Accreditations

I have just finished updating my profile for an accrediting agency that both Hofstra and I are involved with.  The update was necessary if I wanted to be considered for a future accreditation review team.  I recognize that being part of an accreditation team entails significant work but I do so gladly because I think that accreditation makes an important positive difference.

My first experience with accreditation was three decades ago when I was serving as associate provost (and subsequently business school dean) and  was very involved in preparing for a visit by AACSB, the national and international business school accrediting agency.  The end result of this effort was a stronger business school in every meaningful way, including the accomplishments of the faculty as well as the breadth and depth of the curriculum.  My next experience occurred when I was serving a few years later as acting dean of the school of education and I was very much involved in an NCATE visit.  Once again, in preparing for the visit and in adhering to the standards, we were clearly a better school of education.  At this point in time, I have been involved in multiple accreditations, multiple times, and have also served on Middle States Periodic Review teams, AACSB visitation teams and ABA visitation teams.  From my first impressions of accreditation to the current time, my opinion has stayed the same: I think that accreditations, both voluntary and required, serve enhance the education we provide.

Is this always a perfect process?  Hardly! Two concerns stand out. Firstly, there are accreditation team members who view everything that anyone else does through the lens of what happens at their home institution.  There is more than one curriculum structure that accomplishes what needs to be accomplished.  There is more than one way of assessing outcomes.  There is more than one way of doing much of what we do.  Anyone who comes in with a fondness only for what is done at his/her home institution, at the expense of alternate philosophies that are within the accreditation standards, is doing a tremendous disservice.  Hopefully the other visiting team members can moderate any such tendency in this direction, but especially if it is the visiting team chair that has this bias, it can be a real problem.

The second concern is when a member of the accreditation team or the chair of the accreditation team looks for perfection in measuring whether a standard has been met.  A person new to an accreditation team is most vulnerable to having perfection as a standard.  A person who has been on the receiving end of such an accreditation committee member may also be somewhat vulnerable to advocating this standard when they are part of a team.  Perfection is not a realistic standard (or a realistic expectation) but overall high quality needs to be the standard against which an institution or a program is measured. And hopefully the efforts of the visiting team will help move an institution further in that direction.

Overall, for me, accreditation translates into verifiable quality.  I am very pleased that so many of Hofstra’s programs are nationally accredited and I think we are all well served by accreditations.

Commencement Rules

Whenever I think of commencement, I always think of President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech-making quote—“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.”  For any and all speakers at a commencement, there needs to be a realization that this is the graduates’ special moment.  The time should not be filled by long speeches, by overly technical speeches, by politically divisive speeches, or by crude humor.  And having gone – to date – to approximately 200 commencement ceremonies, I have experienced all of the above (thankfully, very rarely) as well as many commencements that were virtually perfect.

The speaker at my own undergraduate commencement spoke endlessly (well over an hour).  It became difficult to tell at the time whether this was a commencement speech or a filibuster.  An endless speech together with being outdoors on a very cool night led to an audience flight of major proportions.  My parents, my brother and my sister-in-law all left before the end of the ceremony.  And since this was a time before cell phones or text messaging, I didn’t know they had left until I had waited almost 30 minutes at the spot we were supposed to meet at, after the ceremony.  At that point, when I called my parents apartment, my mom answered the phone and said they were all waiting for me.  With almost no cash in my pockets (my sister-in-law was holding my jacket with my wallet), I headed for the subway.  During that ride, I had plenty of time to begin developing my guidelines for commencements.  First rule, the length of speeches and the number of speakers needs to be limited. Second rule, a subway ride is not necessarily a moving experience when it takes place immediately after graduation.

Any rule book on commencements needs to include honorary degree recipients.  Clearly in awarding an honorary degree, the single most important factor should be the accomplishments of the person being honored.  An honorary degree recipient is present to not only receive individual recognition but also to inspire.  Therefore the standard for anyone receiving an honorary degree should be nothing less than excellence.  But accomplishment also needs to be accompanied by a high ethical standard.  The person needs to be honorable.  It makes no sense to recognize accomplishment but not take into consideration the person being honored.  A political opinion, different from your own, however, should not be a disqualifier (though as I noted above, commencement is not a time for a politically divisive speech).  Universities thrive on different opinions; a litmus test before an honorary degree is approved undermines the principles we work so hard to preserve.

The rule book on commencements should also strive to build as much of a personal experience into a commencement as possible.  Easier said than done.  There needs to be an opportunity provided for the graduates’ names to be read, for a handshake from the university president and/or other university leader, for a toast in honor of the families and friends that supported the graduating students all through their experience. If there is a very large graduating class, too large to do all of these things at the commencement itself there need to be other opportunities built in.  Graduating is a job well done; the personal recognition should always be there.  And for the highest achieving students, we should do even more.

