The guiding principle that I call “sufficient uniformity” has come up in several conversations recently, so I thought it might be useful to elaborate. But first, two history lessons.
In January, I will have been part of the ACC community for 38 years, and I’ve seen a lot in my time here. One pattern that struck me early on was our tendency — which incidentally is not unique to ACC — to swing wildly between two extreme responses to challenges in our institution. One end of the continuum is to open the gates and let people solve their problems as best they can. The results are pretty predictable: Lots of specific solutions to what may actually be challenges we share across units or even across the college. And because people have invested their time and energy in their specific solutions, it’s a very short step from “solution” to “defending turf.”
And so, we react to turf-defending and silos by swinging wildly to the other end of the continuum: “The” Solution, usually but not always decreed by some administrator. Frequently, the administrator issuing the decree is just tired of arbitrating between people defending their specific solutions, but there are other motivations, one of the most common of which is “The Chewing Gum Principle.”
In my life before ACC, I was clinical director of the adolescent schizophrenic unit in a psychiatric hospital. One day, one of our kids spat one piece of chewing gum on one stair behind the kitchen, and one of our cooks stepped on it and tripped, breaking her leg. The unit director responded by outlawing all gum on the entire campus — with the result that, overnight, gum-chewing became a stealth activity, setting up a never-ending series of police actions on the part of staff trying to ensure compliance.
Just to be clear, I’m making a nuanced argument here, which means it requires some actual thought. There are issues for which the Chewing Gum Principle is, in fact, the appropriate response. Take sexual harassment, for instance: In that case, making one hard-and-fast rule and expecting compliance is the appropriate approach — but that’s not chewing gum.
Somewhere between these extremes, there’s a middle ground characterized by enough consistency that people aren’t disoriented from one unit to another — especially our students — but not so much consistency that addressing the needs of specific units and situations becomes a stealth activity. That is the zone of sufficient uniformity.
Unlike the systemic chaos of everyone-for-themselves problem-solving or the monolithic Chewing Gum Principle, there is no recipe for sufficient uniformity, let alone for seeking excellence in that zone: What counts as “sufficient” for one function may differ substantially from another. Or, in other words, sufficient uniformity for Function A may be closer to chaos than Function B, or closer to the cookie-cutter approach of the Chewing Gum Principle.
And that’s only the beginning: There’s also the matter of pursuing excellence in the zone of sufficient uniformity, which is not merely a matter of balancing or compromising: It’s quite easy to “balance” your way to mediocrity, and avoiding this trap is one of the hardest challenges about problem-solving across units within a system.
I’ve applied the Principle of Sufficient Uniformity throughout my tenure as dean to challenges arising in my division, so I could give you any number of examples of how it works, but I’m going to talk through one example: schedule-building.
Most people who are awake — like all the LAHC department chairs — are intimately familiar with the scheduling challenges of their own departments and disciplines, and I believe that all of them make good-faith efforts to serve our students with their schedules. Nevertheless, when I became dean of LAHC, each department had its own unique (or perhaps, idiosyncratic) way of approaching the schedule, with entirely predictable results. Let’s name just one: Students need a variety of courses across my division, and because the logic behind each department’s approach to scheduling was different, “the schedule” was confusing and disorienting, to say the least. (My colleagues in Schedule Development were equally disoriented by these approaches, so I could tell this story with their experiences in view, too.)
I could have responded to this unsatisfactory situation with a Chewing Gum solution: We’ll all schedule the same way, period. In theory, that sounds like a good approach, until you reflect on the differences between high-demand courses and lower-demand courses, sequential courses vs. “one-off” courses, disciplinary dynamics that drive course scheduling, staffing capacity, faculty preferences, etc. etc. — all of which details are familiar to the department chairs who deal with them, but to few, if any, of our students.
In theory, the Principle of Sufficient Uniformity sounds like simple compromise: Let’s adopt the scheduling practices that leave room for flexibility at the department level but produce a “family-resemblance” among our departments so students are no longer disoriented. (Or at least, less disoriented.)
In practice, it took three years of hard thinking about what sufficient actually means in sufficient uniformity for this one, single, crucial function. The reason it took so long wasn’t the compromise; it was finding the right balance that maximized the excellences of these various course types and characteristics.
Several elements emerged, chief among them being that we build the schedule for students — which means we had to develop a degree of sophistication about students as “consumers” and their behavior, the vicissitudes of the zillions of degree and award plans students might be pursuing — not to mention the other pressures and institutional resistances students face (like the fact that we can’t reasonably offer Arabic at every campus and site in our entire service areas, just in case someone wants to take it closer to their childcare). This increased sophistication meant making some hard choices — and those choices were not just about where to offer what, but how to think about scheduling as a student success initiative. That sort of thinking leads to transformation: Like experimenting with DL or HyFlex to improve availability of courses we can’t offer everywhere. Which in turn leads to questioning our received but constraining wisdom about how we teach courses or disciplines.
People facing choices always make them according to some guiding principle or other, whether it’s explicit or not. So, we needed a lot of discussion to render our guiding principles explicit before we could even begin to question them or align them around some sufficiently uniform guidelines.
To get us started, I framed a set of conceptual notions that were broad enough to allow flexibility but firm enough to ensure a family resemblance, and turned people loose to work within those broad concepts. Over time, the real driving differences among departments emerged as we built schedules, and we were able to disentangle these real drivers from orthodox articles of faith. As we worked together on these schedules, we adjusted the guiding principles of scheduling to strike a “balance” between chaos and chewing gum, always with an eye on excellence and our mission. The result is a set of principles that works reasonably well in the pursuit of excellence for everybody in the schedule-production and consumption pipeline.
No doubt there are still people who want chaos so they can “do their own thing,” and right beside them are people who want a single, rigid structure that prescribes a scheduling “recipe” to lower the cost of decision-making. The resulting schedule-building system is neither, but it is an example of how sufficient uniformity can serve our mission.
