[This is a bit embarrassing. I thought I'd posted this yesterday, but it went up as a tab - you can see those just above here - home, anchorage film festival, chancellor search. So I'm posting it for real now.]
As often as I've gone through the Anchorage airport, I've never gone upstairs in Concourse C to the observation deck and Alaska Native Art Gallery.
Yesterday I took some time to check it out on the way to Seattle. (When your daughter writes that she has a week off and do you want to visit, there's only one answer.)
The gallery is upstairs ( there's an elevator too) after you come out of security as you get into Concourse C, the long one where the Alaska Airline gates are.
The architect designed this so the window at the end of the concourse perfectly frames Denali (Mt. McKinley) on a clear day. Yesterday it was, but it was hard with my little Powershot to get the mountain clear. My memory (faulty as it is) says there didn't used to be a roof blocking most of the mountain. But it is that white speck above the roof in the inset I put on the right.
There are some very good pieces in the gallery. The white mask is by Fred Anderson of Naknek and the other is by Nathan Jackson of Ketchikan.
But I don't think think the art work they have is supposed to be getting direct sunlight as it was yesterday. It probably doesn't happen often, but I imagine a museum curator would cringe.
The blur isn't that I was shaking, but it's the shadow of the lettering from the sun.
I think this is "Going to the Mud House for a Party" by Rosalie Paniyak of Chevak. Seal skin face, appliquéd nose, seed bead teeth, badger hair, bearded seal gut parka. . .
Admission to this gallery is a plane ticket to or from Anchorage since it is inside security. It's also at the observation deck so there is a view of all the Alaska Airlines planes.
Attention: If you ignore this invitation, your registration will not be
activated.
Good luck!Best regards,
VK Administration
It turns out VK.com is a Russian version of Facebook. Here are some comments on a Stream Recorder.com forum in 2009:
I wanted to delete the thread at first, but then realized that it might be useful. Many of my friends really use vkontakte mainly to listen to music. It is absolutely free and they don't have any ads. And you can find almost anything there. Although vkontakte itself doesn't allow to download music, it is pretty easy to download/save HTTP mp3 music streams. You can use many free programs for that or even download such streams with your browser. You can also use Replay Media Catcher that renames and tags songs automatically.
10-13-2009, 08:14 AM
I registered in vkontakte and I like it! I would add that not only music but video could just as easily view and download!
Wikipedia has this article (which they say needs verification):
VKontakte (Russian: ВКонтакте, internationally branded VK) is a Russian social network service popular in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Because of its design and functionality, VKontakte is often claimed to be a clone of Facebook, accommodating not only a similar concept, but also a comparable business model.[citation needed] However, its incorporation of other features makes it more like YouTube, Pandora, and MySpace rolled into one, with an interface highly reminiscent of Facebook.
As of December 2010[update], the network has around 102 million users and is the leading site in Europe in terms of user visits, page views, and the amount of data transfers per day. VKontakte is ranked 35 in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the third most visited website in Russia.
Since 2007, major Russian companies have been sending job offers via VKontakte. Most of the site's users are university and high school students. However, as the site's popularity increases, more and more people are joining, many of whom are youths of various age groups.
In English, В Контакте or V Kontákte is literally translated as "In Contact", but basically means "In Touch". It can be alternatively translated as "Linked In", which is another mostly business-oriented social network.
View More By This Developer Open iTunes to buy and download apps.
The app functionality includes easy access to friends profiles, statuses (online/offline), activities, a simple, fast and powerful messaging system with animated smileys, etc.
App support URL handling + internal browser, cool animated smileys, landscape and portrait orientations, full copy/paste, etc.
App work very easy!
App work very fast!
Now you can receive new messages when app work in background.
Image from iTunes Store
I took it as my blogger responsibility to my readers to check this out, but,
You entered an invalid ID code. Personal identification code must come to the phone as an SMS, if one of your friends sent you an invitation. Personal code: Attention! Send invitations to all the users can not facebook. If you know they do not, you can not register.
The code I got was in Western alphabet, so maybe that was the problem. Another problem I just noticed was the date of the email which just came today:
J wanted to see the Illusionist. I didn't know anything about it except she told me it was animated. I noticed the name Jacques Tati in the opening credits, and later when the Illusionist stumbles into a movie theater, My Uncle is playing.
I remember my dad taking me to see My Uncle and then Mr. Hulot's Vacation. It must have been when they came out in the mid-50's. Even though they were in French, they left enough of an impression on me that I still remember seeing the movies and the bumbling Mr. Hulot.
The Illusionist is a very melancholy story. The illustrations are beautiful - the scenes when he first gets into rural Scotland reminded me of the mountains portrayed in Paxon Woelbers The Prospector.
Here's an interview dubbed in German with the director Sylvain Chomet, who directed The Triplets of Belview, that has a number of shots from the movie.
The movie tells a sad story that makes me want to know happened to Jacques Tati that is coming out in this movie. And so, I had to start looking things up.
The Illusionist (2010) is an animated film based on an unproduced, semi-autobiographical script that Tati wrote in 1956. Directed by Sylvain Chomet, known for The Triplets of Belleville, the main character is an animated caricature of Tati himself. . .
Between 1940 and 1942 he presented his Sporting Impressions at the original Lido de Paris . There he met the dancer Herta Schiel, who fled Austria with her sister Molly at the time of the Anschluss. In the summer of 1942, Herta gave birth to their daughter, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel. Following the pressure of his sister Nathalie Tatischeff, he refused to recognize the child and abandoned the mother and his first child.
For those of you who know history, you'll recognize that this was during WW II which began in late 1939. Wikipedia gives a bit of explanation why this young man wasn't fighting:
In September 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War Tati was conscripted into the 16th Regiment of Dragoons. Placed into a new unit, he fought in the Battle on the Meuse in May 1940. Tati ended up in Dordogne, where he was demobilized.