Even after 200 commencement ceremonies, I still enjoy going to commencements.  And what for me still matters most, going back to my own commencement, is the experience of the students.  For all of us in higher education, it is the value of the student experience from day one through graduation that needs our greatest attention.

The Invisible Horse

As an economics undergraduate major and subsequently a doctoral student, I remember studying World War I, especially the economic consequences of the Treaty of Versailles.  Impossibly large reparations were just one ingredient in setting the stage for another world war to quickly follow World War I.  In high school and most likely in middle school, I also studied this war to end all wars.  As I remember it, history in middle school and in high school was mostly a story of wars with only a brief focus on other events. And when the time came to discuss World War I, the enormous loss of human life was a sobering figure for us all to contemplate.

A few weeks ago, I took my older daughter to see War Horse, the story of a young man in World War I who enlists to find his horse who had been sold to be used in combat.  The play was excellent.  The horses were life size puppets and their movements were so real that it made the impact of the story that much greater.  Horses are hurt by barbed wire in this play, horses die from hunger, horses are killed and the happy ending of young man being united with his horse is coupled with the unhappy fact of many soldiers on both sides dying and many horses also dying.

In all the courses I took that touched on World War I, I doubt if the loss of horses was ever mentioned.  Yes we knew there were horses in combat, we knew this was a time for transition from horses to tanks and cars but that was all the attention I remember being paid to this subject.  The reality, however is that a million horses died and that was just in the British armed forces; overall the number was closer to 8 million.  Of the million horses to see combat for the British, only about 60,000 came home.  And those that came home received no recognition for an important job well done.  In fact, according to an interview in the London Evening Standard with Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse,

In its wisdom the British government decided to sell off many thousands of these war horses. In Egypt many ended up emaciated and maltreated in the streets of Cairo.  In France and in Belgium, they ended up as meat on a butcher’s slab.  It was the ultimate betrayal.

The education I received didn’t place a high value on a horse’s life or 8 million horses’ lives.  And yet, a loss this great is clearly a tragedy. We all know, but sometimes we don’t make it clear to our students that our values permeate our view of reality and of history.  That doesn’t mean that we should strive any less to be as objective as we possibly can be.  But we also shouldn’t strive any less to make sure our remaining or inherent biases are as visible as they can be.  If the reality we present is incomplete or in any way less than objective, a disclaimer is certainly appropriate.  And for our students, the sooner they recognize that black and white is at least somewhat gray, the more we will help foster their intellectual curiosity.

Cyberbullying

A few weeks ago, Hofstra Law School organized a one day conference on cyberbullying.  I had the opportunity, in my capacity as Hofstra’s Provost, to say a few words at the beginning of the conference but I stayed for the keynote address because as a parent and also as a school board member, the topic has special importance for me.  In my remarks I mentioned a news story that attracted major attention a few years ago where a 49 year old mom was convicted on misdemeanor charges for posing as a 16 year old boy on MySpace.com. This mom, Lori Drew, chose to pursue, woo, and then reject a 13 year old girl, Megan Meier.  Along the way to make sure that Megan was as humiliated as possible, the mom/16 year old boy made sure to forward all the secrets learned in the relationship to Megan’s circle of friends. The reason for the mom’s involvement was a falling out between Megan and Lori Drew’s daughter.  The end result was the tragic and needless suicide death of Megan Meier. What could the mom have been thinking?

I am no different than most parents of young and teenage kids in worrying about cyberbullying.   None of us want our kids to be victims but this is certainly a more sophisticated, more anonymous, potentially more vicious and more difficult to confront form of bullying.  What is cyberbullying?  According to the National Cyber Alert System definition:

Cyberbullying refers to the new, and growing, practice of using technology to harass, or bully, someone else.  Bullies used to be restricted to methods such as physical intimidation, postal mail, or the telephone.  Now, developments in electronic media offer forums such as email, instant messaging, web pages, and digital photos to add to the arsenal.  Computers, cell phones, and PDAs are new tools that can be applied to an old practice.

Forms of cyberbullying can range in severity from cruel or embarrassing rumors to threats, harassment, or stalking.  It can affect any age group; however, teenagers and young adults are common victims, and cyberbullying is a growing problem in schools.

What makes cyberbullying such a problem is that the internet provides the protection of relative anonymity which in turn can increase the intensity of the bullying given that anonymity.

