I am a recovering college administrator with an interest in, and a love for, education.  So you may have to bear with me if I post from time to time on that topic.  I have a now mostly abandoned site oriented to higher education questions (here) where the pictures have been excised due to some Picasa glitch but where the text remains.  It is still somewhat current though, so if you have an interest check it out.

What piques my interest today is an article by Peter Wood in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  In it he mines one of my favorite themes: that higher education studiously avoids measuring, or coming close to understanding, the things that it has no interest in knowing.  Often these are the most important things, the things that if understood well would cause discomfort.  Why prompt inquiry when experience shows that, to quote Jack Nicholoson in A Few Good Men, you can’t handle the truth?

Here is a cut-and-paste from the other blog on the point:

Over at University Diaries, Margaret Soltan a/k/a “UD” continues the good fight for higher education. UD was blogging when Fenster was a newbie blogger way back in the day and while Fens semi-retired UD kept at it. Good for her, and us.

If you read UD you know that if there’s one topic that is likely to get her . . . ummm . . . animated it is big-time sports, and its baleful effects on the academy. That is something that Fenster knows something about. He doesn’t know about it from the perspective of a sports-hound. Fenster not that, though he is far from hostile to sports. He knows about it more from having served for a number of years as the top finance and administrative official at a rather large state university, one of the ones that gets into the press from time to time on account of a seeming inability to control costs on the athletic side.

So what Fenster knows, I suppose, is that it is a pretty difficult endeavor from a university perspective to put the athletics genie back in the bottle. Fenster, he has plenty of stories, mostly for another time.

What Fenster did not know enough about, and should have known more about, was the exact nature of all the explicit and implicit subsidies to Athletics. Jeez, as the chief financial and administrative officer you’d think he’d know that, right? Well, yes indeed. But in the several years Fenster was on the job he came to realize an important truth about higher education management, a truth that can almost be distilled into a kind of principle. It has to do with management and measurement, about which a number of aphorisms already exist.

Such as:

You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure.

Measure What You Want to Manage.

You Manage what You Measure.

OK, but these are all roughly saying the same thing. Fenster would like to add an aphorism taking a somewhat different perspective:

If You are Determined Not to Manage Something, Don’t Measure It.
Time and time again as an administrator in higher education, Fenster has been faced with situations in which this rule is applied in a three step procedure to eliminate a problem:

1. Stop talking about it
2. Don’t keep track of it
3. Problem goes away.

Stalin once remarked “no person, no problem”. To paraphrase in this context: no problem? No problem!

This procedure can be spectacularly effective. Not permanently, of course. The problem doesn’t really go away. But it goes away long enough to satisfy the person undertaking the procedure. And in some ways this willful suppression of facts has its own charms. When facts are buried long enough, it’s like the proverbial buried hatchet. Sometimes people forget where they are buried, and in time people not only ignore the problem’s existence, they forget they had a problem in the first place. The cookie trail gets old. Sooner or later the repressed returns, but that’s for another day.

There’s a lot of this confusion in higher education, and it can definitely be present in the financial relationship between Athletics and the University. Not for nothing that scholars have had to work hard to develop a fair reckoning of that relationship.

Just as Reseach as a function within higher education often thinks of itself as producing a profit to the university because it produces revenue, so also Athletics often characterizes its activities as having the effect of subsidizing the rest of the universities. In most cases this is not true of either Research or Athletics. Whatever else they do, and whatever other benefits they provide, they require, rather than dispense, subsidies.

I’ll regale you with more fun stuff about the topic another day, including the true nature of the so-called higher education bubble.  Signing off for now.