In 2000, the screenplay was handed over to Chomet by Tati's daughter, Sophie, two years before her death. Now, however, the family of Tati's illegitimate and estranged eldest child, Helga Marie-Jeanne Schiel, who lives in the north-east of England, are calling for the French director to give her credit as the true inspiration for the film. The script of L'illusionniste, they say, was Tati's response to the shame of having abandoned his first child [Schiel] and it remains the only public recognition of her existence. They accuse Chomet of attempting to airbrush out their painful family legacy again.
The movie now makes sense - why it is so overbearingly sad. It's Tati talking to his long lost baby girl and telling her there is no magic. (Tati died in 1982)
The movie got slow toward the end and we needed that brief walk out in the moonlight after that movie. But the movie will stick. And now that I have a sense of what was behind it, it's very powerful.
I realized that I didn't have my contact lenses in this morning when I was cutting the onion for our omelet this morning. One of the side benefits of contacts for me, is that I don't cry when I'm cutting onions, and so this morning, without them in, I could feel the onion on my eyes. (I have hard, gas-permeable lenses. I don't know if this works with the soft and disposable lenses.)
This makes three posts under 1200 words (including 1000 for the picture.) I kind of like this, but I know there will be some long ones again soon.
I picked up Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages at the library last week. Ever since I was a student in Germany and had to take all my classes in German and got to the point where I could let go of English and just talk in German without translating, I began to think, “Wow, a different language makes you see the world differently.”
I was vaguely aware that not every linguist agreed, so I thought this book might be interesting.
Does language reflect the culture of a society in any profound sense beyond such trivia as the number of words it has for snow or for shearing camels? And even more contentiously, can different languages lead their speaker to different thoughts and perceptions?
So, what’s your answer? [STOP! Don't read on until you answer. Just a yes or no will do.]
I, of course, want to say yes. But then it said.
For most serious scholars today, the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The dominant view among contemporary linguists s that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. Deep down, so runs the theory, all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of systemic complexity. . .
OK, so I should read this and find out where I’m wrong and why. I’m open to changing my stories about the world if I get new information. But then I read on.
In the pages to follow, however, I will try to convince you, probably against your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic view of today, that the answer to the questions above is - yes.
Hot damn. I have an ally. So, I’ll let you know if the rest of the book is as good as the beginning. He does have a sense of humor and playfulness that I’m enjoying just in the prologue.
See, I can do it. This post is under 400 words. One more short post to go. But maybe I can make this a habit.
[Another long post, so another synopsis: I tried to look at this as a clash of cultures. The University's culture of shared governance runs into the Air Force's culture of accountability. And I follow that theme for most of this post. But the more I mull over Gamble's account of how he did the search (on the video clip) and the points raised by the Faculty Senate the more I'm wondering why he seems to have totally skipped over the basic process for hiring set out in the Board of Regents Regulations and why the Board went along with it?] [And this week, I'm wishing I had an editor. Sorry if there are still typos, you can email me to point them out and I'll fix them.]
The Objective: Hire a Chancellor to replace the retiring Chancellor
The Cultures:
Culture One: Patrick Gamble comes from the Air Force (he retired as a general), via a stint at the Alaska Railroad, to become president of the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Culture Two: University of Alaska, a state university with three main campuses and a pretty standard University shared governance system.
The Outcomes:
1. A new chancellor - a former dean of the College of Business and Public Affairs at the University of Alaska Anchorage and also a former US Air Force general.
2. A very upset faculty which felt the standard search process used for every faculty and administrative position, which includes a great deal of significant faculty (and other) participation with the President selecting from the final two or three recommended candidates was completely violated. The standard search also follows a set of procedural steps spelled out in the Board of Regents Regulations, which Gamble never mentioned as he spoke about how he did the search.
The Showdown: (OK, I'm getting dramatic now, it was more a polite, if occasionally heated, group conversation.)
After his surprise announcement, the president got the message that the faculty was upset and he ought to meet with the Faculty Senate. He came to visit them Wednesday Feb 10, eleven days after the announcement.
I've been seeing and posting this story from the faculty's perspective, but now that the President's been to talk to the UAA Faculty Senate, we can fill in some of the gaps. I'm going to look at this through the lens of cross-cultural miscommunication.
The Lessons:
I listened to the discussion Wednesday between the president and the faculty. It was like listening to people from totally different cultures whose languages had the same words, but with different meanings. Actually, I think it's easier when you go to a different country because you KNOW that you are going into a different culture, you know you can't understand the language easily, and so you expect there to be misunderstandings. But when you are in your own country, in a city you've lived in many years, and the people all seem to be speaking a common language, it is much easier to forget you are, in fact, in a different culture.
Note: I should also say that I spoke to the president after the meeting and it was cordial and he's sending me some information relevant to a post I did last year when he was selected as President. I could always be wrong here, but I felt that he was being sincere and open with the faculty and me. And that is consistent with my longer term relationship with Tom Case, the new chancellor-select. He also explained that the Chancellor decision was made prior to the January 31 announcement, that he had to get with the Board of Regents and then Tom Case. Then Case wanted to notify his boss, so the Alaska Aerospace Corporation had more than a few hours to find a new COO. But if he made the decision after the January 18 meeting, they had less than two weeks.
The president began by saying he'd been advised that shared governance was the most important thing he needed to know about the university system when he came into the position. And he read a bunch of books on shared governance (the video starts just at the end of the book part) but that just wasn't enough and he hadn't fully realized what that meant in practical terms. He apologized. And he opened it up for people to talk.
I'll slip in the video of that part right here so you can hear what he said. Then I'll go through it and other things that were said from the two different cultural perspectives.
Much of what he heard from the faculty was about vocabulary. Though he and the faculty were using the same words, they didn't mean the same thing. I'll use some of the key terms as the outline for this discussion.
Sense of Time - Let's get the easy ones out of the way. Gamble said he had enough time for the search. Chancellor Maimon had been hired in 8 months, so when he started in November, he thought there was plenty of time. Conception of time is a big difference between cultures. Apparently, he wasn't aware that there is a national academic hiring cycle, starting at the beginning of the school year. For the highest positions, like Chancellor, they might even start earlier.
