Whistleblowers in Higher Education 1
"Veritas." Motto of Harvard University
Whistleblowers in Higher Education 1
"The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth." Albert Camus in Le Mythe de Sisphe
Chapter
WHISTLEBLOWERS IN HIGHER
EDUCATION: A TECHNIQUE TO
REDUCE DYSFUNCTIONALITIES
IN U.S. UNIVERSITIES
Bruce D. Fisher copyright 1995 Bruce D. Fisher
"Mary, I'm going to have to ask for your resignation as Associate Dean," said Arthur Featherstone, Dean of State University's Business School. "Your inability to come up with appropriate solutions to school problems and generate community support for the school leaves me with this conclusion. Of course you will keep your position as professor of business law." Mary sat stunned but managed to leave Featherstone's office. Up until a few minutes earlier she had been an Associate Dean and representative to the athletic conference of her university. She had reported that football players at her school had violated conference regulations by taking correspondence courses rather than attending classroom courses as the university required. Her university job had been to monitor compliance with such regulations.
"Professor Foster, there are no data on this disc," reported Susan Smith, Professor Foster's new research assistant.
"That's impossible," replied Foster. "I had Arthur Dunn copy his data on that disc just before he left. Surely a systems major such as Arthur would be able to perform such a simple operation. Arthur was an honors graduate."
Susan nodded and said, "But the fact is that there are no data on the disc."
"Professor Smith was the best teacher that I ever had when I was a student here," said Calvin Walker, who had been an assistant professor at State University for 30 years. When asked the basis for his judgment on Professor Smith's teaching Calvin quickly replied, "You could take a good set of notes from his lectures, never crack a book open, and get an A."
The scene was the President's conference room at Kallikak State University, a major state university. The audience consisted of selected faculty, university donors, student representatives, and local media members and was called to announce the new chancellor at Kallikak State. The candidates were three: Dr. Carol Everly, a professor of biological sciences at Kallikak with over 20 articles in high quality academic journals, but who lacked administrative experience, Dr. Joseph Black, a law professor and law school dean from the University of Michigan, and Dr. M.T. Suit, the handsome vice chancellor for admissions at Kallikak, a noted after dinner speaker who had never written a book or an article appearing in an academic journal. To no one's surprise the President beamed at Dr. Suit and announced Suit's selection to lead Kallikak in its quest to reach the first ranks of research universities.
"Bill, your suggestion that we use external reviewers for my promotion packet is not in the best interests of the university," said John Capon, Bill Foster's department head at State University.
Bill shifted uncomfortably in his chair and his vocal chords tightened as he observed, "Well, we've done this recently in the case of others in the deparment and thus it seemed only sensible to do it for you. If we show off our faculty, other universities will respect us more. Also we are always citing other schools' salaries as being more generous than ours, so doesn't it make sense to compare our research records those same schools? If we are producing the same as them, our case for better salaries is stronger," he noted.
"I suggest that you leave administrative judgments to administrators," replied Capon.
The five prior scenarios are not apocryphal. They happened to individuals and at universities known to the present writer. The first, fourth, and fifth represent administrative dysfunctionality, the second professorial dysfunctionality, and the third student dysfunctionality. Although the names and institutions involved have been changed, the facts otherwise represent a series of weak management practices, if not abuses, endemic to U.S. higher education which threaten the institutional integrity of organizations supposedly dedicated to the nurturing and perpetuation of truth.
The U.S. collegiate education system can count many successes. It is, in many ways, a model for higher education internationally as democratic societies strive to broaden access to tertiary education in an attempt to increase national productivity and competitiveness. There are many objective manifestations of excellence at the university and collegiate levels in the U.S. The United States is tied with twenty-four other nations for the highest literacy rate in the world. [1] On a more anecdotal level, a significant number of Nobel Prize laureates teach at U.S. colleges and universities. Collateral measures of well-being related directly to educational levels such as purchasing power parity [2], various per capita measures of consumer goods ownership [3], all suggest that the United States is number one, two, or three among all nations. Thus the educational system which could produce this level of societal well-being from as ethnically and religiously diverse a nation [4] as the United States must be doing something right.