As educators and as parents we have an important role in protecting children and young adults from these anonymous attacks.  First of all as parents, we need to clearly state that cyberbullying is unacceptable.  We need to comfort the kids who have been bullied and we need to age-appropriately punish any child involved in these activities.  Adults also need, in this and so many other areas, to model appropriate behavior for their kids and other kids.  Lori Drew was clearly not a role model; she was a major contributor to a major problem.

As a parent and as a school board member, I want and expect the schools to play a very active role in combating cyberbullying and there is considerable activity that I’m aware of that has made a difference.  Anti-bullying programs, codes of conduct, anti-bullying pledges, and parental education are all taking place locally and in school districts across the country.  In an article on bullying in the October 27th issue of Newsday, there were statistics included for Long Island from the New York State Education Department showing that being proactive is working well with “a nearly 11 percent decline on the Island in incidents reported as intimidation or bullying from 2006-2007 to 2008-2009.”

These statistics are impressive but I still have concerns in regard to our schools confronting this serious problem.

One is the question of what schools can and can’t do.  As noted by stopcyberbullying.com:

When schools try and get involved by disciplining the student for cyberbullying actions that took place off-campus and outside of school hours, they are often sued for exceeding their authority and violating the student’s free speech right.  They also, often lose.  Schools can be very effective brokers in working with the parents to stop and remedy cyberbullying situations.  They can also educate the students on cyberethics and the law.  If schools are creative, they can sometimes avoid the claim that their actions exceeded their legal authority for off-campus cyberbullying actions. We recommend that a provision is added to the school’s acceptable use policy reserving the right to discipline the student for actions taken off-campus if they are intended to have an effect on a student or they adversely affect the safety and well-being of student while in school.  This makes it a contractual, not a constitutional, issue.

And the second concern is economics .  We are entering an era of stringent tax caps, which of course have an appeal to a public that feels overtaxed or worse in a difficult economic time.  What will happen to programs in areas such as cyberbullying as we try to limit our expenditures?  Will they remain?  Clearly not all these initiatives cost money and even those that do, cost limited amounts.  But they are often not free and so require resources; if cutbacks happen these programs may be vulnerable.  We should all exert our influence to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Arts Priority

Recently at a program presented by the Long Island Arts Alliance, New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner made an impassioned plea to a very friendly audience in support of arts education.  The Commissioner feels strongly that art and music education not only has a place in K-12 education but that it is a very important place equal in importance to English, Math and Science.  I very much agree and I would also add that health and physical education hold a place of importance as well.  It all comes together as a well rounded education, which hopefully brings with it, well rounded students who do better in college, at work, and in life.

To make the case for the arts and music being important, the Commissioner advocates a New York State (Regents) exam in these areas much like the sate wide exams already given areas such as English, math and the sciences. And though the audience was completely on board in recognizing the value of the arts and arts education, there was no such unanimity regarding a standardized test in these areas.  How would the test work; how would you assess both the theoretical as well as the performance elements of arts education? The Commissioner felt there were already examples in actual use elsewhere and he gave Britain as an example of a country where an arts test dealt successfully with the issues raised.

There was another concern raised during this discussion regarding the potential negative consequences from turning arts education into another area of test preparation at the middle school and especially the high school level.  Would this limit creativity?  Would this diminish enjoyment of the arts?   And would the long term negative consequences create a population that moves away from these areas as soon as there are no more requirements and no more standardized tests. This is certainly a valid concern and could be a very negative unintended consequence of an effort to make the arts more prominent.

I have great difficulty conceptualizing a standardized examination in these areas.  And I urge that no such examination be implemented without a full review and opportunity to provide feedback on what is being proposed. Schools of Education and university music departments can be of great assistance in both the development and assessment phases and should be fully utilized.  But I worry in this time of potentially significant reductions in K-12 education funding, that implementation of an arts standardized exam will not follow such a  comprehensive vetting process.  And I worry even more in this constrained time that teaching to the test will provide the most economical and therefore perhaps most utilized response to the test.

We really need to be very careful that in our quest to give the arts their rightful place in a program of essential learning that we don’t weaken rather than strengthen arts education. The most important test is whether we can foster creativity as well as a long-term appreciation of the arts as part of every child’s education.  For our children’s sake, we need to do well on this test.

Charging Into the Future

For the last four days, I have been driving a Chevrolet Volt which is a real electric car (different from the typical hybrid) with a back-up gas powered engine to charge the Lithium-Ion batteries when necessary.  The “when necessary” is when you drive the Volt for more than 40 miles.  It’s been very interesting and the future is clearly visible here.   The car will be displayed on campus (courtesy of East Hills Chevrolet) as part of the University’s Earth Day activities, and the dealer also invited me to drive the car for a few days before it goes on display.