Searches that start later run the danger of missing the top candidates, who get and accept offers earlier. By the time a search committee that started in November is ready to make an offer, the people still in the pool are often those passed over by other universities. That's not hard and fast and you can be lucky. And if your opening happens mid-cycle, you don't have any choice. But in this case current Chancellor Fran Ulmer gave notice already last January putting UAA in a great position to get a good start for Fall 2011. President Hamilton publicly noted this and thanked her for being considerate enough to give so much lead time to replace her. The way Gamble talked about the time - he felt he had plenty - suggests he didn't understand this cycle. It's the kind of thing you learn over time being in a new culture. And it's why you discuss what you're thinking with people who know the culture much better than you, why you have shared governance. Instead, his strategy was not to let people know what he was thinking, he said, so as not to create expectations.
Worldwide Search - this is a term Gamble used a number of times. But people in the University system actually say 'nation-wide' or 'national' search.' This isn't an issue here, but just another sign that he's still learning the language and perhaps his ear isn't that good. Like any new language learner, he got the sense, but not the idiom.
Gamble emphasized this notion of national search and that he wasn't inclined to go that way if there were good Alaska candidates even though the faculty wanted such a search. But the 'search' part is also important. Even if not national, the faculty expected the standard set of steps that happens with every search and so they were totally surprised when none of those steps had happened and Gamble simply announced a new Chancellor.
Downtowner - Another term Gamble used a lot. One faculty member asked him what he meant. Anchorage is not a big place, she said, and 'downtown' is where many government offices are, where her doctor's office is, and her kids' school is. Did he consult with her doctor? Her kids? Or her kids' teachers? The faculty live all over and some are 'downtowners.' But we don't talk about people as 'downtowners.' We do talk about the bigger university community. Gamble responded that this was a term the Air Force used and perhaps he misspoke. Again, not a biggie, but part of learning a new culture. This idea of 'downtown' and its stake and say in the search came up again as part of the understanding of shared governance.
Shared governance is the essence of how the university works. This embodies the basic democratic principles of the United States. Faculty, staff, and students are also involved in governance. There's even a student on the Board of Regents. There are even community people involved in governance. Things may take longer because democracy isn't always efficient, but when decisions are finally made, they have widespread support because the affected people had a chance to participate. Gamble served 30+ years in the Air Force in defense of democracy around the world and the faculty expected him to support it in his own organization.
From the discussion, I'd say the president and the faculty had real differences with two aspects of shared governance: 1) How it's shared and 2) With whom it's shared.
How it's shared
Basically, the custom is that major decisions are worked on by committees. (No snide comments about committees, please. Democracy doesn't work without committees. That's why learning to work in groups is such a critical skill.) In some areas, the committee has the jurisdiction to make the final decision. In others they present the final options to the decision maker - say a dean, or chancellor, or president - to decide. If the dean disagrees with the options offered, she has the right to make a different decision, BUT, and it's a big but, she better talk it through with the committee so she understands their rationale and they understand her issues. In most situations, they would work out an option they can both live with.
A dean or chancellor who disregards the committee's recommendation completely - as it appeared to the faculty the President did to their memo - will alienate the faculty and lose their support and cooperation in the future. You don't need an MBA to understand this. The lowliest employee in any organization knows he can work slower, misplace materials and equipment, and use other guerrilla tactics to make up for lack of official organizational power.
So, the faculty assumed that when the president started the search in late November, there would be a search committee made up of people chosen by various governance bodies that would represent the various constituencies in the university and community. They knew the routine of a search because it's used for every faculty and administrator and follows the Board of Regents regulations. They were alarmed by his unaddressed 'flyer,' as one faculty member put it (objecting to his word 'letter'), [Yes faculty can be nitpicky too] which hinted at skipping a search. In response, they sent a memo back to him saying in essence, "Whoa, if you're gonna skip the search, then here's a person we can accept." They got no response to that. Instead people in the president's office invited people to a committee meeting (that most uninvited people didn't know about) to talk about the search. (The President did not allow his staff to be blamed for this at the meeting and took the responsibility himself.)
From the clip above and the rest of the meeting, it's clear to me that Gamble saw 'shared governance' as meaning, "I'll ask a bunch of stakeholders what they think and then I'll make my decision."
With Whom it's Shared
The president talked about all the stakeholders he talked with over two months. Faculty, students, downtowners, even someone who caught him in the elevator at the Captain Cook. One of the faculty members took him to task on this idea that everyone he meets has equal standing in this decision. And he was clearly moved by her passion on this. "I've devoted my life to a very low wage, not because I like making no money and having decisions made for me, by people not expert in my field, but because believe in this and consider it a calling and a service. I'm a faculty member, I'm not just a stakeholder, I'm a faculty member with a PhD who teaches and does research. I matter more to this institution than a 'downtown' CEO of a bank. If I go away and the faculty go away, you don't have a university."
Like in Animal Farm, not all animals are equal. But in this case, with good reason. The bank CEO is important as a supporter of the University, but he or she doesn't walk the streets asking the people of Anchorage whom to hire as bank manager. And most public agencies don't either. They rely on the people with specific expertise in that area. But the university believes in shared governance and that extends into the community. But we do assume that the faculty and staff and students are the experts here and will be much more affected by the choice of Chancellor and should have more say in the decision than people who have a more casual interest in the university.
This came up again when the president talked about the - did he really say séance on that clip? - meeting he held in January. He tells us that he threw out two issues, and, he said, the message to me was clear: 1) Pat, you've got to make the final decision, and 2) We've got talent inside Alaska, let's hope we can find someone from here. He took that to mean a national search wasn't necessary. But another faculty member who was at that meeting said, "I objected and said we should have a national search and so did the other two faculty." But the faculty voice was voided by all the other 'stakeholders.'
