Customer service at universities: From non-existing to pathetic

As I was listening to Horst Schulze, the Ritz-Carlton co-founder, I was suddenly struck by how poorly universities do customer service, and how used we all are to our low standards. At Ritz-Carlton hotels, whoever gets a complaint from a customer – either a room cleaner or front desk person – they deal with it. They do not send the concerned guests to someone else. Every employee, including kitchen staff, are authorized to spend up to $2000 without further approval to make a customer happy. By contrast, on many campuses, hundreds of students are still forced to walk around collecting signatures on paper forms such as Add-Drop class, and Change of Major. Technologies to eliminate this irritating exercise have been around for at least 25 years, and yet no one somehow thinks it is a priority. Even freshmen know that electronic workflows do exist. They assume we simply do not care enough, and they are right.

Despite all the talk about student success, most universities are not committed to customer service. We say all the right things about student success, student engagement, and student experience, but we fail to address multiple bureaucratic micro-barriers to having a pleasant, friction-free experience on campus. We profess lofty ideas of challenging their minds, expanding their horizons, and training them for real life, but fail to make campus life as smooth as a stay in a good hotel. Do you want more evidence? Let me give you a few, and these things are by no mean unique to my university.

Our systems are so glitchy that hundreds of students fail to register for the classes they need and want on time. Students experience massive anxieties and frustrations, and so do chairs, program coordinators, and staff members that have to manually register all of these desperate students. This happens every semester on every large campus, and somehow is never treated as an emergency, and it is by choice. We have other priorities. Not one university has put in their strategic plan something like fixing these small bugs.

Our rules are so complex, that the absolute majority of students do not understand them. I have written about problems with catalogs several times before and will not repeat the argument. Just tell me what kind of business creates such complex rules from their customers? What kind of business keeps their customers accountable to the rules that are beyond comprehension? Just imagine your local grocery store having a loyalty program explained on 30 pages of text.

We tolerate incompetent employees (both faculty and staff) who are rude, patronizing, or dismissive, skip or cancel classes, do not return graded work for months, do not respond to emails, bounce a concerned student around, refuse to help, do not bother to prepare for class or update syllabi. There are very few of those, about 1 %, but they cause sustained damage to many students. We tolerate them for years and decades. What kind of business can afford to do that?

We all have no refund policies, no matter how awful was student experience in a particular class or program. Yes, sometimes we relent, and offer tuition refund to make a legal threat go away. There is very limited practice, but no policy. We are definitely not Costco, and not willing to bet any money on student satisfaction with our services.

I know what you all are going to say – we are not a hotel, and education is not a service industry. We need to have authority over students, we maintain academic standards, and ours is a higher calling. I say: BS. There is no educational reason not to make student experience pleasant and anxiety-free. We just cannot muster the will to make a simple and strong commitment to customer service. We prefer build innovation hubs and art museums, instead of truly caring for the everyday experiences on our students. The first university who implements the kind of commitment Horst Schultze did will set the trend for the next generation of higher education.

Trumpism and the discourse of sin in education

How do educators talk to people who seem to be impervious to ethical argument? A democratic society is hard to conceive without the possibility of persuasion. The problem is not in “echo chambers” of social and mass media, and not in deficiencies of communications. The problem is in refusal to enter dialogue and to consider ethical argumentation. This paper will examine the Augustinian concept of sin and Martin Luther King’s notion of “social sin” and indicate the educational potential of the authoritative moral discourse.

In his July 17, 2019 speech, President Trump had not even once spoke of compassion, empathy, love, forgiveness. The speech was built on such virtues as greatness, success, victory, and revenge, the state of the economy, trade, markets, and jobs.[i] A typical MAGA rally otherwise, it distinguished itself by audience’s chant “Send her back,” repeated 13 times under the speaker’s approving gaze. The chant was referring to the Somali-born House representative Ilhan Omar; it echoed the President’s own tweet a few days earlier. The incident did not damage Mr. Trump’s ratings that have been at about 40% for a year.[ii] Trump’s supporters show no sign of abandoning their leader – not because they do not understand him, but because they do. Regardless of the outcome of the impeachment process, and of 2020 presidential elections, Trumpism is here to stay whether Trump stays or goes.

The psychological Ur-Fascism

I will begin with a diagnosis. Earlier explanations of Trumpism still works – to a degree. The movement’s core is disaffected, economically constricted, mostly White people of all social classes, alienated from both the new global economy and from democratic politics. However, the explanation does not account for such people’s refusal to acknowledge Trump’s moral failings, both personal and of his performance in the office. I used to think it was a form of denial, but the chant episode shattered the illusion. Trumpism is not a case of a bad shepherd leading ignorant flock. It is more likely that he is just saying what these people want to hear, so it is not clear who is corrupting whom. The phenomenon of mutual reinforcement is hard to deny. We are dealing with a mass movement that resembles Fascism – not necessarily as a political ideology (although there is some of that, too), but as a cultural and psychological phenomenon. My intention here is not to stick alarmist labels on people for political reasons, but attempt to find the closest historical analogy. Fascism just fits best.

I will begin with Dmitry Bykov, a well-regarded Russian writer and literary critic. Bykov initially relies on a work by Umberto Eco Ur-Fascism.[iii] Eco points out significant differences among various totalitarian regimes in the first part of 20th century Europe, and yet tries to identify family resemblance. He lists 14 features of Ur-Fascism, all of which can be observed in Trumpism: anti-modernism, the cult of tradition, irrationalism, and rejection of critical thinking, the fear of difference, the appeal to frustrated middle class, the conspiratorial nationalism, the sense of humiliation by enemies, the idea of life as permanent warfare, the cult of a hero, the machismo, the elective populism and disdain for parliamentary institutions, and finally, the use of Newspeak. It is debatable how many of those features can be found in Trumpism—arguably all of them and most at the very least.

Bykov elaborates on the idea that Fascism rejects modernity. He further defines Fascism as a “cult of ecstatic, orgiastic pleasure.”[iv] Fascism, he says, is intentional evil. His description of Fascism in terms of erotic and intentional embrace of evil is very perceptive:

"If the Modern is characterized by a cult of suffering and sacrifice, Fascism is a cult of pleasure. […] Take a look at the German culture of 1930-s. […] Notice the excitement of corporal liberation, the ecstasy, the cult of eroticism, of sexuality. The Fascist culture contains a lot of sex; it is the sexuality of submission, the sado-masochistic, and celebratory, complacent sex. […] It is the cult or orgiastic, ecstatic pleasure that is characteristic of Fascism. […] Fascism is a conscious evil, because without the intent, there is no orgasm, and no orgy. It is a conscious and joyful violation of moral taboos.[v]"

This is why people like David Remnick are wrong when they are trying to persuade Trumpists by appealing to their moral sensibilities.[vi] Trumpists know they are being bad and unkind to immigrants, to people of color, to the disabled, to sexual minorities—to all others. The unkindness is exactly what they enjoy. It is a collective psychosis impenetrable to rational dialogue. A Trump rally is an orgy of hate, and people show up for the same reason they would attend other orgies: for the pleasure of being bad. The sheer number of those attending allows them to avoid personal responsibility, to drown the moral voice in the crowd’s ecstasy. Notice the joyful rejection of “political correctness” which is simply a contemporary version of politeness or propriety. The ability to say what is on one’s mind is an act of delightful liberation from ethics. The source of pleasure is not the mass violence yet, but the first step in that direction. After all, the process of dehumanization always starts with words, not with actions. While Trumpism is a very young species of Fascism, it bears the mark of a future monster.

The phenomenon of the conscious rejection of moral constraints may be understood in a pragmatic sense. What do we do with it, at both the political level, but also in the educational realm? We have a diagnosis, but what is the pathogen? Is there a cure? Can people be inoculated against it? I will now turn to St. Augustine’s concept of sin in search for answers.

The concept of the sin

Augustine begins with a famous incident, when he and his friends stole pears from a neighbor, and fed most of them to swine. He describes his motives as “having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my own error—not that for which I erred, but the error itself. Base soul, falling from Your [God’s—author] firmament to utter destruction— not seeking anything through the shame but the shame itself!”[vii] He notices the pure desire to be bad, to break moral taboos. In general, he observes, there is something else that sinners normally want – money, power, or pleasure. However, in this case, “my sole gratification in [pears] being my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy.”[viii] If Bykov is right and Fascism is intentional evil, Augustine has captured it well.

