In the previous series on mission, intention, and trust, I laid out a framework for identifying patterns and improving organizational functioning for the sake of our mission. Let’s turn now to applications of this MIT framework to specific decisions, large and small, throughout the college, starting with the search for a new provost.
My focus is the search process itself, taken as an institutional activity. I want to look at how that process is structured, rather than any specific decisions or recommendations by anyone in particular. This involves analyzing how we approached the process of searching for a provost, from the perspective of mission, intention, and trust. One goal is to use the MIT framework to reveal patterns that can explain specific symptoms that arise in the institution; another, of course, is to suggest a way to improve.
I’ll start with a warning of sorts: To many in the institution, this discussion will be inflammatory. I understand. Confronting patterns like these — patterns that often conceal jockeying for privilege or territory, for instance — is usually challenging and even painful. I’m not engaging in this discussion to attack or embarrass anyone. My point throughout has not been to indict anyone or point fingers. Rather, continuing the diagnosis/treatment metaphor, I’m attempting to take signs and symptoms seriously, look for the patterns they reveal, and suggest a treatment plan. These case studies, I argue, show that the MIT framework is a useful paradigm for addressing these patterns and moving us toward becoming a mission-centered, intentional, confidence-inducing organization.
Let me begin this case study with the selection committee itself. If you examine the membership closely, you’ll see that there are 17 members, seven of whom, or 41%, are represent roles directly involved with instruction. Of those seven, two are in roles representing the so-called “academic transfer” division, including one department chair and one professor (representing the FTF Senate). For completeness, there is one adjunct professor in academic transfer, but that person is on the committee representing APTE. That means that, in terms of “official” representation, academic transfer is 12% of the representation on the committee.
Now let’s contextualize this breakdown in terms of the core mission of the college, looking at a plausible metric, contact hours.
| Division | 220F Contact Hours | Institution % | 221F Contact Hours | Institution % |
| ADM | 462,624 | 8% | 450,800 | 8.50% |
| BUS | 268,624 | 5% | 268,112 | 5.10% |
| CSIT | 287,312 | 5% | 283,440 | 5.40% |
| DMCAT | 242,048 | 4% | 271,760 | 5.10% |
| HS | 440,320 | 8% | 441,072 | 8.30% |
| PSS | 215,808 | 4% | 198,576 | 3.80% |
| LAHC | 1,172,016 | 20% | 999,072 | 18.90% |
| LASBS | 1,280,976 | 22% | 1,074,176 | 20.30% |
| SEM | 1,493,376 | 26% | 1,307,072 | 24.70% |
| Total | 5,863,104 | 100% | 5,294,080 | 100% |
| “Workforce“ | 1,916,736 | 33% | 1,913,760 | 36% |
| “Transfer“ | 3,946,368 | 67% | 3,380,320 | 64% |
Sectors appear in quotation marks because the divisions are not as neatly divided as it might seem: There are programs generating workforce contact hours in academic transfer divisions and vice versa. Nevertheless, I’m using this data, based on our own categorizations, available weekly to anyone in the institution. Now let’s juxtapose some data.
| Sector | Representation | Contact Hours |
| Non-instructional | 59% | 0% |
| Instruction | 41% | 100% |
| Workforce | 29% | 34% |
| Transfer | 12% | 64% |
Not all contact hours are created equal
As I have been at pains to make clear, students need the array of support services we provide, and the institution needs non-instructional functions like HR and accounts payable to function. Nevertheless, we wouldn’t perform any of those activities were it not for the core mission, namely, educating people. For that reason, the contact hour, meaning, a clock hour of direct instruction to a student, is prima facie a plausible way to quantify activities at the core of the mission of the college.
Nevertheless, using contact hours as a metric does indeed distort the picture of what our organization does, but not in the way you might think. Some years ago, I was able to obtain data from our business office concerning the specific costs of various departments and programs. This data revealed a very interesting picture of the “cost per unit” of offering a contact hour across the college, and it confirmed a common-sense presumption that some programs are simply more expensive to run than others. Consider, for example, philosophy: There are relatively few costs to offering an hour of philosophy instruction beyond the basic costs of keeping the building open and staffing.