The president said he got lots of letters, so the faculty letter was just one of many. Another faculty member pointed out that the letter from the Faculty Senate calling for a national search had been approved 44-0. And each of those 44 represented 15 other faculty. (I'm not saying every faculty member agreed because that will never happen, but 44-0 in the Faculty Senate is pretty convincing.) And it should have carried a lot more weight than the advice from some individual he bumped into in the elevator in the Captain Cook.
Surely, as Commandant of Elmendorf, he gave more weight to the people working on the base about key base operational decisions than he did to the Chamber of Commerce. Or maybe not.
Shared governance means people with different perspectives weigh in on the details of important decisions so that one person doesn't overlook something important or isn't swayed by some personal bias. Especially when that one person doesn't really know the culture that well. It doesn't mean three faculty at a two hour meeting with 30 other 'stakeholders.' Based on that initial 'flyer' to the world, Gamble was already leaning toward limiting the search to Alaska and he seems to have heard people who agreed with him much better than those who didn't. (In a normal search process, everyone who attends a presentation by a candidate is asked to submit written comments and so there is at least some quantifiable documented evidence of how many had what opinion.)
Accountability meets Shared Governance
Gamble used the term accountability frequently in the discussions. While Gamble knew Wednesday that he'd made a mistake, he still had questions about exactly what 'shared governance' means. (Not unreasonable, it takes time to get it.) I'm paraphrasing here, but several times he said something like, "If the faculty tells me 'We want this person or else we do a national search' I can listen to that, but are you saying I have to do it? Because ultimately I'm responsible, I'm the one who is accountable, not the faculty."
And the faculty did send such a letter. They'd gotten his email late November which said he was starting the search (and they thought he'd wasted a lot of important time already getting started) and in the letter there was a paragraph saying:
I am mindful that the last formal, national UAA chancellor search in 2003-2004 cost $250,000* and took eight months. I am equally mindful that all three of our current chancellors, who I personally consider exceptionally talented leaders and working partners, were not selected through an extended and costly formal search process. Considering these past experiences I believe we should remain open minded about a method that will lead to the best outcome for UAA and the state.
[Note, this did say 'national' not 'world-wide.']
Just before that, the letter said,
Please send me your comments and suggestions. If you actually have a candidate name to offer, at this point it's not too early to advise me of your recommendations.
The faculty had assumed the search would be run like every other search, but were concerned that he was already saying we might not need a national search because all the Chancellors we have now are great and they weren't from national searches.
So they responded, fearing the national search might be scrapped, with a memo from the Faculty Senate saying, in part:
But, if you opt for a direct hire, the only person Faculty Senate would support is Mike Driscoll because he was hired as Provost after a national search, he has performed well as Provost, he knows UAA perhaps better than any other applicants for the position, and he has served as Acting Chancellor several times as Chancellor Ulmer has worked on the Presidential Oil Spill Commission.
After hearing Gamble speak Wednesday about accountability, I'm guessing that he took that letter as an ultimatum, possibly an impossible demand given his take on accountability. But coming from the University culture, I read it as a very loud - "hey, we're serious, we want a national search, but if you really are thinking of cutting it out, we know Driscoll and we'd be comfortable with him as Chancellor." This wasn't an ultimatum, it was an alarmed memo, worried about what an Air Force general who is now the University President was going to do. (We don't know your culture and you don't know ours!) They weren't expecting him to roll over and choose Driscoll, but they did want him to know that a national search was how we normally do things - even if we have a local candidate - and they expected there would at least be a lot more discussion. Minimally, they expected that there would be shared governance, a search committee that would go through all the candidates, and make recommendations to the President, and he'd pick from one of the acceptable finalists. As was the case in the search the resulted in Gamble becoming president.
Accountability seems to be an important term in the Air Force, maybe on a par with 'shared governance' at the university. Here's an excerpt from a paper by Lt Col Jackie Tillery done for a course at Maxwell Air Force Base, dated April 1997 (a few years before Gamble retired), called "Authority: Inconsistent, Situation Dependent and Subjective."
It's larger and clearer if you double click it
So the faculty's understanding of 'shared governance' seems to have come into conflict with Gamble's understanding of accountability.
Outcomes
The president used the term 'outcome' a number of times. "I'm an outcomes guy." Outcomes is a hot management word. Outcomes people are no-nonsense types. It fits well with accountability. Without good ways to track outcomes, you can't have accountability. Far too many organizations continue to do things the way they've always done them even if they're no longer effective, if their outcomes are poor - say, too many students drop out. And I'm somewhat of an outcomes guy myself. Outcomes are why an organization exists. But with some caveats. Everyone who matters needs to participate in defining the outcomes. And some important outcomes are a lot more measurable than others. The less tangible ones shouldn't be sacrificed because they aren't as easy to quantify. And a set of outcome numbers can't substitute for informed understanding. Thus the protests against "No Child Left Behind."
Here, the president had already come up with his list of criteria for the new chancellor in the letter that announced the beginning of the search. These characteristics might be good for what an Air Force general wants for one of his team, but do they cover everything needed in a University Chancellor? Out of 15 lines, there's only this to hint this is a university chancellor position and not some generic leader:
We need someone with . . . an unwavering belief in the efficacy of shared governance, and a leader who actively promotes the value of academic and research integrity. [click here for the whole memo]
And outcomes don't justify the means. In this case the means relate to a search process. I've already discussed the participatory nature of the search process at the University of Alaska as a manifestation of the idea of shared governance. But there's another aspect - the technical procedures for filling a position as spelled out in the Board of Regents Regulations.
Search
The two of you who have read this far already know there's a gap between the president's model and the faculty's model of a search.
The President's Model, as he described it in the video, was to gather information from a wide range of people and then, because there were two highly qualified Alaskans he knew who fit the criteria he'd written up himself, when people said a national search wasn't necessary, he chose one. (Herbert Simon described this in the 1950's as satisficing - taking the first option that meets your minimum qualifications and not trying to get the best possible outcome. He did say this was a rational way to avoid spending too much effort getting more than you needed. Good enough is good enough.)