He eventually suggests the origin of this desire to be bad: it is the desire to “the obscured likeness of Thy omnipotence.”[ix] Conscious evil is a case of seeking the thrill of pretend omnipotence, a case of God-envy. Augustine establishes a more general, and important principle: all sins are shadows or perverse versions of some benign desires:

And sloth seems to long for rest; but what sure rest is there besides the Lord? Luxury would fain be called plenty and abundance; but Thou art the fullness and unfailing plenteousness of unfading joys. Prodigality presents a shadow of liberality; but Thou art the most lavish giver of all good. Covetousness desires to possess much; and Thou art the Possessor of all things. Envy contends for excellence; but what so excellent as Thou? Anger seeks revenge; who avenges more justly than Thou? Fear starts at unwonted and sudden chances which threaten things beloved, and is wary for their security; […] Grief languishes for things lost in which desire had delighted itself, even because it would have nothing taken from it, as nothing can be taken from Thee.[x]

According to Augustine, sin is a desire without God. One can also understand it as unlimited desire, where missing limitations are not of quantity, but of quality. He does not call for moderation, which would be a quantitative limitation. Instead, a desire must be shaped for some higher purpose. Sin is desire not shaped by love. In Christian theology, “God is love,”[xi] among other things. It is important to note that the kind of love John refers to in his gospel is agape, not the romantic, exclusive love. Agape is more of a kindness to distant others. The ultimate sin is the desire to be God, at least where the omnipotence is concerned. It is the desire for power without a good reason to use of that power.

The idea of privation was not unique to Augustine; it was more or less a common place among his contemporaries, both in the West and in the East. For example, Mark the Hermit thought that the source of all sins is to forget God.[xii] The idea goes back to Aristotle’s concept of privation, the opposite of possession. Any desire not shaped and channeled by agape is sinful. The entire Trump speech at the rally is one long manifest of sin. I must note here that what I am saying here is not new, and should be known to any anyone with rudimentary knowledge of theology. The fact that a significant segment of American clergy seem to ignore such a direct manifestation of sin is quite puzzling.

The link to Bykov’s notion of orgiastic impulse in Fascism is Augustine’s observation on the social nature of sin:

"…had I at that time loved the pears I stole, and wished to enjoy them, I might have done so alone, if I could have been satisfied with the mere commission of the theft by which my pleasure was secured; nor needed I have provoked that itching of my own passions, by the encouragement of accomplices. But as my enjoyment was not in those pears, it was in the crime itself, which the company of my fellow-sinners produced.[xiii]"

Augustin then wonders about the origins of conformism, especially “when they say, ‘Let us go, let us do it,’ we are ashamed not to be shameless.”[xiv] This confirms his initial observation: sin is a perversion of a natural human desire for friendship, a perversion marked by the absence of the divine grace. The joy of being bad has to be shared with others; it does not have much pull when enjoyed alone. This is why one needs a rally, a movement, a social media platform to derive pleasure from sin as such. I will return to the sociality of sin in the concluding section of this paper.

The problem with Augustine’s initial concept of sin is that he does not stick to it. As soon as Chapter VIII of the Confessions, he begins wondering about “sins against nature,” including those of Sodomites, which are very quickly swapped for “those offenses which are contrary to the customs of men are to be avoided according to the customs severally prevailing.”[xv] He still contends that “when God commands anything contrary to the customs or compacts of any nation to be done, though it were never done by them before.” However, that is where Augustine and Christians after him go wrong. Instead of consistently applying his own concept of sin, he succumbs to convention. To remain consistent, he would have said something like that: “the Sodomite desire, like any other, is subject to the presence of the Divine Grace. Without it, it is sinful; with it, it is not.” Yet he never says that. He began with a focused and insightful concept, and ended up with one broad, unfocused, and open to abuse. Christians were trying to convert, and could not afford to be too radical where conventional mores were concerned. It was very difficult to develop a philosophy, a theology, and a social institution of the church at the same time. That is not an excuse for philosophers; we just need to remember Augustin’s failings.

Stretching the notion of sin to the cover the social conventions opened the door to manipulations with the sin discourse. The concept that was initially meant to help accept and shape one’s desires, was eventually used to classify and categorize desires into good and bad ones for the benefits of maintaining social order. Can the original ethical sense of sin be recovered? It is hard to say if the word itself is salvageable. Perhaps it is not, for too many other connotations pollute its original meaning. I am more concerned with the philosophical notion than with the word with which it can be described.

The Augustinian concept of sin does specifically recognize the importance of desire in human action. He goes overboard in his suspicion of desire itself, but it does not negate the importance of desire, including the most important desire to belong. He offers a criterion that distinguishes constructive desires from destructive ones: any desire has to have another directionality, and extra vector, in addition to the object of desire. Augustine teaches us to check if our desire is consistent with agape.

There is an important question here: how do you know whether God wants something or not, and whether your desire is therefore blessed or sinful. The difficulty here is rooted in the very concept of God, both central to religious worldviews, and elusive by design. Epistemologically, God is a construct that describes intentionality and directionality of truth seeking. It is a kind of an ideal that was intentionally left almost blank or extremely vague, so it maintains the potential for a universal appeal. All Abrahamic traditions, as well as Buddhism and Hinduism, point to the general direction of compassion, love/agape, and kindness. There are significant differences in application, but a remarkable unanimity about the general direction. While this cluster of values does not in any way exhaust the maddeningly multiple meanings of the divine, their absence strongly suggests the absence of God.

Negative criteria are in general more robust than positive ones. For example, correlation of two variables can rarely prove causation, but the absence of correlation generally proves the lack of causation. It is the same with God. The pragmatic sin test is simple: take a discourse and look for instances of compassion, love, or kindness, as well as forgiveness, and charity. If these values are referred to, the discourse may or may not be good; it is open for further analysis. If these values are absent, but strong and shared desire is present, it is definitely sinful. Sin is easier to detect than goodness.

Trumpism is sinful not because of its economic or social policies, or its stance on climate change or on deregulation. Those are within the realm of legitimate political disagreements. No, it is sinful because of the collective orgiastic solidarity of being uncharitable to others. To recognize the sin within oneself, it is enough to ask, “Why am I having so much fun?” Even a quick reflection of the rally’s content will reveal the utter absence of agape in it. One does not have to be a religious person to recognize the gaping void where compassion should have been all along.

How does one talk to sinners

Although this is outside the scope of this essay, a brief detour on how to talk to those not yet infected. The conventional wisdom so far has been to focus not so much on Trump, but on developing specific policy proposals. I think only the first part is right. The way forward is to create the broadest possible anti-Fascist coalition, and focus on the moral danger of the Trumpist movement. Yes, do not focus on Trump as a person, but focus instead on the moral abyss that is Trumpism. People who did not succumb to the temptation need the sense of urgency to resist. Fascism have been defeated many times in the past by creating such broad anti-Fascist coalitions. Popular anti-Fascist fronts rarely presented positive programs, but knew exactly what they were against. It can and should be done in the US one more time. Instead of debating fine differences in policies, considering the benefits of Medicare for all, anti-Trump candidates should appeal to the broadest possible coalition of liberals, progressives, and moderate conservatives. The only reason Nazis took power in Germany was the Communists’ stubborn refusal to form a National Front with Socialists and centrists. By the time they relented, it was too late. However, the strategy worked in France in 1936, and yet again in 2017.

The question more pertinent to this essays is, - How do we talk to Trumpists who have already succumbed to the temptation? Here I revisit the Augustinian notion of sociality of sin (the orgiastic component of ur-Fascism). Martin Luther King has formulated a similar idea in a more contemporary terms: “When man comes together collected in society, when persons come together and come into, bring into being this big something called society, then sin rises to even more ominous proportions.”[xvi] King develops the notion of “social sin” that in his words, “is almost inescapable in this level.”[xvii] King takes Augustine’s observation a step further. While for Augustine, the social dimension of sin was a curious aside, King realizes that sociality is actually one of primary causes of sin.