Where I live is just less than 11 miles from the campus.  The Volt is therefore good for my daily commute including a meeting or lunch off campus, which of course happens regularly.  The car has keyless ignition, automatic transmission, Bluetooth, a highly interactive and well thought out instrument panel. leather seats, pleasant styling, and power window, mirrors etc.  This is a very well equipped and very comfortable vehicle, it handles well and rides well, not that different from many other very nice sedans.  Except there are differences—first and most noticeable, the car is silent.  Not just quiet but beautifully silent (unless the climate control fan is on a higher setting, in which case the car is virtually silent).  Even more importantly, there are no emissions when driven within its electric range and so the environment clearly benefits. The other major difference is that the car needs to be plugged in when I come home at the end of the day.  So now when I come home, I not only make sure my phone is fully charged for the next day, I also make sure my car is fully charged as well.  In fact I never travel anywhere without an extension cord.  At the beginning of the day and the end of the day, I am liking this car.

What I am also liking, is what the car says about General Motors and by extension what it says about the American automobile industry.  We can compete, and we can be at the cutting edge.   Overall, the cars being produced this year by GM, Ford and Chrysler come closer to meeting the needs and desires of the American public than any product line-up in many years.  There is no longer a need to go to a Japanese or German car to drive a top quality vehicle.

But there is still much more work to be done.  The American automobile industry must show it can build quality cars responsive to consumer demand, not just this year but over the long term.  And the cars must also last over the long run.  Innovation must continue.  Here too there is much more work to be done.  The Volt is a great car but it is only a start.  The battery capacity needs to be increased and the price needs to come down. The technology is brilliant but this is still not my idea of a $40,000+ car ($32,500+ after factoring the Federal tax credit).  I would like to drive a green car but one with an electric range of closer to 200 miles.  And if I spend $40,000 on a car, I certainly expect power seats rather than the manual adjustment the car presently has.

I will miss driving the Volt and I really like the car.  Perhaps not in the next year or two but certainly in the next 5 or 10 years, I see myself driving an electric car on a daily basis.  The world is certainly changing.  In the car industry as well as in higher education, we need to make sure that what we do facilitates change, prepares us for change and respond to change. No short circuits welcome here.

Positive Disagreement

At least one a year, an entry level administrator will ask me if it is OK to disagree with his/her boss and, if yes, how should s/he disagree.  We all know that differences of opinion and the resulting discussions are valuable aspects of an enlightened decision making process. And I could just respond to the question (since I am a Broadway musicals fan) by saying (since singing is not my strong point): just do everything “the company way.”  Instead, my answer is that it is certainly OK; if you keep in mind the time, the place, and the style.

The easiest to explain is “the place.”  If you are with your boss at a meeting with others and a difference of opinion arises, it is not helpful to disagree with your boss in front of others.  Whether you are right or you are wrong, airing a difference of opinion in front of others undercuts your supervisor and is not consistent with “positive disagreement.”  If you can take a break in the meeting, if you can discuss after the meeting, if you can anticipate differences before a meeting, all of these provide appropriate alternatives.  The only exceptions to these guidelines are life or death situations, and meetings where everyone knows, respects, and works well with everyone else at the meeting. 

By focusing on “the time,” I am clearly not talking about whether early in the morning is better than immediately after lunch or just before going home.  I am also not suggesting that disagreeing on Monday is fine but that we follow the rule of never on Sunday.  The time needs to be as early in the decision making process as possible.  Insights are most helpful early in the process; positions are most flexible early in the process.  By sharing your thoughts early in the process you also have the maximum opportunity to make a difference in the process as well as the maximum opportunity to make a positive impression.  What happens if your supervisor doesn’t agree with your position?  It happens, and you need to understand that it can happen almost regardless of the level that you are at.  You need to get used to it, and it really can be OK for the situation and for you. If your opinion doesn’t carry the day, but your argument or the points involved are well made, you enhance your chances of moving forward.  However, if you disagree with almost everything your boss says or does, it’s time to look for a new boss and a new opportunity.

And of course, by focusing on style, I am not suggesting that dark business attire is prerequisite to a stylish difference of opinion.  What is prerequisite is a sense of respect and the need to be a good listener as well as a good communicator. In making your point of view known, please understand that there are likely other equally valid points of view.  Please also take for granted that your supervisor is a knowledgeable person.  Never be insulting, derogatory, sarcastic; never question your supervisor’s intelligence.  Just focus on the issue at hand and make you point.

Is this always easy?  Clearly not.  Can there be times in your career when the opinion you have of your supervisor for valid or not so valid reasons make it impossible to follow the rules of time, place, and style?  What should you do?  You needn’t spend a long time searching for an answer; search instead for a new position.