The Faculty's Model. The University of Alaska has a professional selection process which includes
announcing the opening in standard public media so that people interested in such jobs would know to apply and people aren't discriminated against because they don't have inside connections
screening processes with criteria and rating systems so that the subjective judgments of raters can be objectified as much as possible against the stated criteria and several people evaluate the applicants to minimize the risk of bias - intentional or unintentional
a record of how each candidate was scored by each rater so if there is any legal challenge to the decision, all the paper work is available
1. develop the vacancy announcement and advertising copy;
2. develop screening and evaluation criteria;
3. select the screening committee/individual screeners;
4. conduct interviews and reference checks;
5. select the best qualified candidate based on job-related criteria and available information;
6. obtain approval for the recruitment process from the regional human resources office prior to making the job offer;
7. for staff positions, identify appropriate starting salary in conjunction with the human resources office, and obtain authorization from the human resources office to offer the position and the approved salary;
8. for faculty positions, identify appropriate starting salary and obtain authorization from the Provost, or designee, to offer the position at the approved salary;
9. offer the position;
10. notify unsuccessful candidates;
11. submit required reports and documentation to the regional human resource office; and
12. forward recruitment records to the regional human resources office or maintain the records for the required period of time.
While there are some exceptions in the regulations - they don't seem to cover this hire. (This search didn't involve Temporary or Emergency Hires, someone from an underrepresented class, or Casual Labor for example.)
So it isn't remarkable that the faculty were expecting the Chancellor search to comply with Board of Regents regulations which would have meant the process officially had barely even started.
While it's true that the president makes the final decision on the selection of the chancellor, I can't find where this means he can by-pass all the regulations for announcing the position and evaluating the candidates.
The president seemed particularly eager to avoid the expense and time of a national search, but even an in-state search should include all the steps outlined in the Personnel Rules of the Board of Regents regulations.
I know enough about rules and bureaucracies to know that there are often back ways to get waivers to not follow the regulations in some cases. If they were waived, who did it, when, and what was the justification?
As the president related the process in the video tape above, he never mentioned anything about the regulations, that he got approval from HR for the job announcement, that he created any rating scales for evaluating the candidates, or even that he got all this waived.
In fact, when one of the faculty members said something like "every faculty and administrative position has to go through all the steps so why wouldn't the chancellor?" he seemed to be genuinely surprised. And he experienced some of these steps himself last spring as an applicant for his current job. So he knew that the process includes more than asking people for suggestions and then making a decision. Even in the speeded up President search process last year, there were public forums in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau for all the three finalists and feedback from everyone before a decision was made.
I'm not sure how people get appointed to positions in the Air Force. I know there is a very demanding evaluation system that all officers go through regularly. Perhaps a general can just pick his preferred candidate without justification - but those candidates come from a pool of people who are eligible to apply for that position and who have been carefully vetted. In this case, according to the president, there were two Alaska candidates that he knew. There was no mention of developing evaluation standards, of reviewing candidates against those standards, or anything remotely like that. I don't even know if he got applications from both candidates or not.
I've said there was a clash of cultures here - and if you'd been at the meeting, I'm sure you would agree. Every successful organization has its own culture that is appropriate for the kind of work they do and while organizations sometimes bring outsiders into the culture, they don't generally have half their top leadership from the same alien culture unless it's a hostile takeover. It takes time to learn a culture, to understand the language, to know all the rules and procedures. Gamble's apology and acknowledgment he'd made a mistake, while appreciated, show the consequences of not understanding the culture.
More than culture
Writing this has given me time to think things through. The president presented himself during the search for his own position as an experienced manager with an MBA. He was into strategic planning and achieving outcomes. One outcome of the search - Tom Case as Chancellor - could have been much worse. Though, as I said in the very first post on this appointment, the collective impact on the University of Alaska is a very homogeneous top four positions and does not reflect the diversity of the faculty, students, or the state. But the other outcome was a very alienated faculty and people raising questions about cronyism.
Being an outcomes guy shouldn't mean you are oblivious to the process. Cause the impact of a bad process IS an outcome.
As he described the search process, I didn't hear any evidence of the human resources class he must have had as part of his MBA. There was no process. There was no official announcement of a position. No system for rating the candidates. It appears there were no official candidates even. Just a couple of names he knew about.
The strategic planner was doing this by the seat of his pants. "It was a process that wasn't laid out yet. I wanted to see where this process was going to take me." And it doesn't seem to have taken him to the Board of Regents Regulations governing hiring at the University. I'm guessing the HR people found some loophole to waive requirements. Did this happen before or after he announced his decision? But what was the justification? Covering up for a president who didn't know there were any rules?
Gamble's education isn't in chemistry or Arabic language. Those fields don't teach management as part of their program. But Gamble has an MBA and 30+ years in the Air Force, so he should understand that organizations don't operate in a vacuum, that there are processes designed to deal with routine activities like job searches. (Maybe this is how they do things at the Railroad.) I can give him slack for not understanding the shared governance part, but the hiring steps are pretty standard and basic in the private sector as well as the public sector. While he sounded open and honest with the faculty, and acknowledging one's mistakes and apologizing mean a lot, what I heard at the meeting now raises new questions for me about how this all happened. And where were the staff who should have let him know the University rules? Are they all yes men? And what about the Board of Regents?
Is it any wonder the faculty are concerned?
*Also, I don't doubt someone told the President that the last UAA chancellor search cost $250,000, but as I think about it, I don't see how it could have been that expensive. $10,000 each to fly up three candidates from Outside should be way more than adequate. Another $20,000 for advertising. That would leave another $200,000 to go. Did they count the time all committee members spent on this? That wouldn't be a real expense because all the committee members' time was out of their own hide. The faculty still had classes to teach and research to write. Administrators still had their jobs to do. Most would be salaried and not getting overtime. If that's what they negotiated with a professional search company, I'd like to see the profit margin the company got off this contract. In any case, I think the $250,000 was something of an easy excuse for not going national and that a reasonable search could have been done for considerably less than that.