King’s solution to the massive social sin is another key Christian concept of Grace. Grace is a gift, something one neither deserves, nor merits. Historically, it has been invented in Judaism to counter the naïve hope for “contractual” or reciprocal relationship with God. The prohibition of idolatry has the same origin. King gives several examples of sin and grace; the most poignant one is about racism:

America, you’ve done that. You’ve trampled over sixty million of your precious citizens. You have called them “dogs,” and you have called them “niggers.” You have, you have pushed them aside and kicked them around and pushed them in an inferior economic and political position. And now you have made them almost depersonalized and inhuman. And there you are in that far country of oppression, trampling over your children. But western civilization, America, you can come home and if you will come home, I will take you in. And I will bring the fatted calf and I will cry out to all of the eternities, “Hallelujah,” for my nation has come home.[xviii]

Like any Christian, King predicates Grace on redemption: “If you will come home” means “if you repent.” How do you make Trumpists to repent, especially given the strong sociality of their particular sin? How do you repent alone, how do you go against your friends and co-sinners? What makes social sin a super-sin is that is masks as solidarity, as friendship. The camaraderie of raiding the neighbor’s garden is the vehicle that gets the virus of evil past the ethical immunity defenses of the soul.

The whole point of all religions over the millennia was to have an institution, where one is told what one does not necessarily wants to hear. A religious congregation is an authority that would call people on their sins. In a sense, telling people what they would rather not hear that is the central social function of any religion. American religious institutions all but failed this essential mission. Support for Trump among White Evangelicals is 25% higher than the national average.[xix] For Evangelicals specifically, it is a tragedy with long shadow stretching into the future, implications of which will be painful and long lasting. Let me just cite the diagnosis by Peter Wehner: Evangelicals are “Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche.”[xx] This may be unfair to Nietzsche, but fair to the Evangelical thought leaders.

The point is that the society as a whole cannot count on of its Evangelical churches and Orthodox synagogues to bring Trumpists back to their senses. Even if they were willing to do that, their reach and authority are not sufficient. Besides, plenty of more secular people support Trump. The institutions we have now are public education and mass culture. For better or worse, teachers and celebrities are clergy and bishops of today. Schools, universities, and streaming services are temples of today. Movies are sermons, and social media is the church hall. Whether we like it or not, there is nothing else.

Here again, the example of early Christianity is telling. The late Roman Empire was a remarkably pluralistic society with respect to religion, with Manicheans, Arians, Gnostics, and Trinitarian Christians competing for the minds of both the elites and of the masses. Of course, Christians received huge help from the imperial authority, but they were remarkably successful on their own it as well. They were not big on dialogue. In fact, all they did was telling people how rotten they are, and how terrible their sins were. The authoritative moralistic discourse worked in the past, and there is no reason it should not work now. M.L.King’s sermons were still sermons, but their appeal was not limited to a particular congregation, or even to the community of believers. In search for a non-denominational, and secular equivalent of a sermon, I will use Mikhail Bakhtin distinction between the authoritative and internally persuasive (dialogical) discourses:

"[The authoritative discourse] enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with authority – with political power, an institution, a person – and it stands or falls together with that authority. One cannot divide it up – agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part. [xxi]"

In the internally persuasive (dialogical) discourse, a word is half-ours and half-someone else’s:

"Its creativity and productivennes consists precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and doesn’t remain in an isolated and static condition ...The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean.[xxii]"

Bakhtin himself, and many of his followers, including the author of this essay, have always posited the dialogical discourse as superior to the authoritative one. However, the ideal of dialogicality clearly fails when we encounter ur-Fascism. The social sin is impervious to dialogue with outsiders. However, it is not impervious to any and all communication. King demonstrates the authoritative discourse of a preacher, an impassionate direct speech that is aimed at destroying the social fabric of the sinful orgiastic community. What really works against orgies of immorality is shame: not dialogue, but the authoritative discourse of a preacher who delivers the self-righteous admonition. The victory of the Civil Rights movement, no matter how imperfect, was a result of shaming the White majority into abandoning its social sin. Dialogue had little to do with it, nor did any kind of rational persuasion.

The authoritative discourse of shame works, because it appeals to the evolutionary shaped social instincts of our species. It is the same instinct that makes the social sin possible. Both sin and shame are social, conformist, and intuitive. Telling people they are sinners plays on anxiety of belonging – what if I belong to a wrong crowd? What if I am the only one naked in this orgy of hate while most of guests are dressed and well-behaved? What if the other, larger group will reject me for it? God in this sense represents the larger, universal social group that includes not just the rest of the humanity, but also the past and the present of humanity.

As long as liberals, the Left, and centrists speak with a voice of a particular group, one of many political voices, they can be ignored by the Trumpist. Only someone who can represent a higher authority, who can speak as a historic American, or as a voice of God can plant doubt into the sinful solidarity of Trumpism. Many educators have cultivated a careful, neutral teacher voice, voice that is reluctant to sound like preacher’s. It is a voice of dialogue, and of doubt, a voice that asked students to form their own opinion, to exercise critical thinking. The pedagogical discourse was meant to resemble Bakhtin’s internally-persuasive (dialogical) discourse. However, we went too far, and I am now calling for passionate, authoritative teacher voice that shows no doubt and hides no position. There are areas of fundamental human morality that are off-limits for dialogue; that are non-negotiable and non-discussable. Those are the fundamental, essential values of love/agape, compassion, and kindness. It would be wise to point out that the authoritarian moral discourse has its limits, and that a teacher must master the internally-persuasive (dialogical) voice, too. However, it should be made clear that both are acceptable, and should be used for different purposes.

The same or almost the same can be said about the mass culture. Someone has to portray the social sin of Trumpism, in all of its complexity, with its deceptive and so appealing qualities, and with its sinful nature. While Hollywood almost universally rejected Trump, it has done almost nothing to expose the moral failings of the movement he represents. There has been no artistic examination of the phenomenon, only a few attempts to expose the far-right wing of the movement. There is no movie where an average Trumpist would recognize himself and be horrified.

We should be calling on people who go to Trump's rallies: "it smells really bad, and you will be ashamed of yourselves one day. These rallies are not fueled by compassion or by love. I know they feel good, but ask yourself, why do you feel good? It feels great to free yourself from the constraints of political correctness. It feels good to feel great again. Nevertheless, your mother and your clergy have probably told you, we should not do everything that feels good. Watch out; it is a dirty path, because freedom at the expense of compassion is the path to hell. There is no goodness there, only pleasure, only freedom from constraints of common decency. No, you did not go all the way down that path, but you are on it. It is not too late to turn back."


[i] Donald Trump Speech Transcript at North Carolina Rally ‘MAGA’ Event, Rev https://www.rev.com/blog/donald-trump-maga-event-speech-transcript-north-carolina-rally


[ii] Project FiveThirtyEight, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/, retrieved July 26, 2019.


[iii] Eco, Umberto. "Ur-fascism." The New York Review of Books 42, no. 11 (1995): 12-15.


[iv] Дмитрий Быков, «Фашизм как высшая стадия постмодернизма» [Dmitry Bykov, Fascism as the highest stage of Post-modernism], Radio lecture 07/10/2016, https://yadi.sk/d/keP7PPI6wPS3y


[v] Bykov, 2016, translation by the author.


[vi] Remnick, David, “A Racist in the White House,” The New Yorker, 07/15/2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-racist-in-the-white-house-donald-trump-tweets-ocasio-cortez-tlaib-omar-pressley


[vii] Augustine, Saint. Basic Writings of Saint Augustine. Vol. 1. Random House, 1948: 24.


[viii] Ibid., 25


[ix] Ibid., 26


[x] Ibid.


[xi] John 4:7-9.


[xii] Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. 3. The golden age of Greek patristic literature: from the Council of Nicaea to the Council of Chalcedon. Spectrum Publ., 1960, p. 505.


[xiii] Ibid., 27.


[xiv] Ibid., 28


[xv] Ibid., 37.


[xvi] King, Martin Luther, Jr., Man's Sin and God's Grace, circa 1954-1960, The Martin Luther King, Jr.

Research and Education Institute, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/mans-sin-and-gods-grace


[xvii] Ibid.


[xviii] Ibid.


[xix] Wehner, Peter, “The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity.” The Atlantic, JUL 5, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/evangelical-christians-face-deepening-crisis/593353/


[xx] Ibid.


[xxi] Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imaginatio.n: Four Essays by M.M.Bakhtin. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342-346.


[xxii] Ibid

The relational university

In higher ed, we have been innovating a lot, but mostly in the wrong areas. The information technology has done very little to improve instruction. Assessment and data analytics have done very little as well. It is time to recognize that students come to universities to have the cultural experience of college, to make life-long friends and to find older, wiser people with whom they can build stronger relationships. In many cases, they come to fulfill their families’ dreams and aspirations, to gain recognition and higher social status. Of course, they also come for skills, leading to good jobs, but those are actually hard to predict and measure, so let’s keep them a bit of a mystery. Best universities have been on the path I am describing for a long, long time, although some of the regional comprehensives may be a bit behind. This is not a proposal for radical change; rather, an acknowledgement of what works, and an appeal to focus on it, while reducing effort in other areas.