Nonetheless, problems associated with the educational system exist, particularly at the college and university level. Dysfunctionalities are found at all levels of higher education including administrative, faculty, and student levels. Amounts devoted to U.S. higher education in absolute dollar amounts are staggering. [5] The amount spent on colleges and universities in the U.S. in 1993 was higher than the gross domestic product of all but twenty nations. [6] U.S. higher education has great ambitions. It seeks to broaden society's access to its hallowed halls and attendant higher lifetime earnings. The U.S. has the second highest tertiary enrollments in the world. [7] The absolute number of students in higher education is large. [8] But there have been costs to its ambitions. In recent years university tuition has regularly outpaced the general inflation rate [9] even though measurable gains from such education are increasingly being called into question. 1[0]
This paper identifies selected problems at all three levels of higher education, but focuses on administrators given their power reflective of the fact that most U.S. universities are essentially "top down" institutions quite reminescent of the organizational structure of a "command" society such as the defunct Soviet Union where planners rule.
After examining some of the more serious problems confronting higher education in the United States, this paper discusses the possibility of using whistleblowers to rectify the abuses. Whistleblowers expose waste, fraud, and abuse in an organization. Often whistleblowers are members of the organization they criticize. They are familiar with institutional malfunctions through the incomparable learning of experience.
Whistleblowers encounter problems in their efforts to expose perceived abuses in higher education. This paper identifies some whistleblower control devices and concludes that although there are occasional victories for whistleblowers as individuals, they, standing alone, face a futile, as well as thankless 1[1], task. The message of notorious abuses which some higher education whistleblowers attempt to bring to society's attention, the frustration individual whistleblowers encounter, and the importance of the functions university education serves, not only in the United States, but in the world over, point to the need for a solution to higher education dysfunctionality.
The solution tendered to the problems in U.S. higher education is based on principles of institutional transparency. The transparency approach has been recognized in dealing with environmental problems facing the U.S. society as well as other areas of management.
1. Areas Of Mismanagement In U.S. Higher Education
The following discussion addresses the university dysfunctionalities according to recognized sectors on the U.S. campus. In a broad sense, most of the problems could be grouped under the heading of abuse of the evaluative function and more generally of the stewardship to truth which is the keystone in the arch of education. There are other common themes to university dysfunctionality. First, maintaining control of the university power structure by the university administration has, to a disturbing extent, replaced merit and truth as the focal point of higher education administration. Secondly, while recognized management paradigms such as TQM--Total Quality Management--have been borrowed from business settings to improve higher education, such adaptations have failed to take account of differences between education and business.
The late expert on upgrading organizational quality, W. Edwards Deming, has observed that "Eighty-five percent of quality problems are the result of management errors." 1[2] Further, Professor Deming has noted that quality is a matter of institutional culture. Look at an institution's leadership, or should we say, managers, for this sets the tone of the entire organization. Institutions are mirrors of the accomplishments or lack thereof, of the persons who lead them. Professor Deming stressed empowerment of individuals as the key to better products and services that institutions deliver. Thus failures in United States higher education are laid squarely on its administrators, and it is to them that the major part of this paper devotes its attention.
A. Dysfunctionalities in University Administration
Administrators refer to university presidents, chancellors, provosts, deans, and department heads. These are the positions which guide the flow of resources down the pipeline until it eventually arrives at the bottom of the university "food chain," the classroom instructor and student. Administrators also are the legally responsible parties for making all major decisions associated with the running of U.S. universities and the parties to whom the courts 1[3] and legislatures regularly defer in the making of the decisions incident to the running of such institutions. Included among managerial decisions are accomplishments needed to earn a particular type of degree 1[4], what credentials a person should have to qualify as a faculty member, and many other decisions incident to running a university.
i. Misrepresenting Student Proficiency
The educational process is increasingly being analogized to the business or manufacturing paradigm. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear university administrators refer to the student as the "customer." 1[5] As with a business, internal reports of the company's products may glow, but the test comes when a product gets beyond the system creating it: Does that product do what it is designed to do in a "real world" setting? Analogizing the manufacture of automobiles with the education of minds may seem inappropriate but given the increasing tendency to subject education to the same cost/benefit discipline to which business complies is not altogether inappropriate.
Several years ago a Detroit auto manufacturer hired Japanese engineers as consultants to the then ailing U.S. auto industry to improve product quality. After viewing the manufacturing process, the Japanese suggested taking off all of the auto's doors at the end of the assembly line and reattaching them. The U.S. engineers noted that this would be impossible since most of the doors could be reinstalled only with great difficulty given the cars' "loose" construction, which would inordinately slow up "the line." This is an era of "team players." 1[6] The assembly line inspectors were part of the system and knew that they would not be viewed as "team players" if they became "fault-finders." Thus they "passed" autos that actually were defective. The Japanese were pointing out the need for some independent validation of the system to counteract the "team-mentality."
