Selecting a Chancellor

The search committee for the UMass Amherst chancellor held forums yesterday and today for people to provide input into the process. I spoke briefly near the beginning. This isn't an exact transcript, but I hope it's close.

I hope you've all received a copy of the Chancellor Qualities document that the MSP prepared. I was one of the architects of that. We began with the Lazarre Report ten years ago and it was very interesting to go back and see where the campus was ten years ago, where we thought it was going, and where we've ended up. But I want to speak on something slightly different today.

Our society has come to fetishize numbers and measurement. Everything is supposed to be "data driven" these days. But much of what people call "measurement" really isn't. When you "measure" something, you have a unidimensional axis and a common set of units that everyone agrees upon. If you say one thing gets 10 miles per gallon and another 20, everyone can agree on what a mile is and understand what that means. But many of the things that people call measures really aren't. Like rankings. These kinds of things -- or constructs -- aggregate a bunch of things together that are assumed to covary with what you're really interested in and they may help you make some rough comparisons. But once you start trying to shift those measures, you can end up going the wrong way.

Does everyone remember melamine? People wanted to measure the quality of milk and were using a protein test as a measure of quality to decide how much to pay for milk. But people discovered that a cheap industrial chemical would cause the test to go up. But it was toxic. That's what can happen when you start looking for the cheapest way to make some score go up.

In college rankings, the same kind of thing happens. At Clemson, a high ranking official said the president had manipulated the rankings, for example, by placing an artificial cap on class sizes so that more classes would be under 20 seats, which resulted in students actually being in more larger classes. They didn't do it to improve the students' education -- it was because in the rankings "20" is a magic number -- and if you can improve the percentage of classes under that, you can improve your rank.

I've seen the same kind of thinking underlying the administration at UMass Amherst from the Board of Trustees on down. I particularly saw it with Steve Tocco, who had a kind of view from 60,000 feet where he wanted to "shift the parameters of UMass Amherst" so that they looked more like our "peer-aspirant institutions" -- that was how he talked about this stuff. But it was like if we discovered that Stanford had 15 light poles per square mile and we had 20, we should go cut down a bunch of light poles. And the current chancellor's Program for Excellence is full of this kind of thinking: every point is about how we rank and where could we make a targeted investment to improve the ranking. That approach may improve the "brand", but it doesn't necessarily make the institution better.

It isn't that rankings can't be useful, but many of the comparisons that they enable simply aren't useful or relevant. It's like comparing apples, oranges, billiard balls and planetoids. Yeah, they're all sorta round. We shouldn't spend all our time comparing ourselves to other institutions or being driven by those comparisons. We need to look inward at ourself and be the best that we can be.

What we need is someone to help identify the real problems we have on the campus; to prioritize and fix them. And to listen to the people who really understand how this place works and help their ideas and solutions emerge. That's how you make the institution better.

There was a lively discussion that followed with, Jean MacCormack (the President of UMass Dartmouth) pushing back a bit that the role of the chancellor requires a balance between looking inward and fixing problems and looking outward to represent the institution to external constituencies. I would certainly agree -- but it is a balance that I feel has not been well met during the 15 years that I've been here.

I was generally pleased with what I saw and heard. The committee is saying and doing the right things.