To push a university along these lines, we need to do several things:

1. We need to refocus the entire innovation strategy on the relational side of education, and pull the resources out of the informational side. Education has turned out to be a lot more about relations than it is about information.

2. Radically reduce the complexity of curriculum and program/graduation requirements. Students are uncomfortable with too many choices; there is enough evidence to show that too many choices frustrate rather than liberate. Processing the choices create logistical nightmares for administrators. Not a single student is able to understand academic requirements as they presented in our catalogs. As a result, we create massive anxieties, breeding ground for many costly errors, and must spend many resources on translating the bureaucratese into plain English – for every single student. While I am a strong believer in the value of gened (common core) and liberal arts, there are ways to make those simpler. Academics should be as easy to navigate as Instagram or TIkTok. I have written about it before (1, 2, 3, 4).

3. While we are at it, university’s operations (HR, payroll, facilities, registrar, IT, etc.) should be simplified, automated, and partially outsourced. They consume too much of university resources, and create too many frustrations and irritants. There has been much progress on it within the last 20 years or so, but no real R&D money is spent on it. People Soft and Banner are ancient systems in comparison to what Walmart and Amazon have. Besides, they are bottle-necked for security reasons, and are hard to make flexible. This is a part of focusing on student and faculty experiences. They have to be pleasant and not frustrating.

4. Let’s evaluate faculty for the right things. Stop requiring service on committees - many of those are unnecessary and can be eliminated. They only exist because of the service requirements for tenure and promotion. Instead, every faculty member, tenure track of adjunct, should have obligations regarding student engagement outside the classroom. Those can be advising of student clubs, organizations, research groups, reading groups, athletics, etc. Reduced expectations of institutional and community service should create time to focus on students. About 70% of survey students reported being mentored by faculty, 50% by student affairs advisers (Thanks to Igor Chirikov for the reference). Of course, those are overlapping numbers. The numbers are not bad; we just need to improve on them.

5. The co-curriculum record should be strongly encouraged if not required of all students. Some campuses have that, and it needs an infrastructure to support. To create an opportunity for group work with others outside classroom is the essential part of the college experience. That is what students need and want, and we must nudge them, as well as provide space and structure for that. Right now, about 20% of students report they have never been involved in any college groups. I am sure this number is higher for mostly commuter campuses. We have no idea of the relational quality of those organizations students do get involved with. Intramurals actually lead here, not academic clubs and organizations.

6. Universities should stop the mission creep, and stop trying to be everything for everyone. They need to focus on their students, as well as faculty and staff, and on the relational side of education.

Just tell me why, or the Tale of the Lost Rationale

You know how good newspapers do this idiot-proof summary at the end of their articles, for people who may not know the context. They were under the rock for the last 20 years. It is something like “The second and the last US president who was impeached but not removed from office was Bill Clinton in 1998.” Or, “American Civil War was between the North and the South states in 1861-65.” This is a good journalist practice every organization should try to follow.

As J.Q. Wilson has noted, every instance of red tape or of a seemingly stupid bureaucratic rule is the organizational memory of a past incident the rule aims to prevent from re-occurring. A contemporary large organization like a university is a land of forgotten rationales. We follow certain rule or a procedure without remembering why it was implemented in the first place. Not knowing why things are the way they are can be an alienating and frustrating experience, especially for new people. Why do we have to approve international travel a month in advance? – Because it goes all the way to the President for approval. And why does it goes all the way to the President? – Because international trips are especially sensitive to public perception, and because there were improper uses in the past that caused public embarrassment.

Only a trained mind can reconstruct the correct rationale. Most people have no organizational imagination whatsoever, because they had never been in a position to make those rules. When I taught a course on ed policy, I asked students to come up with any stupid rule they could not explain, and then brainstorm what would be the rationale for it. I remember one of them brought up the ordinance that banned overnight parking without a permit at any curbside in the City of Providence. Students thought it was just dumb, but I saw at least two different rationales for it, anв was pretty sure both were considered.

This is not an attempt to justify every stupid rule. Indeed, very often the original rationale has either gone away, or was weak to begin with. Without knowing the rationale, it is very hard to rescind a bad rule. I think every communication about a rule or a decision should have this short paragraph of explaining the initial rationale. It would help people who must follow the rule to feel more comfortable, and also help to see bad rules that need to change. Right now, we normally include rationale only in more formal memos that justify a new and complex decision. We do not provide rationale on our numerous forms, platforms, e-mails, and in routine and simple decisions. I think it is a mistake, and we all should try to write an extra sentence or two in most decisions and requirements. Let’s not assume the Why is obvious – it is often lost on most people, and almost always lost on some people.

Why is outcome-based education so wrong?

Focusing on outcomes means losing focus on the process. Philosophically, the outcome-based education is a soft extension of “ends justify the means” approach. Imagine that you have found a method that trumps student dignity, but helps students learn more. Would you use it? All kinds of “tough love” theories assume that yes we should use such methods – as long as the outcomes are good. In fact, fear or pain may make our memory work better. Memories coloured by strong emotions tend to last longer. Should we go back to flogging children in school, if it proves to be effective?

Assessing quality of education should not be limited to easily measurable outcomes. It is like evaluating the quality of marriage by the number of healthy children produced: you can do it, but you really should not, if you have any brains. The very process of education should be if not all the way pleasurable, at least interesting and pleasant enough to justify subjecting students to it.

I am not the first person to say it, and yet we keep trying to reduce assessment in education to the measurable outcomes. Instead of trying to measure more, we relegate the things that are hard to measure to second class.

It is the same with the workplace. The quality of my experience here is just as important to me as how much good I do to the world, or how much money I make. I enjoy most of my meetings here, because I am interested in what people I like have to say and catch up on their news. My work has the stimulating value for me that the taxpayers of California did not necessarily intend to support. Yet they benefit, too, because if I enjoy my work and trust my colleagues, we are much less likely to screw up or hide problems. We are more likely to do our primary job better.

The thought here is simplistic enough to border on triviality. Here, take it or leave it.

The hell of micro-tasking

None of these things is a big deal. Complete another required training. Approve a request. Sign a contract. Confirm a transaction. Find and send me this one file. RSVP. Complete a survey. Evaluate so and so. Submit your absences, approve absences, now do the same for UEI. Sign the log here. Set a reminder. Enter into the project list. Schedule a meeting. Put together a Doodle poll. Send a message to your faculty. Send a message to your staff. Find that e-mail, and send it to me. Find that form online, complete it, sign in, send it. Build a survey, get a link, send it out.

None of these will take more than a few minutes to do. However, they eventually swell into a huge swarm of micro-tasks. Like mosquitoes, their individual bite is almost imperceptible. All together, they can suck your blood, all of it, to the last drop. All you have to do is to send me your […] once a semester, in this format. Because any single task seems reasonable and easy to do, they do not trigger resentment and do not provoke a revolt at the time of introduction. What is one mosquito bite to me? Gradually, they add to a huge swarm that can darken the sun. You tend to get frustrated and paralyzed, suddenly sending messages too short to be polite, because you cannot afford to write a longer one.

This is the unfortunate side effect of automation. Each individual procedure was meant to remove routine, boring clerical work. And it does – 99% goes to a machine somewhere, but 1% comes back to you, the dean, the chair, the faculty member. Objectively speaking, the management revolution within the higher ed is remarkable. With digital tools, we can now do much more, much faster, with more accuracy, and fewer mistakes. Subjectively speaking, it feels like the special hell of micro tasks. Each requires a tiny thought, a small effort that depletes the brain power one bit at a time. They fill all the small gaps in the day. I pee with a phone in my left hand. I eat my lunch with an eye on yet another dashboard. Something went wrong with automation, probably a few years ago. Half of emails in my inbox are written by computers; no human being wrote the, and I am just another computer in the network.

I have a hypothesis. There is evidence that introducing helmets made football even more dangerous, because athletes believe they are less vulnerable, and take more risks. In the same way, institutions would not dream of doing that much over such short periods if they did not have the online forms, the data processing, servers, mail merge, email, including automatically generated email. We just attempt to do too much, because we know the power of the information technology at our disposal. Human hubris is fed by the believe our brains are as good as the machines we make. They are not; they cannot handle too many easy tasks. The micro tasks make us incapable of handling the real, important tasks. Well, at least this is how I feel right now, on vacation, while looking at my inbox, horrified.