Obviously, if a "captured" or "system" test is used to evaluate a product of that system, the product will be shown in its best light. After all, who wants to blow the whistle on the system if their livelihood is dependent on the system? Who wants to prove that their peers are making junk? As just noted, U.S. corporations increasingly recognize the value of the "fresh eye" that only an outsider brings to an organization. 1[7]
This is a major part of U.S. higher education's problem: One would expect administrators, when evaluating what, in effect, is their own work, to make their students look as good as possible. What better way to elevate the apparent quality of one's work than by creating a grading system which presents student performance in the best light? 1[8] But if the performance reflected in the evaluation bears little or no relation to the students' mastery of the subject matter, the administration is aiding and abetting in a social fraud: Their students know less than faculty are telling you and, further, administrators are willing to lie to the public about the students' proficiency.
Notice the institutional benefits in exaggerating student mastery of the subject matter. Universities, colleges, and departments can justify more faculty since more students will want to major in a subject which will generate a high grade point average. Colleges, particularly in a period of downsizing, can insure their own survival if their enrollments are stable or increasing. Universities can justify higher tuition and state appropriations when they can prove that they are doing their jobs well. There are few constraints on administrators for debasing the coin of the realm--the course grade. That "grade inflation" has occurred in U.S. higher education is a well recognized fact. 1[9]
Furthermore, there is an inter-university effect on grade inflation that is occurring, a type of Gresham's law effect at work on a national level. For example, the University of Tennessee, the University of Alabama, and other second tier undergraduate universities are influencing, if not determining, the grading scale at top undergraduate schools such as Harvard and Yale. This occurs because of universal standards for entry into highly competitive professional schools such as law, which is determined essentially by a two pronged test: Undergraduate GPA and LSAT (in the case of law school). 2[0] The Law School Data Assembly Service (LSDAS), as well as individual law schools, make some attempt to weed out weak courses but when an entire institution has intelligent students who are willing to accept lower than top standards for their academic work, these individuals from lower quality programs who score comparably with Ivy Leaguers on national entrance exams such as the LSAT and GRE exams, will be admitted on a par with those from the best schools unless the best schools adjust their grading scales to reflect the fact that all students in them are comparable to the top students at second tier and "lesser" schools. Harvard and other top undergraduate schools are cognizant of this fact and have made appropriate adjustments to their grades, giving blanket A's and B+ for entire courses in recent times. During one recent year half of the class at Harvard undergraduate school was graduated "summa cum laude." After all, going to Harvard or some other top undergraduate school should not permit the Tennessee and Alabama graduates from squeezing out Ivy League graduates from premier professional programs. Hence, lesser schools are influencing the grading at the better schools which contributes to the grade inflation.
It is when one emerges from the higher education "factory" that its products can, for the first time, be tested by an "extra-system" measure. One would expect educational achievement levels to be at or near the top in many areas given the resources devoted to U.S. higher education. This has been shown not to be the case with respect to recent graduates. Their quality is increasingly being questioned 2[1], the functional literacy 2[2] of the adult population has been questioned, and the culture generale or cultural knowledge of so-called U.S. "college graduates" is increasingly questioned. 2[3] It is not uncommon, for example, for leaders in industry to comment publicly on the poor quality of the product the U.S. educational system turns out. 2[4] The lower perceived quality of college graduates is, to some extent, reflected in the salaries they earn upon graduation. 2[5]
Perhaps the severest implicit vote of "no-confidence" in today's U.S. undergraduate occurs with respect to certain professional school admissions: Four hours of LSAT exams count the equivalent of four years undergraduate work in the admissions decision to many, if not most, U.S. law schools. 2[6]
ii. A Flawed Paradigm: The Student as Customer.
In an effort to bring business techniques to higher education and enhance efficiency, U.S. higher education administrators have fallen into the trap of the false analogy: They assume that management techniques applicable to making cars, for example, are equally suited for higher education.
The current leading management paradigm is TQM, Total Quality Management. This approach, developed by the late Professor Deming, is designed to address the problems of injecting quality into bureaucracies which produce most of the goods and services of contemporary society. The monument to the success of his TQM approach is the Japanese economy which outgrew its 1950's image of producing junk to its current position as the quality standard of the world.