Plans and Values

With the election finally done, it’s back to the task at hand.

Friday’s Inside Higher Ed had a terrific piece about campus communication plans during COVID. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Though some interviewees advocated for more robust and complicated plans, most others said they believe developing guiding values and statements of ethics could help institutions better navigate the ethical tensions in a crisis.

Yes. Exactly this.

Planning is essential, but also subject to the law of diminishing returns. If some planning is good, more may not be better. That’s because plans rely on predictions of circumstances. As circumstances unfold, they have a way of deviating from predictions. At that point, too specific or dogmatic a plan becomes an active hindrance. Many organizations get around that problem by putting plans on shelves once they’re completed and then never referring to them again. It solves the flexibility problem, but it creates a why-bother problem.

(A common variation on that is the plan so abstract as to become vaporous. “We plan to pursue excellence while maintaining our distinct character.” That may avoid offending any internal constituencies, but as a guide to action, it’s entirely useless.)

COVID disrupted all manner of plans; a year or two ago, I’d guess that most of us didn’t predict a global pandemic disrupting campus operations in 2020. But it isn’t just a matter of the occasional extreme event. The limits of knowledge are much more basic than that.

Colleges are collections of moving parts with free will and complicated agendas. They exist in larger political universes with even more moving parts and agendas. For example, when I arrived at Holyoke in 2008, my predecessor had started a program of cluster hiring of faculty. She had allowed the English department to hire five full-time faculty the year before I arrived, with the intention of rotating departments over time. Then she left, the economy crashed, hiring ground to a halt, and I was stuck with a massive staffing imbalance among departments that took years to fix. Cluster hiring presumes the sustained availability of resources for hiring, and that assumption proved false. A plan based on one set of circumstances -- in which it was at least arguably reasonable -- was a terrible fit for subsequent circumstances. Cluster hiring is sometimes presented as a low-conflict way to increase employee diversity, which it can be. But before carrying it out, you’d better make darn sure you have the resources to do a full rotation around the departments over several years. Otherwise, you’ll freeze an imbalance in place for years.

And that’s before accounting for pushback, changes in state or national policies, unexpected departures of key personnel, and the ways that the rumor mill will interpret things. Plotting out everyone’s future reactions to something, and the fallout from those reactions, and the outcome of future elections, and the state of public funding, and the presence or absence of natural disasters, requires a level of epistemological hubris beyond what prudence would dictate.

But core values are much easier to specify. They tend to hold up over time. While they don’t exactly dictate courses of action, they certainly help prioritize. They’re helpful in knowing which way to tack when circumstances change. Do you value deference to positional authority, or individual initiative? Do you believe in the “weed 'em out” function of college, or are you more of a “help everyone succeed” type? When improvement requires moments of discomfort, do you value the prospective improvement more or the comfort more? Most of us see some value in each of these, but when values conflict -- and heaven knows they do -- you need to know which side you want your organization to choose.

For instance, in putting together Brookdale’s Academic Master Plan, I had to sift through all sorts of input from interested parties and bring some coherence to it. I found a common denominator: the reduction or elimination of student achievement gaps by demographic group. That became the single overarching goal of the plan. All of the tactics underneath it were chosen because they were consistent with that one goal. It didn’t rely on predicting the future, but it did provide a reasonably useful guide to future action. When the pandemic struck, it wreaked havoc on some of the tactics we had identified, but it didn’t alter the goal. Suddenly we had to shift from stocking the campus food pantry to providing loaner laptops, but the point was the same. With a clear goal, we could adapt tactics to changing circumstances.

If the last week taught us anything, it’s that we don’t know what the future will bring. All the more reason to be clear on what matters.