Is preschool a deniable service?

Karen, and Associate Dean, and I had exactly the same thought while visiting a preschool in Shenyang: “Why they can afford it, and we cannot?” The preschool is a gorgeous building with large windows, a number of role-play areas (a toy kitchen, a supermarket, a hospital). There was a multi-layer crawl construction in the middle, bedrooms for all children, classrooms, a pond with real fish, a fruit and vegetable garden… Whatever stereotypes you may have about Chinese preschool, definitely did not apply – the kids were happy, outgoing, curious, and busy playing and socializing. I specifically asked if this private preschool is an exception. I was told that it is one of the 5-stars, better preschools, but by no means is an exception in the city of 8 million. In fact, many university faculty kids went here. In China, university professors are solidly middle class, of course, making more than an average person, but still one can tell – this is not a place only for the elite.

Now, the median salary in Shenyang is $14,826 per year, while the median household income in in Sacramento is $ $56,943. Those are not the same measures, but still. Why is it again that they can afford such preschool, and we cannot? I actually know all the answers – about the labor cost, about the taxation structure, about the paternalistic state… Yet somehow, none of these answers satisfies. We have the money build and run quality preschool for every child. What we lack is a political consensus on whether such a service is undeniable.

There is a class of services I call undeniable – they are impossible to deny to anyone. And the list of those services have been expanding with time. For example, anyone who shows up at an emergency room will be served regardless of income. That right cannot be denied anymore, even though it is a relatively recent achievement. No one can starve in this country. While some people’s diet may be terrible, there has not been starvation. No child can be denied a K-12 education. Its quality may be questionable at times, but K-12 education is an undeniable service.

As the scope of undeniable services grows, so does the role of the state. You may or may not be a fun of socialism (I am definitely not one), but the practical reality is strikingly obvious: the list of deniable services keeps shrinking, while the list of undeniable services keeps growing. Preschool is still a deniable service, but for how long? Higher education is deniable, but we are not sure if it lasts. Basic healthcare has been deemed an undeniable service in most of the developed world, with the exception of the US, but the exception will not last for long. The existence of disposable wealth itself drive the process. It becomes morally impossible to see a starving person in the middle of an affluent society. There are many socialist and even communist institutions in the US, you only have to make an effort to see them. Public libraries are utopian communist organizations – free to all, unlimited. The military and the police, public education, community health clinics, environmental protection, fire departments, urban infrastructure - all socialist institutions, already here.

As anyone who grew in the Soviet Union, I am wary of all things socialist. A powerful bureaucratic state contains many dangers, including over-rich into private lives, and inefficiencies. At the same time, I cannot ignore the growth of undeniable services, and am not at all surprised at the rise of the Left wing of the Democratic Party. I am not sure what it would do to the next election, but the long trend seems to be towards more socialism, and more redistribution of income. We will have preschools in Sacramento like that one in Shenyang, sooner or later.

Gingko leaves

In California, fall comes gradually; as if unsure it is welcome. In New England or in Siberia, it invades the world quickly, uninvited, and cocky. But not here: plane trees will start rusting slowly and dutifully long before the first hints of cold. The grass never dies; to the contrary, it gets greener and thicker in the fall. Sequoias ignore the whole seasonality thing altogether. Some ducks leave while others hang out through the winter, if you could call it that. It is a mixed picture; only the sun comes up not as high, glancing sideways at us, changing the tint of every color slightly.

I take my clue from gingkoes. They are the masters of the autumnal arts. Their leaves will greet me with such an honest, naïve, and courageous yellow. Colors normally do not tell me much. Svetlana can see thousands of interacting shades, hear a whole symphony of colors. I barely get the tune; perhaps this is why gingkoes seems to be so loud to me. Their yellow is like trafficс light letting another fall into the city. A gingko leaf is shaped unlike any other leaf. It looks like a delicate insect, or a fairy. If you don’t see gingkoes in the fall, you are missing the season altogether.

How to avoid being manipulated

If you speak with someone and suddenly start feeling anger, resentment, or irritation against another person or a group, a red flag should always pop up. Your mind just have been hacked, and you are being manipulated. The person you’re talking to wants to use you for their purposes, to fight their fight with your help. In a regular, harmless gossip session, you feel just mildly amused. When you’re being manipulated, you feel a stronger emotion and want to act. Our emotion makes the actual difference.

The mechanics of manipulation are very old. The manipulator links your solidarity instinct with the justice instinct. We all are naturally inclined to emphasize with our interlocutor. That is how social cohesion works. At the same time, human have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness that has been found in animals as well. A manipulator uses two perfectly good instincts to recruit you into something that is good for her or him, but not necessarily for you. Then you find yourself fighting a pointless fight, or being embroiled in something you have no stake in. Once you join a pointless fight, it is difficult to retrieve, since you have already invested your reputation and capital in it. This why the initial hack is so important to notice.

A common pitch is like this: “They (administrators | other departments | junior faculty | senior faculty | T&P committee) are so incompetent | selfish | wrong | untrustworthy | greedy. They just did this (fill in with almost any action).” To manipulate others, you need to hit on a point they are already anxious about. With junior faculty, tenure and promotion always works well. With all faculty, allege violation of shared governance, because there are so many myths about shared governance in the first place. With administrators, exploit the anxiety about their performance. With women, touch on gender bias. With white men, there are too many anxieties to list. All of this could be done with an e-mail, just forward some private conversation, and add a few words to create some toxic context.

Smart people are manipulated just as easily as simpletons. In fact, people with better social instincts can become an easier prey, because their solidarity and fairness are well developed. This is why the Academia is so prone to group conflicts with very little substance. Such conflicts can last decades, and they damage souls of many otherwise wonderful people.

To avoid being manipulated is a discipline, a set of simple rules that many wise people discover on their own. However, some never do. It is not anything particularly new. The Buddhists probably figured it out the best, hence their stance against attachment, or clinging. The Stoics had similar ideas, and so did other religious traditions. A manipulator has invisible tentacles that attach themselves to your emotional veins and insert their fine poison. Imagine brushing off those tentacles, not allowing them to attach to your skin. That is what the Buddha meant.

The inoculation against being manipulated is simple. Ask yourself – why is s/he saying this to me? (This is an amazingly effective simple trick). What would the absent person or group say in response? What is their perspective? Can you be them for the sake of a conversation? Literally walk over to that other person(s) in question and ask for their perspective. Reflect on your own emotions – why am I feeling angry? Do I really care, or this is the manipulator’s agenda? Is the cause for our joined anger really a big deal? Is there too much drama? Are my emotions being hijacked? Don’t be too fast to empathize or express agreement. Do not commit to a possible manipulation stack; take time to think about it.

What about the manipulators? Why do they do it? Some people cannot live without some intrigue going on in their lives. It probably has to do with some unresolved middle school issues, where they had to have a victory over randomly appointed enemies, and collect an ever-greater army of supporters to do that. If you learn a few tricks, you can entertain yourself endlessly by stirring up conflict, outsmarting your enemies, and fooling the naïve to do your bidding. For others, it is an inept attempt to grab more power or at least influence. It never works, because those who fell victim of manipulation will eventually catch up to it, feel silly, and never trust the manipulator again. Manipulators are compulsive; it is a sort of addiction to steering up conflict. They cannot help it, and even more – their intentions are not all that bad. It is just a bad habit, and they are rarely happy because of that.

I have never seen a manipulator who is really good at it, although literature suggests they do exist. Or else, they are so good that I am being manipulated, but am not aware of it.

False kindness and kicking the can down the road

Academic admissions is never a perfect process. Sometimes we realize a student is not going to make it through the program. S/he may not have the right attitudes or character, or may have academic deficiencies that are too large to overcome, or some combination of these. However, we tend to support our students, and it gives us no pleasure to expel anyone. We pass someone barely, deep down knowing the student is not going to succeed, and yet hoping against evidence that s/he may benefit from another chance. Such indecisiveness simply kicks the can down the road, letting someone else deal with the problem.

Down the road, things are not going to get easier. A student who stays in a program long enough gets an impression that s/he is doing just fine, and can succeed. S/he invests a lot of money into a particular career, and becomes less open to other options. Not doing anything about an unfit student is ethically problematic. It amounts to giving false promises and charging unnecessary tuition. It is a part of the American culture, the irrational belief that anything is possible if one tries hard. This is why it is so hard to tell someone – this profession may not be good for you, but if we are not honest about it, who will be?