OK, my next three posts will be under 1200 words. :)
This is going to be a short post. I've raised some questions in the last week or so about the appointment of the UA Chancellor. Today, UA President Patrick Gamble came to talk to the Faculty Senate. (He'd spoken to the University Assembly just before.) I don't have time to sort through all that was said, but I'll briefly summarize:
The President apologized
Acknowledged he'd made a mistake
Acknowledged he didn't understand the meaning of 'shared governance' the way the University understood it
Listened to some pretty heated faculty
Listened to some less heated faculty
Explained his thinking process when he made the decision on the Chancellor
My sense is that he was genuine. That he hadn't realized the huge difference in organizational culture between the Air Force, Alaska Railroad, and University of Alaska. I felt that the faculty accepted his apology, but were less sanguine than the president about how quickly he's going to be able to adapt to the vocabulary and ways of this institution. But he proved that he will listen, acknowledge mistakes, and apologize.
I think that this is a good first step. I'll post more about the meeting later, but that will take a while to sort through. For those who are interested in what happened, I at least want to get this out. Below is a short clip of the President apologizing.
Patrick Gamble and the University got married less than a year ago. And here he's gone out and bought a '56 Corvette from a buddy who gave him a good deal, without consulting his spouse who had a new Subaru in mind. Is this going to be the pattern in this marriage or is he going to talk things out next time before he makes what should be a family decision? This spouse isn't like his first two. She expects to be a full partner in this marriage she was pressured into. Is he going to have to be firm until she shapes up or can he learn to enjoy life with an equal partner?
Is the appointment of Tom Case as UAA Chancellor by his fellow retired Air Force general an example of cronyism? (An aside raises the same question about Craig Campbell's appointment as Case's replacement at the Alaska Aerospace Corporation.)
Why is this worth blogging about?
[This is a long post, so here's a brief SYNOPSIS: Case's appointment fits three of the four criteria of cronyism and may well fit part of the fourth. President Gamble's decision to by-pass a normal participatory search process and to ignore unanimous Faculty Senate recommendations makes the case for cronyism more plausible. This suspicion is exacerbated by Case's same day replacement as head of the Alaska Aerospace Corporation. With that said, Case is clearly qualified to head UAA, but not necessarily the best qualified. The faculty and students and rest of the campus community have to determine whether Gamble has knowingly abused his power to hire a friend or truly didn't understand the academic culture. If the latter, he has demonstrated why bringing in another leader from outside the academic culture is problematic to many. The UAA community will also have to assess whether Gamble is willing and capable of respecting and adopting the culture.]
1. What is CRONYISM?
Cronyism: partiality to cronies especially as evidenced in the appointment of political hangers-on to office without regard to their qualifications (Merriam Webster online)
[Noun] An intimate companion; an associate; a familiar friend. To oblige your crony Swift, bring our dame a new years gift. Hence, an old crony is an intimate friend of long standing.. Source: Webster's 1828 American Dictionary.
Crony A familiar friend. An old crony is an intimate of times gone by. Probably crone with the diminutive ie for endearment, and equivalent to "dear old fellow," "dear old boy." (See Crone.). Source: Brewer's Dictionary.
The act of showing partiality to one's close friends, typically by appointing them to a position in a company or organization despite the individual not necessarily being the best person for the position. Although this is [sic] favoritism is frowned upon in many cases, it is often hard to determine what is or is not cronyism. In general it is not wrong to hire or appoint someone you know, as long as they are well qualified, so the boundary between the two scenarios is very unclear. Although accusations of cronyism are prevalent, they very rarely amount to any disciplinary action or removals from power. See also nepotism.
doing favors for friends: special treatment and preference given to friends or colleagues, especially in politics ( disapproving)
Most of the definitions I found were close variations of these. So from these definitions we can pull out the common factors:
Partiality or favoritism
Towards a good friend
Usually through an appointment to a position for which the friend is
Unqualified OR not the best qualified
Wikipedia's discussion of cronyism gives more nuance to the term showing why it happens and how it relates to other terms we know such as networking or good old boys system:
Governments are particularly susceptible to accusations of cronyism, as they spend public money. Many democratic governments are encouraged to practice administrative transparency in accounting and contracting, however, there often is no clear delineation of when an appointment to government office is "cronyism".
It is not unusual for a politician to surround him- or herself with highly-qualified subordinates, and to develop social, business, or political friendships leading to the appointment to office of friends, likewise in granting government contracts. In fact, the counsel of such friends is why the officeholder successfully obtained his or her powerful position — therefore, cronyism usually is easier to perceive than to demonstrate and prove.
In the private sector, cronyism exists in organizations, often termed 'the old boys club' or 'the golden circle', again the boundary between cronyism and 'networking' is difficult to delineate.
Moreover, cronyism describes relationships existing among mutual acquaintances in private organizations where business, business information, and social interaction are exchanged among influential personnel. This is termed crony capitalism, and is an ethical breach of the principles of the market economy; in advanced economies, crony capitalism is a breach of market regulations, e.g., the Enron fraud is an extreme example of crony capitalism.
2. Is the appointment of Tom Case by his fellow retired Air Force general an example of cronyism?
Cronyism, like most things, isn't either/or, isn't black or white. There are situations which are clearly not and situations which clearly are, and more ambiguous ones in the middle. But let's go through these four factors:
Partiality or favoritism
We know that UA President Gamble knew there would be a vacancy for the UAA Chancellorship even before he took the job. It was ten months after Chancellor Ulmer announced she would retire, before Gamble began the search process late November 2010.
We know that the UAA Faculty Senate - on notice that Gamble was considering skipping a national search - unanimously recommended their Provost as the candidate they could live with should he choose to NOT have a national search.
We know the next public step was that Gamble appointed Tom Case to be Chancellor.
Towards a good friend (All Air Force career information comes from the Air Force webpages for Gamble and Case.)
