The Headmaster Ritual

My generation of faculty was the first in Missouri State University history actually required to earn tenure and promotion. In some ways it was the worst of both worlds. President Marshall Gordon had been brought on in 1983 with an explicit mandate to raise the University's research profile, and woe to the tenure candidate whose publication record did not satisfy then-VPAA Donald E. Bowen. On the other hand, the departmental personnel committees were stocked with asshats who had never published anything, and who had gotten tenure and promotions just for showing up on a regular basis. The same was true for most of the department heads. My generation taught the same number of courses per semester as the belligerent ghouls who were already tenured - the difference was that we were expected to publish or perish.

As an incentive for faculty performance, President Gordon had also installed a "merit pay system." Part of any annual raise for the faculty would be doled out as an across the board percentage, with an additional raise for faculty who had been "meritorious." For purposes of merit pay, the workload for all faculty at SMSU was set at 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service. This was an ideal balance for newcomers like me, because we were expected to be all things to all people at all times anyway. But the oldtimers didn't like the merit pay system at all. They had been hired to teach, not to do research. They sure didn't want to receive a grade on their annual performance. Worst, the idea of their junior colleagues making up ground on them financially was downright perverse.

Naturally, the departmental merit pay committee and personnel committee were controlled by the oldtime asshats; they passed their recommendations up to the department heads, who tended to be even older timers (although heads were starting to be brought in from off campus by the time I arrived). Non-tenured faculty could serve on merit pay committees, but they tended to keep their mouths shut, even if it meant going along with some rather outlandish claims on the part of the senior faculty. A colleague I like and respect deeply, two years senior to me, chaired the committee once while still non-tenured. He had the nerve to call out an old-timer on a bogus conference presentation the old-timer was trying to take credit for. In return for this and other alleged instances of "uncollegiality," the personnel committee (they had to recommend tenure; this colleague had literally outpublished the whole department) unanimously recommended against promotion to associate professor. The department head concurred. If not for swift strong action by the then-College Dean, my colleague's promotion would have been toast.

As the Gordon administration plodded onward, the pool of money for merit pay eventually dried up. But the merit pay evaluations, and the wealth of bad feelings they produced, continued regardless. Acting President Keeling introduced a sliding percentage scale for faculty to set their own workloads; a worthwhile idea which only complicated matters in practice. The Keiser administration's solution was to pay off four years' worth of arrears with a maximum available raise of $1000 for a faculty member who had averaged 100% meritorious performance over that time. For what it's worth, I racked up $960. I wasn't happy to see the merit pay system go, but I respected President Keiser's decision to end the unfunded charade. It was replaced by a greatly increased number of faculty awards for research, service, and teaching. But that is another rant.

That Joke Isn't Funny Any More

The major shortcoming of the Keiser administration was its utter lack of concern over what the faculty, as a whole, thought or felt. Of course, the faculty had just as little of an idea about what the central administration really does. But then, since the central administration exists primarily to facilitate and guide the faculty in "producing educated persons," I considered them to have have a more pressing need to understand the way we operated, and not the other way around. Such was not the case.

When I got here, the University still had a biennial morale survey. Whether I believed or disbelieved in any particular rant, paean, or simple comment, I was almost always edified, and in time began to submit comments of my own. But the biennial morale survey vanished from sight in 1996 in a welter of rumors and dire predictions of potential libel suits, prompting a suspicion that the central administration was more interested in throttling meaningful faculty input than practicing shared government.

Over the years this suspicion has hardened into certainty, as illustrated by the scathing Diamond/Sell Report presented to the central administration in January 2004. Foremost among the identified shortcomings were indifference toward the Public Affairs Mission and the lack of any meaningful communication between the faculty and the central administration. I was personally informed by one of the then-Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs that remedying these perceptions was the job of... the Director of the Academic Development Center. WTF?

The central administration responded with a series of "Centennial Public Discussions" in early October 2004. Handsome fliers were produced and splattered all over campus, facilitators trained, and tables loaded with Sodexho's finest hors d'oeuvres - and almost nobody showed up. Those who did show up were invited to discuss not the Diamond/Sell Report but about how best to include the Public Affairs Mission into one's teaching. WTF?

It's not that I'm not blaming us. It's nothing short of pathetic that 90% of the faculty couldn't be bothered to spend a couple of hours discussing the future of the institution. Too many of us are indeed that shiftless. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to tell that nothing worthwhile would come out of the Centennial Public Discussions.

