By Professor
Doom
Administration: “We’re now tirelessly
working on a strategic plan…”
--a notice that lets faculty know
that a(nother) vast sum of money is about to be thrown away.
I’ve written many times about the glut of
very highly paid administrators in higher education, and a very natural
question concerns what, exactly, these people do with all those resources. It’s
time I address what they consider their most important (overt) task: the
strategic plan.
When a new president/chancellor/Grand
Poo-Bah is hired, the very first thing he does is put the old strategic plan
right in the shredder. Hold that thought, because we’ll come back to that.
Next, the Poo-Bah starts work on the new
strategic plan, with many great meetings and administrative retreats soaking up
thousands of hours of administrative time putting together this new plan.
“Two running tracks, two stadiums, football and baseball, with a
combined seating of 5,000, a student recreational center, an administrative
building complex, an orientation building just for incoming students, an indoor
and outdoor pool, a 2.4 mile long walking route…”
---I can’t even begin to describe how
grandiose this plan was, for a campus situated in a town with total population
under 2,000, which never had more than 1,000 students on campus at any one
time. The campus has no sports program, nor any actual plan for a sports
program.
What’s a strategic plan? It’s the plan for
the growth of the institution. Growth and retention are all that matters, and
administration feels it very important to set down how exactly, growth and
retention can be maximized.
Administration: “We’ve updated the
strategic plan to include a multi-level parking garage, so that when we have
varsity teams, their families can have a place to park their cars.”
--I’m not sure if the town even had a
single two-story building in it. Does the water tower count?
It’s important to understand that the
strategic plan is a living document. It’s never finished, so the work being
done on it is perpetual. These things can run hundreds of pages. There is
considerable planning for the planning:
“…a system-wide strategic planning
process designed to ensure that each campus and the system have a focused plan
for the next five years. Throughout the 2012-2013 academic year, MU’s
Strategy Workgroup drafted a document that outlines our campus’s strategy
for the next five years. Since it was first drafted, that document has been
revised multiple times in response to two campus-wide meetings and feedback
from Faculty Council, the Strategic Planning and Resource Advisory Council
(SPRAC), Provost’s Staff, Chancellor’s Staff, the UM System, and the Board of
Curators.
--this isn’t even the ONLY strategic
plan for this particular campus, it actually has multiple strategic plans.
Consider all the committee time spent on this plan…and then realize all the
other plans use a likewise amount of time from another legion of committees
composed of tetralegions of administrators…
It isn’t just wildly ambitious plans for
further building development. There are also pages and pages of pure blather.
“…conducted a year-long comprehensive
strategic planning process. The significant endeavor involved 900 persons from
the university’s network of stakeholders in a focused, five-phased planning
process. The result, Strategic Plan 2017, was recently approved by the Board of
Trustees. The plan is a complete articulation of a new vision for Saint Mary’s
as a top-tier, national university…”
I’m not picking on this institution. All
strategic plans go on and on talking about how much time was put into making
the plan, which, every single time, uses a ton of words to say “we’ll try to do
the best we can with what we got.” Literally, millions of dollars’ worth of
administrative time is poured into these things. Just how focused can a
five-phased process involving 900 people going years into the future be? That
is more people than Congress, the Senate, and Executive branch combined, and
nobody accuses the US government of being particularly focused. It’s like they don’t
even read their own words. I feel the need to quote from one phase:
“…Create a vibrant campus and
transformational residential life experience at the College.”
--it took nearly a thousand people a
year of work to decide this is worth having? Flip the meaning of this
statement. Were there many proponents of a plan to make the campus dull and campus
life completely pointless? Every phase is filled with statements whose
goofiness becomes obvious once you flip their meaning. Do note that the plan
doesn’t, you know, indicate how to actually achieve the goal, merely that a vibrant
campus, for example, is something to want.
These
massive, weighty, documents are awesome bureaucratic constructs. They’re also a
big part of the resume of the Poo-Bah. When he leaves and goes to another
campus he shows off how amazing he is at formulating a strategic plan.
Admin announcement: “We’re moving to a new campus.”
--Despite the years of effort going
into grandiose plans, the campus of the small school ended up being moved to a
totally new site…with a grim boiler room for faculty cubicles, bland classrooms,
and an architectural ambiance that is best described as “yellow outlet mall.”
There was never the slightest chance of anything in that perpetual strategic
plan being used, and everyone who worked on it over a decade knew it. Before
the move, our Poo-Bah retired…wanna guess the first and second things the new
Poo-Bah did?
When the old Poo-Bah leaves, a new Poo-Bah
is selected. Guess what? The new Poo-Bah needs to put together a new strategic
plan—if he uses the old, he’ll having nothing for his resume for when he moves
on up. So, the old strategic plan goes into the shredder, and legions of new
committees are formed to give input on the new, completely irrelevant,
strategic plan.
“Today, however, virtually every
college and university in the nation has an elaborate strategic plan. Indeed,
whenever a college hires a new president, his or her first priority is usually
the crafting of a new strategic plan. As in Orwell's 1984, all mention of the previous administration's plan, which probably had
been introduced with great fanfare only a few years earlier, is instantly
erased from all college publications and Web sites….”
--I thought what I’d seen with my own
eyes was a fluke, but it turns out it’s
quite common. It takes a few years to craft a plan…and most Poo-Bahs only last
a few years, creating an endless pointless cycle of shred/craft/shred/craft.
As I’ve written many times before,
administrators in higher education get paid enormous sums. I’ve shown that
administrators in higher education seldom
have any qualifications to run an institution of higher education. To
justify their pay, and their jobs, they engage in many make-work programs, the
most glaring of which is the strategic plan. I guess I should be grateful that
Vision for Excellence strategic planning is a pure waste of time since so much
of other administrative work seems to be focused on destroying any scrap of
integrity in higher education.
But seriously, it’s very clear that we
have far too many administrators with far too much time on their hands, and
this is quite possibly the greatest factor in the rising costs of tuition. For,
literally, centuries, institutions of higher education managed to do just fine
without strategic plans, but now every institution is perpetually constructing
them.
…In 2006, the chancellor of Southern
Illinois University's Carbondale campus was forced to resign after it was
discovered that much of its new strategic plan, "Southern at 150,"
had been copied from Texas A&M University's strategic plan,"Vision
2020." The chancellor had previously served as vice chancellor at Texas
A&M,…"
--not only are plans generally
irrelevant, they can
easily be plagiarized (I’m astonished some wonk actually read both plans
and could remember the crap well enough to see it was cut-and-pasted). I saw
such things when I brought an institution through accreditation, but thought
little of it and saw no reason to protest the plagiarism (sometimes years-old
official documents have names of other institutions on them, “somehow”). It’s just gibberish anyway.
When students choose schools, they often
do so based on tuition. Wouldn’t it be nice if they got a breakdown of how much
of tuition goes to administration? Even better, a breakdown of how much of
tuition money goes into education? For many institutions, I suspect the true
amount would be well under 10%.
Think about it.
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