Gamble graduated from Texas A&M and became a student, undergraduate pilot training, Randolph Air Force Base, Texas in 1967.
Case graduated from the Air Force Academy and became a student in the Undergraduate Pilot Training, Laughlin AFB, Texas in 1969.
I'm not sure when they met, but both careers included assignments in Vietnam, Korea, Europe, and Washington DC.
Gamble (August 1996 - November 1997) and Case (October 1998 - September 2000) were both commander, Alaskan Command, Alaskan North American Aerospace Defense Command Region, 11th Air Force and Joint Task Force Alaska, Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska.
And they served together in Hawaii when Gamble (July 1998 - May 2001) was commander, Pacific Air Forces, Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, and Case (September 2000 - July 2002) was Deputy Commander in Chief and Chief of Staff, U.S. Pacific Command, Camp H.M. Smith, Hawaii.
Commander, U.S. Pacific Command (CDRUSPACOM) is the senior U.S. military authority in the Pacific Command AOR. CDRUSPACOM reports to the President of the United States through the Secretary of Defense and is supported by four component commands: U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Pacific Air Forces, U.S. Army Pacific, and U.S. Marine Forces, Pacific. These commands are headquartered in Hawai’i and have forces stationed and deployed throughout the region.
Both men retired to Anchorage where Gamble became head of the Alaska Railroad and Case became, first, Dean of the UAA College of Business and Public Affairs (where he was my boss) and then COO of the Alaska Aerospace Corporation.
Usually through an appointment to a position for which the friend is
Search committees are the norm for faculty and high level administrative positions at the University of Alaska Anchorage - usually national searches. The previous Chancellors at UAA and UAF were not selected through nationwide searches, but faculty and community members were involved and approved of the selections. See previous post footnote beginning at "*I'd point out" for how those searches were conducted.
In this case,
Nov. 23, 2010: the President announced the beginning of the search and hinted at skipping a national search because there were good Alaskan candidates.
Dec. 6, 2010: The faculty responded by proposing the current UAA Provost for Chancellor. If not him, then they wanted a national search.
Jan 18, 2011: The President brought together a committee and asked them to come up with characteristics of a good Chancellor.
Jan 31, 2011: The President announced Tom Case as the new Chancellor
The President skipped the normal search process, rejected the faculty's proposed candidate without consultation, did not consult with the faculty or other normal constituents about possible specific candidates, and simply selected someone he'd known in his previous career who was also a personal friend.
Unqualified OR not the best qualified
Unqualified? - The Chancellor has a leadership position which requires good management skills and an ability to work well in the community for university support and partnerships and for fund raising. Generally, someone from inside the academic profession with the highest academic credentials (a doctorate) is chosen because they know the culture and norms of the institution they will lead. This is occasionally waived if the candidate has other remarkable qualities.
Tom Case does not have a doctorate, but he has a masters in systems management and a great deal of education and training in the Air Force plus experience leading large organizations. He also spent five years as Dean of UAA's College of Business and Public Affairs. In that position he expanded his widespread contacts in Anchorage and Alaska developed earlier as Commandant of Elmendorf Air Force Base.
There is no question in my mind that Tom Case is qualified for this position.
Best Qualified? - This is a question that might still be debated if there were a national search and there were several candidates. There might never be absolute unanimity. There are factors to criticize with his candidacy.
He doesn't have an academic background so he doesn't understand the culture of people he will be leading. But this isn't enough to make him unacceptable. Sometimes an outsider can bring in new ideas. Another factor arises if we take the macro view. Not just how this decision affects the one campus - UAA - but the impact on the University of Alaska system. As I've pointed out in a previous post.
There will now be four white males over 60 without terminal degrees in the four top posts of the university. While these four men are each unique individuals and have their own perspectives and experiences,
having other perspectives is both symbolically and substantively important. The fact that this wasn't considered too important by the President is also troubling. Also, as I've said,
having outsiders in academia is not necessarily a bad thing. But two retired Air Force generals in the top four positions seems redundant. We've wasted an opportunity to have a different perspective among the top four positions. Why? Simply because Gamble is more comfortable with an old Air Force colleague? That's not good enough unless he brings in other qualities so special they make him clearly better than other candidates.
But we can't even consider whether he is the best candidate because there are no other candidates.
So, is this cronyism? Pat Gamble hasn't told us his motives (other than saving money by not having a national search). It is clear that it meets at least three and possibly four of the standard benchmarks of cronyism.
He used partiality or favoritism - he chose someone he already knew and was partial to without letting any other applicants into the process. He chose another academic cultural immigrant from the Air Force. While he may think he has simply chosen the best possible person for the position, in fact he picked a friend without considering others. He didn't even discuss with the faculty the person they recommended and why they supported him and why he (Gamble) didn't.
But he clearly decided that despite coming from a different organizational culture - two actually if we include his time with the Alaska Railroad which seems to be a particularly 'good old boy' system - that he knew better than the faculty, without even having to talk to them about their candidate and his. Or any other possible candidates a nationwide search would produce.
The person he chose is a personal friend and professional colleague.
He did this through an appointment that was a deviation from the standard process. While there had been some deviation in past appointments, this one was extreme by totally excluding the faculty and others in the university community. The past searches for UAA and UAF chancellors deviated by not having a national search, but the conditions were different and shared governance wasn't abandoned in those cases. One major concern, I understand, for the faculty is fear that the exceptions will become the new norm and this appointment will set a precedent for skipping national searches and search committees altogether.
Tom Case is clearly qualified, but not necessarily the best qualified. We don't know whether he is the best qualified because Gamble's process excluded competition against which to measure Case.
How hard is it to imagine Gamble and Case and Campbell at a party discussing what Campbell would do after his term was over? "You know, there's an opening for Chancellor coming up. I can appoint Tom to that - he was a dean there already - and then Craig, you can take Tom's spot." Actually, I do have trouble imagining Tom Case in that meeting, but somebody must have discussed this for it all to happen so quickly and smoothly. Too quickly. Too smoothly.