I am not talking about cases where the outcome is indeed uncertain. Many students do change, and many dramatically improve with time. Some can really surprise, and we should have plenty of room for trial and error. In those cases, one has to work as hard as possible to move such a student along, while warning other colleagues ahead in the program. Yet we prepare educators. Somone can be an OK engineer or a research assistant, but not a good teacher or psychologist, or a school principal. The test is simple: Would you let your own child or grandchild have this person as a teacher or a counselor? If the answer is no, the ethical obligation is clear. Other people’s children deserve the same as yours. Our primary ethical responsibility is not with our students, but with their students. I suppose it is the same with other professions as well. If you train pilots, their future passengers are more important than this student’s life dream.

Sometimes a fear to make a mistake may be paralyzing. However, it is impossible for just one faculty member to dismiss any student from a program. Students always have a right to due process. There will be committees, appeals, several layers of review. What we use is a collective judgement to protect students and each other from making hasty, biased decisions. The collective wisdom of the institution is greater than that of any of us individually. However, to engage it, someone has to raise an alarm, and not kick the can down the road.

No place for democracy in standard development

At a recent state-wide Deans of Education meeting, I asked why our state’s standards for teacher preparation (TPEs) are so long. For example, this proposed set of standards has 93 items on it, which makes any meaningful compliance impossible. One of the panelist responded “It is because of the democratic process is used to develop the standards.” She added that the elements are mere guidelines, and that of course, institutions are not asked to demonstrate meeting every element of the standard. But that is exactly what we are required to do, and the panelist just could not imagine such an absurd is possible. A less charitable colleague described the process of standard development as multiple special interest groups lobbying for inclusion of their things in the standards.

No matter what do you call it, there is a problem with documents developed through broadly based participatory input. Just remember when you were a part of a group that brainstormed something. Everyone in the group needs some recognition. When you come up with an idea, you want it added to the list, otherwise you feel worthless, and rejected by the group. The groups has an interest in maintaining peace and cohesion, so it is likely to accept your idea even if it is marginal or just weird. That is how we end up with laundry lists of standard elements that are impossible to use in real life.

It is important to solicit input from broader constituencies. However, any brainstorming should always be followed by a critical phase, where a smaller group would apply a critical eye to the lists of generated ideas. Each item has to be checked against the purposes of the document. For example, can programs actually credibly show that they are meeting this specific element? It would be good to check if a requirement has any kind of basis in research. Standards should be evidence-based, and derive from research. For the example, the proposed set includes “diverse learning styles,” a theory that was debunked more than ten years ago.

Finally, California regulators completely ignore the Item response theory, which is, more or less, the essence of the contemporary psychometrics. Here is how you take GRE in math test now. If you can answer a calculus question, you will not be asked to prove that you know the long divisions, or fractions. It is because statistically speaking, people who have more advanced skills, are very likely to also have the lower level skills in the same field. Deborah Ball had a somewhat similar idea, when she came up with the idea of “High-leverage practices.” For example, if a teacher can show that she or he can adjust instruction, we can safely assume that the teacher is capable of formative assessment. Otherwise, how would she know how to adjust? Extending this logic, if a teacher can “Apply knowledge of the range and characteristics of typical and atypical child development [...] to help inform both short-term and long-term planning and learning experiences for all children,” s/he should be able to “Differentiate characteristics of typical and atypical child development.” However, the standards check for both. There is no way teaching performance can consist of 93 different scales. Some of the items should be measuring the same constructs, right? Some of the elements can be included in others.

I am not just grumbling. Poorly designed, bloated, and unenforceable standards cost the taxpayers millions and millions of dollars in labor cost and lost opportunity. More significantly, they demoralize faculty, who must pretend to comply with the poorly designed requirements. I just met with two young faculty members to discuss their committee work. One of them had recently turned in a 317 page-long matrix document, and another was in a very small group that submitted a 546-page long document. In addition, they were asked to submit things like Lists of all students and their placements, list of all faculty by status and by courses taught, adjunct faculty and TT faculty job announcements, student handbooks, Hours in the Field by Type of Activity, Current list of MOUs with partners, training materials for supervisors, clinical experiences assessment instruments, Description of Process Ensuring Appropriate Recommendation, Candidate Progress Monitoring Documents, etc., ad nauseam. I felt bad for them. Did they work so hard on their PhDs to do all this mindless work? Does anyone really think these torturous processes assure program quality?

All of this is because of one small error. Standard development cannot be a democratic, all-inclusive process. Or rather, the initial phase of it can, but not the whole of it. We failed to build in a second phase, where someone with an OK knowledge of research and some common sense could just edit it down by let’s say 90%.

Why some people never reply to your emails, and how to stay cool about it

On every campus I know, a few people can be counted on to never return an email - not soon, not within a week – never. I always wonder why and how do they get away with that? I am sure they reply the President’s messages, but not to mine. It may seem irritating but the world of human communication always contains more shades of meaning.

I think there is a difference in a fundamental assumption about email: some implicitly believe it is an optional, almost superfluous form of communication. If you JUST email, you must not be that serious about it. They believe that not replying is not rude; it is just one of several options. The non-replying means, “If you really need to get a hold of me, call, me, or find me on campus.” The non-replying can also have the meaning of “I am not really interested in answering your question, or engaging in a conversation with you at this time. Please remind me later.” It is because there is no way to say how important your e-mail is. Yes, I know about the High Importance button, but it is reserved for true emergencies. Some readers may perceive this is an overly generous interpretation, but I believe it. I use the non-replying very rarely, and for me it means, “I do not wish to continue this conversation.”

In many cases, senders do not use the important difference between “To” and “CC” fields. In theory, only people in "To" are expected to reply, others are there for information only. In practice, it is all over the place. I do not reply when it is obvious that other people among addressees are in a better position to answer. However, the assumption can be wrong, and none of the addressees answers, because they all assume someone else is in a better position to do that.

Then there is the random error that eats up messages – from accidental deleting, to various devices’ synchronization problems. It is the “sync or swim” world. Statistically, it is quite probable for an error to strike twice or even three time against my messages in your mailbox. However, human mind does not tolerate low-probability coincidences, so after the second error I will think you are ignoring me. The solution is to try again, to write a second message, or to call and follow up. Some tolerance to human and technical errors is essential to a healthy organizational culture.

Some people do not possess good skills in dealing with their email flow. There is a method here. For example, reading e-mail three times helps, counterintuitively. The first time is a quick scan, where you delete junk, or answer those that require no effort to answer quickly. Then you read more substantial emails, but do not respond right away. Your brain will subconsciously work on replies, although it does not seem to be the case. Then, quickly scan again before actually replying. There are also ways of sorting by sender, the Outlook rules, and conversations that help deal with flow of emails. Amazingly few people take advantage of the new federal law on “unsubscribe” link, so their inbox is clogged with spam. If you never see the bottom of your inbox, you should probably learn a few things.

Finally, some people just receive too many emails. Faculty who teach large sections deserve the most sympathy here. Yes, there are many tricks to reduce the flow of student e-mails (most importantly, do not make your syllabus and assignments so confusing). However, student email inflow can be truly overwhelming at times. The rest of us, administrators, should not be getting more than 20-50 emails a day. Getting more is a reason to rethink how you organize your work. This means you are probably not delegating enough, not automating enough, and have become a human bottleneck. Being overwhelmed with emails is nothing to be proud about; I would not recommend bragging about it. It is, rather, a worrying sign.

Even 30 emails will take 2-3 hours to work through, and it is a major portion of our workload. One has to recognize it and plan for the daily task. For example, a day of back-to-back meetings guarantees a second shift at night, reserved just for emails. The shift is lonely and cranky. I’ve learned to never send any important emails at night – they always come out wrong: either too curt, or too vague.

Join the Google Revolution. An open letter to CTC

In California, 45 main and 14 additional standard elements describe requirements for elementary teaching preparation. Each of the main elements should be introduced, practiced, and assessed, which makes 135 minimal data points that should be linked to a specific place in one of the 15 course syllabi. Of course, many elements are actually taught several times, and are mentioned in different parts of the syllabus. For example the element 1.3 (Connect subject matter to real-life contexts and provide active learning experiences to engage student interest, support student motivation, and allow students to extend their learning.) is linked to various places in syllabi 29 times. Element 3.1 is explained through 33 links, etc. We have submitted 12 program reports, some of which may have up to 88 standard elements (Mod/Severe SPED). That’s 12 matrices with hundreds of references to specific pages in multiple syllabi.

