Rainy mornings, worthy projects, and good stories

Autumn is not here yet, but you can smell it. The tiny pungent aroma of wet leaves, still deciding whether to turn or not. The slow lazy rain openly invites all procrastinators and homebodies to stay put, get a Netflix movie, and do nothing. It is wonderful morning for me to break my usual frenetic pace and just think about things.
One of the issues I tried to tackle this week is that of our various partnerships, grants, and public service projects. Which ones should we support, and which we should not? And to what extent can we do it? All wondering comes from ignorance. Several requests for different kinds of support made me realize I have no method of deciding.
What if you found out your Dean has used School’s money to support a particular charity; let’s just say www.iorphan.org , which I happen to like. Just cut a check from one of our accounts, and sent it to them. Would that be OK? - Of course, not. I do not have faculty and administration consent, and there is nothing in our mission that would justify this kind of expenditure. Note, the project is undoubted worthy, and deserves support. But the intrinsic worth of a project is not enough.
OK, what if you found out we provide reassigned time for someone who offers free or deeply discounted classes to teacher of… let’s say Anthropology, in Rhode Island? This feels closer to what we do, and perhaps should be supported. But maybe not? The job of a Dean is really not that closely supervised, and I am not likely to be questioned on decisions like these. However, I always want to have a good story as if somebody asked.
So, let’s slice it. First, any kind of material support should be connected to our mission, which is, if you have forgotten, “is to prepare education and human service professionals with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to promote student learning and development.” Anthropology teachers pass the test, but Russian orphans do not.
Second, the needs of the community are immeasurable, but we have very limited resources. The public (represented by the Board of Governors) wants us to keep tuition low. If we teach for free, or offer deep discounts to one group of students, how is it fair to other groups of students? For example, we run a graduate class for Anthropology teachers for $50 per credit, and charge other students $342 per credit. The latter are, in effect, subsidizing the former. But did we ask students if they like to help out? Did we ask the taxpayers of Rhode Island if they would like to help out Anthropology teachers specifically, at the expense of, say English teachers? No, we did not. Therefore the project cannot drain resources from other programs, and it should at least pay for itself, no matter how worthy it is.
However, things get complicated when a subsidized project actually has direct benefits to our main programs. For example, if we manage to get a status of Peace Corps Fellows site, it may help us recruit completely new population students, which will increase revenues and help everyone. Just the free advertisement of RIC on their website is probably worth good money.
Here is another example of a paradoxical logic, from my previous institution. A colleague was asking for substantial reassigned time to edit a major national journal with 40,000 copies circulation. How is this not a pet project? How does it benefit the rest of us? I argued that every time the journal is printed, 40,000 people will see the name of the institution on its cover page. This kind of publicity costs a lot, and we are getting a great deal doing it for a few thousand dollars a year needed to replace him. Should everyone who edits a journal get the same perks? Of course not, the logic of equality does not apply here. A small journal with only a few dozen readers will not provide nearly enough exposure to justify the cost. It is also easier to edit.
That’s some of the thinking that goes into assessing all the worthy projects for material support.