The University of Alaska is a state organization and the Aerospace Corporation is state created and largely state funded. These are positions with serious salaries. The Chancellor gets about $250,000 plus benefits.
3. Why is this worth blogging about?
I've learned over the years that cronyism, like other ethical infractions, is "something that other people do, but not me." While working with Municipal Assembly members, for example, on rewriting the Municipal Code of Ethics, I had assembly members defend their right to have lobbyists pay for their lunches with reactions like, "Are you suggesting I could be bribed for a $20 lunch?" I had two responses: 1) How expensive a lunch would it take? and 2) If $20 is trivial, then why don't you pay for the lunch yourself? But I got the point. Other people were unethical, but even hinting they might be was insulting.
Most people, particularly those who have dressed themselves in society's symbols of legitimacy, rarely recognize when they do something wrong. Tom Delay, for example, is still protesting his innocence. If Gamble reads this, while he might acknowledge some of the points theoretically, he'd probably say that, practically, he'd made the right decision and he'd do it again. And that's why I'm covering this in such detail. He shouldn't do something like this again. And if he does, it won't be out of ignorance.
Broader Issues
1. The University of Alaska is a large public organization with a budget over $1 billion. The FY2012 operating budget alone is $884,983.300. The capital budget is another $212,525,500. (To put this in context, the Governor's proposed total operating budget for the State of Alaska is $5.45 billion. To be fair here, only $350 million of the UA budget comes from the State. But the total operating budget is 1/5 the State's operating budget.) How the University is run should be of concern to Alaskans.
2. The University of Alaska is the main institution for higher education in the state of Alaska. How it operates, its emphases on one approach to education or another, will greatly affect the future of the state. Nationally, great changes have been going on in higher education as university budgets have almost matched health care for significant increases. Legislators have reacted with calls for more efficiency. A business metaphor has replaced the idea of education. Students have been changed into customers and education has become preparation for a job rather than for life. "How?" is replacing "Why?" as the basic question for college students. There are legitimate questions about what universities do and how they do it. But there are also many simplistic answers floating around.
Facing these changes requires people who both understand education and who understand what parts of traditional education are essential to keep and how to move into the future taking advantage of new technology to make education better, but without making it superficial. So Alaskans, even those not involved in the University, have a huge stake in what happens in the administration of the University.
Specific Issues - Consequences of Skipping a Search
1. Credibility of the President's Commitment to Shared Governance
The President, in his November letter announcing the beginning of the search, said the new chancellor should have "an unwavering belief in the efficacy of shared governance." Either the President
doesn't have such a belief himself,
doesn't understand this the same way it's understood by faculty and staff and students, or
didn't want to risk not getting his preferred candidate.
There was no shared governance in this decision. Gamble muffed an opportunity to be a University President and instead acted as the University CEO. Chancellor Case was appointed by the President with no meaningful participation of the UAA community. Not only did Gamble choose someone against the Faculty Senate's unanimous recommendation, but he did not bother to discuss his reasons why before he made the appointment or why he scrapped any semblance of a search.
When push comes to shove, this new Chancellor will be clearly and unequivocally representing the President in Anchorage rather than representing the UAA community to the President. This is not shared governance.
2. Legitimacy
The odor of cronyism floats over this appointment. Even if Tom Case is the best possible chancellor - which we really can't judge given the lack of other candidates to compare him to - skipping over the process leaves a residue of suspicion and distrust. Had there been an open process with several candidates, the President may have risked that his preferred candidate was not recommended. He then would have had to make a decision - either to accept the search committee's recommendation or to still choose his preferred candidate. Gamble didn't take that gamble. The odds would have been in his favor. Usually such a committee identifies acceptable candidates and possibly a preferred candidate. Had Case made the acceptable list, his legitimacy would have been assured, and this would not have been seen as a possible case of cronyism. Odds are good this would have happened.
Instead the new Chancellor comes in under a cloud. And there is antagonism between the faculty and President.
3. Communication
The time that a search committee puts into developing criteria for a position is time where people have to articulate their values and their models of education and universities. There is a lot of give and take, people reveal themselves, and relationships are built. This would have been a great opportunity for the President, who comes from alien organizational cultures, to have gotten an intimate look at this new culture he now heads. That opportunity has been lost.
Conclusions
This is a post I wish I didn't have to write, but I feel strongly that if the President continues in this path the relationship between him and the faculty will get more and more strained. The faculty are in an awkward position. They don't want to spend their time taking on the President, they'd much rather work cooperatively with the head of the University system to make the university a better place. But a lot of them think they've been rolled by the President and don't want it to happen again.
My sense is that while they feel misused and are concerned about the future, they are willing to accept and support Tom Case. They also have to assess Gamble. Was this a willful decision to by-pass the process to make sure his Air Force colleague and friend would get the position or simply a cultural blunder? If the latter, is he willing and capable of respecting this new (for him) culture and concepts like shared governance? Did he know buying this Corvette behind her back was wrong, but did it quick before she could say no? Or is he just not used to having to check with the spouse? And how's he going to behave next time there's a family decision to be made?
This has been a long post because none of the other news media are covering the story, except the UAA student newspaper, Northern Light, and I want to document the complexities of this situation as best as I can for the record.
I expect that Tom Case will be a good Chancellor at UAA. I worked with him in the College of Business and Public Affairs and respect him as an honorable and sensitive man of considerable ability.
But in a democracy, the ends don't justify the means. Prisoners get released when the police or courts have violated procedures set up to protect their rights. The President had more than enough lead time to fill this vacancy properly. And as one of his first major acts of significance, it behooved him to do it right. He didn't. Wednesday he's coming to Anchorage to talk to the UAA faculty. Whether the future will be rocky or smooth will depend on how that meeting goes.
The university can be a frustrating place because democracy can be frustrating. Democracy allows time for people to have their say and be listened to. And I myself could point out to ways I would streamline things - but not at the expense of serious shared governance.
One needs to remember, "It's not WHAT you do, but the WAY you do it."