One can only imagine how many hours of tedious manual work went into construction of the matrix with thousands of links to syllabi. Because syllabi are dynamic documents, and they SHOULD change every semester, we have to use a special “official” syllabus that is not exactly the same as the document given to students. Moreover, most faculty use the learning management system (Canvas in our case). Therefore, they have to construct an "anchor syllabus" mainly for compliance purposes.

Just wait, it gets worse. The reviewers also do not find the matrices useful. There is absolutely no way for a reviewer to click through hundreds of links, looks at hundreds of pages in the syllabi and make a sound judgement on whether the program element is taught well. Therefore, they end up randomly clicking a few places, and finding a few bugs. The reviewers will get a really good sense of the program by talking to students, partners, and faculty. Professionals can always tell if things are going right or wrong. They will report their overall conclusions based on those intangibles. However, they will pretend to derive their conclusion from the massive accreditation reports.

I know the system well, at all levels. I know people who developed those standards, and those who designed the technical requirements for accreditation, and those who submit and review reports. These are all decent, smart, well-meaning people. None of them intended for the system to become so absurd. In general, good people sometimes build bad systems; this is the first law of the organizational studies. What happened is that we have managed to miss the Google revolution that profoundly changed the information processing.

It is all about finding information. The first generation of data systems blindly followed the conventions of paper-based technologies: it had hierarchical directory structures. Some people still treat their personal files that way: they have directories, folders, subfolders, and sub-sub-folders, as well as file naming conventions. However, information is not hierarchical, and certain files can belong to two or three different folders. For example, a file on payments to faculty related to grants on graduation initiatives can belong to Faculty folder, to Financials folder, to Grants subfolder, and to Graduation Initiative folder. Computer scientists came up with a clever trick of tags (or keywords), where you could attach all four tags to this file, and retrieve the file four different ways. In effect, the same file could sit in many different “folders” at the same time.

Then came along Google, whose founders had a breakthrough insight: every word in the document is already a tag, every word is a keyword, and in a weird way, is a folder of its own. If you index the entire internet, you could find anything just by using the words or phrases in the document. Using the natural language’s syntax helped to narrow down your search. The information you get from Google search is not as neatly structured, but is a lot cheaper, and vastly more relevant than what we had before.

It took a while for the thinking to find its way into people’s personal computers. Like many other people, I do not have any folders in my drive – I just search through my documents the same way I would have searched the internet. It is the same with e-mail – there is no point in storing it in folders, just search for what you remember was in the message: names, words, numbers. With large text data, searching is really the only game in town. There is no other economical way of organizing and retreating these data. Accreditation bodies everywhere have missed the revolution completely, and design accountability practices assuming the data is small. However, the data sets are much larger than they assume, and the work of marking (tagging, linking) it is out of hand.

Here comes my pitch to CTC (it is California Commission on Teaching Credentials) and to all accrediting bodies in the world:

• If you want to see the real dynamic picture, not a set of documents constructed just for you;
• If you want faculty and staff to work on program improvement, not on mindless compliance;
• If you want to save millions of mostly public dollars;

All you have to do is this: Ask the programs put all their current, real syllabi, canvas shells, handbooks, and program websites into one searchable directory. Ask your reviewers to google what they are curious about in each of the programs under review. They will see a search box tuned to look only through documents specific to one program in question. For example, to see if the program actually teaches about individualized family support plans, google “IFSP,” and see how and in which context it is introduced and assessed. Google “phonics” if you think we do not teach it enough. Google anything else related to any of the standards, as you do in your normal everyday life when you want to learn something about anything. Program review is just that, learning about a program, right?

(Now, the standards also need to be trimmed; 60 elements is simply ridiculous. Engage in Deborah Ball-like thinking. There are essential, priority skills, which you need to work on and assess. The time of checklists is over. While it is an occasion for another revolution, I will just suggest that standards themselves could be a list of key concepts rather than vague pseudo-scientific statements they are today).

Catching up with the Google Revolution would liberate us from a whole lot of useless work and allow us to do more for program quality while doing less for the sake of simple compliance. Compliance takes away all resources, all our time, all our energy so that very little is left for actual improvement.

What do deans actually do?

Every trade has a particular way of thinking. Teachers develop a specific thought process about instruction and classroom management. Plumbers see a building in a very different light than electricians do. A writer reads a text with an eye that no other person has. In general, work involves applying a particular way of thinking to the world.

Here is how an academic administrator works. First, we recognize problems and opportunities where other people see neither. I, for example, get bothered by multiple data re-entry, where we go electronic-manual-electronic-manual. This requires a lot of work, mostly not needed. I always have murderous thoughts about processes that may not be needed at all. Or, one of my colleagues has learned about one of our partner's troubles and figured out how wonderful it would be for us to expand our consulting portfolio while strengthening our partnership. That kind of thinking matches several considerations and sees an opportunity to advance.

The next skill is to prioritize problems and opportunities. There is never enough time and resources to address all challenges or pursue all opportunities, so one has to assess – is this a "do or die" situation, is this a once-in-a-lifetime chance, or can it wait? Is there someone really affected, or is this a small annoyance or someone's fancy? We have invisible scales to weigh a potential project for whether we can handle it or not.

Once we decide to try something, the key mental operation is selecting organizational tools. For example, we really need to maintain a connection with undergrads who are interested in teaching but are not in our programs yet. There are at least four different tools – organizational forms – that we can use. It can be a stand-alone program, a student club (both registered with student affairs or informal), or it can be a special class. Each of these potential solutions has a toolkit, with its own limitations and advantages. For instance, a stand-alone program needs someone to run it, and we should either pay that person or find someone who would do it as a part of their regular work. Faculty and staff have different labor arrangements, and it depends on who will run it. Student organizations rely on student leaders and faculty advisors and tend to be unstable over time. Classes work great because all university systems understand the language of academic courses. However, they are hard to make club-like and informal.

If you want to do something with faculty, there is a different set of options. Can it be done by a standing committee? By an ad hoc? Can the Dean's office do it? Can we find a champion who can actually deliver? Should we hire someone external, or give someone assigned time? Who would be receptive to running the project, and whom do we need to ask, beg, or bribe into participating? The set of available tools is limited, but there are always choices, and various costs, not always measured in money, but in time, effort, and the missed opportunity cost – all these people could have been doing something else, perhaps more useful to the organization. Think of a carpenter, pulling out the right tools out of his toolbox: which one will work, which one needs fixing, and which one he has to buy or build. That is what we do.

Because we need to run multiple mental models, thinking cannot be done alone. You need a team that would play various scenarios in their minds and alert of potential advantages or problems. This is really an exercise in imagination, based on the team's knowledge of the larger system's capacities and limitations. We also imagine how specific people would do something and what sort of support and controls they need. The team thinking takes time and has to be organized as well. Planning to plan is another idiosyncratic thing we do.

Lastly, one has to put all of it in a timeline. How long does it take to find someone? To schedule a course, first as a pilot and then propose curriculum? How long does it take to hire student assistants? Who would help when, what are the unknowns, when do we learn them, and when do we adjust? You sort of lay all your ducks in a row, project your story into the future, and set up checkpoints.

Not all projects work out, some because they were improperly designed, made wrong assumptions, or were mismanaged, others for unknown reasons. Therefore, there is a special skill to sense that point in time when you're beating a dead horse, or throwing good money after bad, whichever metaphor works for you. The ability to pull the plug in time is also a part of the administrative mindset that people from other fields may or may not have to possess.

What deans and other academic administrators do is match – interests with resources, problems with tools, people with organizational forms and processes. Our core function is not glorious and not public. In the end, it is a kind of service. Just like facilities personnel do not teach, they make sure the lights are on, and toilets flush. Similarly, we make sure the organization runs smoothly and improves with time.

The miracle technology

Online survey platforms are quietly improving organization development in the Academia, and I suspect, elsewhere. That is not what the authors of such platforms had in mind. All the survey monkeys, gizmos, qualtrics, etc. – they were literally meant to be survey instruments. However, turned them into various online forms, data bases, assessment instruments, workflows, and many other things. I have 56 of them right now, 31 were designed by someone else and shared with me. We probably have hundreds throughout the organization. This kind of technology does not need to be pushed on people.

