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October 09, 2006
Need for prayer
Usually I don't like anonymous academic blogs - too many of them strike me as excuses for people in an absolutely charmed vocation to moan about administrators or students mercilessly. (For examples, browse through Inside Higher Ed's Around The Web section and the associated blogrolls. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which anonymous blogs really hack me off.)
For better or for worse, though, some anonymous blogs are absolutely invaluable. They work when you have an individual who gives you insight that there is no possible way anyone could give without being anonymous. The blog Confessions of a Community College Dean is the pinnacle of those blogs. I understand more about how administrators work, and why, for having read this blog than anything else academic I have read. I learn about hiring presidents. I learn about professorial politics. I learn about cultures of departments. And that's just in the last month.
Today, reading the latest post where Dean Dad is being necessarily non-specific...I feel like he knows what I'm going through right now.
I'm confronting a happy-fog vs. truth-teller issue, and I'm starting to get worried. Without getting too detailed or revealing, I'll just say that it involves the limits of what internal reform can accomplish in the face of negative external demographic changes. The happy foggers say that there is no limit to what internal reform can accomplish, as long as everyone stays focused. More darkly, they intimate, people who mention limits are saboteurs or malingerers, dooming the college with their self-fulfilling negativity. (To be fair, curmudgeons frequently like to style themselves truth-tellers, when in fact they're just bitter and nasty. So the intimations don't come out of nowhere.) The smarter truth-tellers actually support internal reform, but suggest that expecting too much to come of it can only end in tears.
We're at the point at which a significant number of painful internal reforms have already taken place, but their impact has been disappointingly small as against external changes. This is where the conflict gets tricky. Both groups agree that the payoff has been frustratingly small, but they offer different explanations. To the truth-tellers, the payoff was probably the best that could be expected in a hostile external climate. The next job is to face up to the reality of that climate, and start making some really unpleasant decisions. To the happy-foggers, the payoff was small because too many people don't like change, too many nay-sayers are running around, and too many people just refuse to get with the program. There's nothing wrong with the program; it just needs to be amped up.
Of course, I'm still trying to figure out how I became one of the happy-foggers.
So pray for Dean Dad. And pray for me while you're at it.
Posted by Chuck at October 9, 2006 06:19 PM
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