(Of course, we never ask — and seem not to want to know — the true cost of an hour of instruction. Consider the administrative assistants and other staff across the college that perform functions required to provide that hour of instruction. Someone, for instance, has to hire the professor, maintain records, staff the section, make the schedule that puts that prof in a classroom, arrange for payroll, etc., etc. The true cost of an hour of instruction is more difficult to calculate, but I contend that one disturbing realization that a true analysis might reveal is that contingent labor is not all that much less expensive than full-time labor, all things considered. But that’s a discussion for another day.)
Compare the cost of an hour of philosophy instruction to the cost of an hour of instruction in an equipment-intensive program — semiconductor manufacturing, for instance. This means, and my old data confirms, that academic transfer is quite likely generating 3/4 of the college’s revenue.
A Question of Trust
To summarize: Less than half of the representation on the search committee involve roles whose primary function at ACC is instruction, and only 12% are academic transfer, while as of last week transfer generated 64% of the contact hours this fall and generates something like 75% of the college’s revenue. From the perspective of both the core mission and the financial well-being of the college, the decision about representation cries out for some explaining.
I want to be clear that I am not arguing that the representation on the search committee is inappropriate or nefarious. Frankly, I don’t know, because no one has provided a clear rationale for the representation in light of considerations like typical, easily-available metrics characterizing the core mission of the institution. On the contrary, my argument is that not giving a rationale for this particular decision about representation is not confidence-inducing. From the perspective of the MIT framework, this isn’t hard to detect. It’s just that no one intended to detect it.
This type of decision-making process has consequences because, intended or not, it sends a message — a message that people in the organization receive and react to. An excellent example of a reaction, in my view, is the letter, signed by many faculty, imploring the administration to hire a “scholar-leader.” It’s no accident that, on my understanding, the letter originated among faculty in academic transfer. Let me reiterate that I am attempting to use the MIT framework to diagnose. Taking this letter as a symptom, it is not difficult to understand the underlying disease: Trust.
Throughout this series, I have argued that the framework of mission, intention, and trust, provides guiding values to effect change in our structures and processes. The point of case studies like this one is to illustrate how to see with this framework, and what to do once we see patterns that stand in the way of excellence.
Epilogue
I’d like to take a moment to address two easily-anticipated criticisms of this case study.
First, it’s not hard to imagine someone complaining that my argument is largely self-interested, because, after all, I am a professor and dean in an academic transfer area. That is, of course, an accurate observation and a legitimate question. Here’s my answer: Read my posts more thoughtfully.
Throughout the series, I have consistently maintained that the core mission of this institution is educating people. I have also consistently maintained that the core mission requires collaborative efforts of many functions across the entire college — and I have been at pains to argue that the core mission does not coincide with the activities of one person, one employee group, one department, one division, or one sector. If you need an illustrative metaphor, consider the fact that the “mission” of a whole human being is not a spleen, in spite of what spleens may say.
I have indeed maintained that some functions are central and others ancillary to the core mission, and if we want to assess the core mission in vivo, it makes some sense to look at central functions, with the caveat that the institution’s health requires those ancillary functions as well. This is another way of saying that looking at contact hours does tell us something about the mission, but it can’t tell us everything.
So if your criticism is that my argument elevates my own role as the core mission of the college, the burden is on you to demonstrate that I’m not serious when I argue that the core mission — educating people — transcends my personal interests or those of my role or unit, or yours, or anyone else’s. I agree that it’s difficult for primates to sustain this holistic perspective, but if we’re determined, we can manage well enough.
The second criticism, also easy to anticipate, is an accusation that I am already not happy about the selection of our new provost. As a person generally committed to rationality, it would be inconsistent with my commitment to reason to decide in advance that the choice will be bad. In fact, I moved this post earlier in the queue – in spite of how inflammatory it may be — precisely to avoid giving the impression that I’m complaining about results we do not yet have, rather than diagnosing the process by which we are deciding, and what those processes can tell us about our institution.
