University of Michigan when one looks at graduation rates or future earnings, minorities who are admitted via affirmative action to more selective schools do at least as well as – and often better – than they could have been expected to do had they gone to less selective institutions.

These researchers conducted a thorough study that examined nearly three decades of data on how affirmative action polices had worked at their university and found that minority students who entered the university through the affirmative action policy earned as much over their careers as white students.

In another study conducted by researchers from the University of California and the University of Wisconsin, minority students were found to be less likely to drop out of an academically challenging school than a less demanding institution.

And these are just two examples of this kind of research.

According to the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, roughly half of government leaders and half of corporate leaders are graduates of just 12 selective colleges, providing them a network of contacts and career opportunities.

More minorities attending these selective colleges would result in them also having this kind of access to professional connections.

In the case involving The University of Texas, the lawyers arguing in favor of maintaining some sort of affirmative action at that institution presented data showing that students admitted using race as one of many criteria fare better academically over time than those admitted from the top 10 percent of their high school class, without regard to race.

If the Supreme Court strikes down any type of affirmative action, the consequences can be dire for the future of this country because it could lead us back to a form of the “separate but equal” doctrine of education.

It will also fail to prepare all students, regardless of race, to succeed in a world that is more and more diverse.

Studies conducted since World War I among Army recruits have shown that the differences in IQ performance observed among different ethnic groups are due to environmental factors such as socio-economic and educational disparities and not inherent to race.

That is why the U.S. Army became the first public institution in this country to eliminate discrimination based on ethnicity. This argument also resurrects the old and discredited idea that there is a correlation between race and IQ.

Also, despite numerous studies, no genetic factor has been found to have a causal relation with group difference in intelligence test scores.

Also, let’s remember that elite schools that admit minorities do not do it blindly, but use a number of criteria to accept those students most likely to succeed.

It is interesting that these doubts about affirmative action are taking place in the Supreme Court.

Among the beneficiaries of this policy is one of Scalia’s fellow justices, Sonia Sotomayor, whose admission through affirmative action to Princeton opened doors that ultimately led to the nation’s highest court.

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U.S. Supreme Court Takes On Affirmative Action

The strongest argument one can make regarding a complicated issue is to integrate both a set of statistics and some specific examples that validate the point you are trying to prove.

In the last few years we have seen the transformation of the figure of the college president. Originally it was a person exemplifying the best of higher education, with a solid record as a scholar and as a teacher. Those credentials allowed him or her to have the respect and support of both the internal and external constituencies. However, in the last decade or so the number of college leaders that are coming from outside academia has been steadily increasing. According to the American Council on Education, 20 percent of U.S. college presidents selected in 2012 came from fields outside academia, up from 13 percent six years earlier. And if you follow the announcements of new campus leaders you will probably see that that proportion will continue to increase in the coming years.

We are also seeing an increased number of college leaders failing. According to the book “Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How to Prevent It,” those failures have become more and more common, up to 50 per year. Among the most recently publicized instances of these failures has been the case of Timothy M. Wolfe, who was forced to resign as president of the University of Missouri after racial issues on campus made the national news. Mr. Wolfe had no academic experience, coming from the business world as a former executive at IBM and Novell Americas. From the beginning he started to behave in ways that ran contrary to the philosophy of an academic institution, a culture that places great value on the concept of shared governance. According to some faculty, he was autocratic, failed to consult different constituencies and appeared indifferent to student concerns.

Because of cases like this, campus communities – particularly the faculty – are becoming more and more resistant to accepting non-academics as their leaders. Take, for example, the University of Iowa. This year and under pressure from several sectors outside the institution, the board of trustees chose Bruce Harreld, former president of the restaurant chain Boston Market, as the new university leader. The decision was criticized as soon as it happened. A survey showed that only three percent of the participating faculty considered him qualified for the job. Subsequent events confirmed those suspicions. Within weeks of his appointment, Harreld suggested in a meeting that professors unprepared to teach be shot, comments that generated a public uproar, particularly in these times of campus shootings. He later apologized for those remarks.

Although boards of trustees may have their reasons to choose people from outside academia as campus presidents, they do so at their own risk and that of the institution as a whole. These governing bodies claim they need people with business acumen who can navigate the financial challenges faced by higher education today caused by an erosion of their traditional sources of funding. This need seems particularly relevant at public institutions that have faced significant cuts from state governments. For this reason, boards of trustees look for people with more fundraising experience or political connections.

The problem is that universities are not corporations and their main activity, education, is not a commodity. The culture of colleges and universities is deeply rooted in traditions that date back to medieval Europe. Campuses are highly unique environments that unless you have had a long experience with them you will have a hard time understanding. For one thing, consultation is key to getting things done. Orders from the top will not do, particularly with faculty who are very well versed in the tactics of passive resistance and because tenure provides them with a much higher sense of job security than your average employee.

Dealing with issues such as student protests, race, inequality and bigotry require levels of sensitivity and finesse not always common in the corporate world.

Yet, we need to recognize that most people in academia are not trained to be effective leaders. We see that from department chairs and program directors all the way to presidents/chancellors. A number of institutions have been providing some training opportunities but that has happened in very few places and only sporadically, which means that most people in positions of leadership do not go through any training specific to the needs of the academic institution.

Until very recently the only option for would-be presidents/chancellors to get some training was provided by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, which has an enrollment of about 50 per year. In the summer of 2012, the American Council on Education launched the Institute for New Presidents. In 2014 the presidents of Arizona State University and Georgetown University announced a joint program aimed at creating the Institute for Innovation in Higher Education Leadership. Others provide more specific training for new presidents, such as The Council of Independent Colleges and the American Association of Community Colleges through its Presidents Academy Summer Institute, as well as one by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Although all these represent positive developments, they address only part of the problem. It does not matter how prepared a person is for a position of campus leader when the people who hire him or her (boards of trustees or system leaders) do not really know what is needed for that position. Those boards of trustees, composed mainly of people who also have no academic experience, many times hire someone who has an expertise in a narrow issue of concern, because of personal chemistry, or just because that person does not seem to threaten the status quo. What that means is that they are hiring someone they think they want, which is not at all the same as hiring who they need.

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Colleges Should Be Preparing Their Own Leaders