Here is an example of where such a technology can do what would be almost impossible to do otherwise. For years, the university has been struggling to provide accommodations to Deaf and hard of hearing at its public events. It is not an easy problem to solve. The Deaf community rightfully argue that not offering an accommodation is tantamount to exclusion. They believe – again, rightfully, - that the burden of the logistics should be on event organizer, not on them. The traditional way of dealing with an issue like that would be to train event organizers, and codify the language of accommodations and the procedures. However, every month, dozens of people, who keep changing on us, organize dozens of events. A university is departments, student affairs, faculty affairs, student groups, clubs, athletics … Even if we build another bureaucratic requirement, the results would have been mixed. Diana, our VP for Inclusive Excellence, told me – yes, we can throw a requirement at all those people, but we also need to provide a reasonable way to comply. She is right: we cannot expect every unit, every organization on campus to know how to schedule an ASL interpreter or a captioner. They simply do not have standing accounts with the interpreting agency, not to mention certain expertise needed to do this. In other words, what is possible in a small or mid-sized organization, may be unobtainable at a large and distributed organization like ours.

After a chat with Diana, I asked Binod to think of a survey where an event organizer would enter event details. It would automatically generate a unique URL that can be included in any event invitation or ad; worked into any RSVP system. The link lays dormant until a Deaf or hard of hearing person shows interest to the event, clicks on the unique link, and enters his or her name and email. At that time, the system would generate another automated e-mail that would combine the event details with requester name, and sent to our staff interpreter. She will decide if she can cover it, or book more help from the agency. It took Binod a week or so figure it all out, but he did as he always does. We do not need to invest in another expensive specialized technology, and do not need to build another burdensome and inefficient procedure.

This was probably one of the most complex challenges, but I can give you dozens of examples, from faculty votes to contest entry submissions that can be done through a survey platform. The power of such technology is in its universality. It is not specialized, and with some thinking can be used for many different purposes. Universities tend to rely on heavy, all-encompassing data solutions such as Banner or PeopleSoft. They integrate HR, payroll, scheduling, and Registrar, the key functions of the university operations. At some point, we all believed they could meet hundreds of various needs staff and faculty have. Alas, it did not happen and will not happen. The integrated platforms must be secure, and therefore should be controlled centrally by a few people. Any kind of functional expansion requires months of planning and development. Out-of-box surveys are nimble, simple, and can be used by anyone on campus. Even when we have to re-enter the data into the big integrated platform, it is often worth it.

While I am often skeptical about tech innovations in education, I cannot miss the rare success story. When technology is being driven by users, and allows to solve real issues, it is miracle, because it happens so rarely.

The celestial world of policy

Long time ago, I used to assume that a mind greater than human has designed the world of policies for all eternity. These rules and policies perfectly match and do not contradict each other; they gently spin in a perfect harmony, vibrating with the music of heavenly spheres. When I encountered a mistake, a contradiction, a badly written policy, I thought all those people in power must be complete idiots…

The relationship of a person to an organization is somewhat similar to that of a child and her parents. To a small child, parents appear to be perfect and omnipotent. To an adolescent, they look like complete jerks and failures. A young adult eventually learns to accept his or her parents the way they are – imperfect, messy, confused, erring, but mostly OK human beings. That is what an organization and its policies are: written by human beings who are fallible, imperfect, tired, and sometimes irritated at something very specific. With time, the organizational memory fails to recall what was the occasion, but a policy tends to stick around. New policies are being written because no one remembers all the other policies, and we do not have the time to check for consistency. However, it does not mean the policies and rules are useless or stupid. It simply means we have to read them intelligently, try to understand the initial intent and the rationale, and apply them as well as we can while keeping the organization’s mission and ethos in mind.

Here is one example: we have a policy in the College that a university-wide committee for whatever reason was not able to approve for about a year and a half. We voted for a few changes, mainly to eliminate previous errors and inconsistencies. There was also one untenable requirement. Technically, we are supposed to use the older policy with more errors that can actually hurt some faculty. What should we do? The answer seems obvious to me – we use our better policy even though it has not been formally approved. Can someone complain or grieve us? – Not really, because to complain, you need to show some damages, and none is likely to occur. In fact, people are more likely to complain if we use the old, erroneous policy.

Policies, like laws, are not laws of nature. They cannot always be followed literally to the last point. This is why there is a whole world of law interpretation, when it is applied to new cases and changing circumstances. This is why the legal system has courts, not computers. Human affairs cannot be governed by algorithms precisely because we generate too much variation and too much uncertainty.

In praise of scarcity

Free stuff is always problematic for it leads to over-consumption and hoarding. For example, sending an e-mail is free, so spam floods us. Posting on social media is free, so we post a lot of crap. Web pages are free or almost free, so institutional websites tend to proliferate like cancer, with so many pages and so much information that no one can find anything there.

I remember thinking over every sentence over a typewriter, for there was a cost to every mistake: I’d have to retype the entire page. Not sure if my writing was more eloquent or precise, but it was definitely less verbose. The ease of word processing has made thick handbooks possible, and then acceptable. The abundance of cheap labor discourages technological development. The ability to pollute air and water for free discourages environmental thinking.

Moreover, scarcity of free or cheap resources often encourages hoarding behavior and leads to more scarcity. For example, any department on campus can schedule as many classes as it wants, sometimes with the only purpose of hoarding rooms just in case they are needed in the future. While we seem to have enough rooms every semester, there is a period of acute scarcity right before the classes start.

Scarcity is always there even it is sometimes invisible. For example, the abundance of marginal information cause an intense competition of human attention, which turns out to be limited after all. Our life spans are getting longer, but we still have a limited number of hours and minutes to live. Some instructors believe they have plenty of time in a class, and keep filling time with less than relevant stories. Others treat class time as a precious resource that has to show some intensity and richness of learning experience.

Some economists believe that pricing a resource is the only efficient way of managing scarcity. That is not true. Pre-market economies have been managing resources for millennia without affixing price tags on most. Systems of cultural norms, taboos and conventions did the trick for a long time. Such cultural regulations exist now, and often work well. You may notice that the volume and average length of e-mails is slowly going down, for people have learned to be more modest in claiming too much of each other’s attention. Our university just introduced more stringent regulations on the number of web pages a unit is allowed to produce. Over-consumption does not always result from free resource. For example, we cannot really breathe more than we do, so there is no need to price air. However, it often does. There is never enough of everything, and the tragedy of the commons is not inevitable, especially in organizations with a strong ethos.

Can I teach what and how I want?

Like many other things in universities, academic freedom with respect to teaching is regulated through a mishmash of formal regulations, and unspoken rules. On one hand, all our accreditors require a systematic control over the quality of curriculum and instruction. That is why we have the multiple layers of curriculum reviews, and lengthy and thorough curriculum approval process. When we say that “Faculty own curriculum,” we do not mean each individual faculty, we mean all of them collectively. And administration has its say as well – deans and provosts have the right to veto curriculum changes that are too expensive, or fail basic quality standards. The right is only rarely invoked, but it is there, just in case.

On the other hand, there is little enforcement to make sure faculty teach what the community of peers have approved them to teach. Faculty members routinely exercise the broad right to choose textbooks and other materials, to construct student activities and grading systems the way they see fit. Unfortunately, there is no definite red line to show that one teaches something that was never approved.

The situation is a little different in programs with heavy external accreditation. Normally, a program has to demonstrate it meets all the standards. There is always a round of negotiations on who “covers” what in which course. To withdraw from such an agreement would be very difficult, for it would jeopardize the entire program’s existence. It is also generally well understood that a program cannot constantly reopen such negotiations with every new person teaching a new class.

In effect, the content of each core course is pretty well set, but there is still a lot of freedom about specific assignments, texts, and student activities. However, if there are multiple sections of the same course, students start talking to each other and quickly discover that one instructor seems to be “easier” than another is in the same course. The word travels, and it is not good for anyone. Students will try to get into an easier section. Instructors will start accusing each other of being less rigorous, etc. The best, and I have to say, the most common practice is to agree on several key assignments and the textbooks being the same across all sections. Again, there are holdouts, people who insist their way teaching is the best, and what colleagues think is irrelevant.

More generally, freedom is almost always a negotiated concept; it cannot be understood in absolute terms. What is an administrator to do? One of the few powers chairs and deans have is to tell people what they can and cannot teach. Ultimately, the refusal to cooperate will result in moving teaching assignment to something else to some course where the alignment is not as essential. Plenty of such courses exist, too.