Years ago, the University employed an Attendance Counselor named Harry O. Taylor. Mr. Taylor was an imposing figure who sounded and even looked a little bit like James Earl "God" Jones. I once stopped by his office to follow up on a student whom I had sent to see him; turns out that the student had poked his head into Mr. Taylor's office, looked him in the eye, said "My professor told me I had to see you," and got the hell out of there. "I guess he saw me, all right," laughed Mr. Taylor.

I would have expected behavior like that from a teenaged snot who thought he could pass my course without actually attending it. The faculty should have been able to expect better from the central administration. Yet the President's Office tasked Academic Affairs to establish campus dialogue about the Diamond/Sell Report; Academic Affairs passed the job down to the Academic Development Center, which outsourced it to the Communication Department, whose veteran public dialogue mongers tried heroically to start some meaningful conversations, but in vain.

I guess we had our Centennial Public Discussion, all right.

Alma Matters

I am in my third decade of employment at Missouri State University. It is not my alma mater, but it matters greatly to me. Hence this blog.

Dr. Marshall (no middle initial) Gordon, who was the president when I arrived here, is best known today for financing almost all of the Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts and for putting the second deck on the football field now known as Plaster Stadium. Which of the two he considered more important is clear from his famous statement that "potential donors never ask how your chemistry department is doing." Dr. Gordon was not what you would call a particularly "accountable" leader. What Dr. Gordon did, and why he did it, and the outcomes of what he did... was nobody's business but his. Not mine, not yours, not even the Board of Regents'. The Board eventually got wise to his modus operandi, but even so the process of flunking Dr. Gordon took time, and money, and more under-the-table machinations.

From February 1992 to June 1993, Dr. Russell Keeling served the University as "Chief Executive Officer." Although Dr. Keeling was rightly regarded as one of the biggest old boys on campus, he also enjoyed a justly deserved reputation for personal probity. I personally knew Dr. Keeling would never be ready for prime time when he selected, as his three top assistants, one colleague from the Communications Department and two of his former graduate students. His choices showed more concerned for his personal comfort level than for the advancement of the University; he was allowed to be a finalist for the permanent Presidency but it was well known that the Board was looking elsewhere. It would be churlish to say Dr. Keeling flunked, when in fact he served the University very creditably under exceedingly difficult circumstances. On the other hand, it would be difficult to contend that he passed, either.

Dr. John H. Keiser became President in 1993 with a mandate to clean house. Heralded as a "what you see is what you get" type of leader, he pretty much lived up to his billing. From the beginning he was very clear about what he wanted to accomplish, and how he planned to accomplish it. To this end, his administration developed and disseminated the first of three highly detailed Five-Year Plans. The University would focus on five major themes, with the Public Affairs Mission bringing the themes all together. And so it did. The Public Affairs Mission became a reality - or maybe a surreality; general education was trimmed down and reorganized, admissions became more selective, and so on. That's not to say, though, that things didn't go on under the table. In the late 1990s, Dr. Keiser threatened to dismantle the Economics Department, which was at that time just one of several underperforming departments on campus (in the interests of fair disclosure, mine was another), but counted among its faculty one of his most vocal detractors, Dr. Thomas Wyrick. Another instance was Dr. Keiser's steadfast - and in my opinion, ass-headed - refusal to include sexual orientation in the University's standard non-discrimination language. Incompetent administrators who toed the party line were rewarded, and incompetent faculty asshats who didn't make waves were allowed to collect their across-the-board raises. I could say it stronger, but it's too much trouble.

Besides, I have to admit that I became personally rather fond of Dr. Keiser. The last two or three years of his term, he came to visit one of my classes at least once a year. The last of these times he got into an animated (if not quite heated) argument with three young women in my GEP 397 class. For someone who had spent the last four decades administrating things, he did a very good job of holding his own, which impressed me a great deal. A traditional faculty gripe about administrators is that they have no idea of what goes on in a college classroom. We had a few of those administrators during Dr. Keiser's presidency, but he himself was not one of them. I can't say that I miss him terribly, but I have to credit him for giving the University a sense of focus and for steering it successfully through some genuinely trying times - such as the Hancock II Amendment of 1994 and the State revenue crisis of the early 2000s. He gets high marks in my book.