While Military Media has mostly been focused on defense industry, with some variation to respond to topical subjects of interest to businessmen, in the coming days and weeks it will begin to focus more on finance and financial advice. There will be fewer pieces of analysis such as the one below, and more information for those seeking basic knowledge about how to develop a budget, and navigate various investment opportunities. As always, appreciate your reading!

THE BIG STORY

A Crisis of Leadership in Academia

The Wall Street Journal reports on a strange phenomenon facing leadership in academia. Is this limited to academia, or part of a broader trend in society?

An article in The Wall Street Journal described the crisis in higher education leadership. Harvard, Stanford, and UPenn are struggling to find replacements for disgraced former presidents. MIT’s president is facing down calls to resign. And Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, is retiring at the end of a long tenure, with no obvious replacement waiting in the wings.

The WSJ article suggests that it has something to do with the peculiar nature of academia, and the changing needs of universities; that the job of president is something different from what it was 40 or 50 years ago. Part PR representative, part fundraiser, part mediator on behalf of numerous constituents, and part politician, the president of a university needs to have a skill set that’s difficult to select for in the world outside academia. No other institution has evolved to work quite like a university works; no institution could function as universities do without quickly collapsing or fracturing.

What is the answer? One possibility would be for universities, which have institutionalized in some remarkable ways over the past few decades (Yale has a fully developed HR department and as of 2018 the highest ratio of managers-to-students of any Ivy League university and most 4-year colleges in the U.S.) to take a step most have been reluctant to embrace. That step, which is the most substantial for true institutionalization, is something that the military embraced long ago: movement within an organization in and out of systematized training, the deliberate cultivation of different skills and talents and selection therefore in certain positions, and — in short — professional development that is directed toward advancement. Everyone in a position of authority ought to be thinking about one day becoming president of a university, and there ought to be a path for getting there. In the absence of a professional path, what one gets instead is a network of patronage, where friendship and alliance is the best path to employment and advancement.

So university staffs tend to resemble university faculties, where the goal for most is to become the foremost expert in some niche, and that goal must be pursued with dogmatic and monomaniacal ferocity. Faculty members are academics, and subject to a very strange set of incentives including (1) the need to publish, which is true across every subject (2) the need to curry favor within “academia,” which is essentially a medieval guild (3) the need for young scholars to perform well in a classroom setting, where they’re rated for their performance and (4) the urge to stand out in the public eye, though not too much, or in the wrong way. Of these concerns, (2) is probably the greatest — and, for most academics, relatively few of whom are so talented as to stand out entirely on their own merits, that means finding some corner of science, history, or literature to study and explain, and do that better than anyone else. While the personal goal is likely to make some useful contribution to human knowledge, the professional goal is tenure — the equivalent of a mid-level manager.

Staffs reflect the institutions they serve, professionally and culturally — every military understands this, with the culture of a staff of an infantry unit looking very different from the culture of the staff of a cavalry unit, and both resembling each other far better than they resemble the culture of a staff of an intelligence unit.

According to the WSJ piece, the tension in academia comes about from a staff that culturally resembles faculty, the professionals they see most on a day-to-day basis, but must answer to and respond to a leadership that reports to and must address the priorities of faculty, alumni, and (increasingly) donors, which may be alumni, or may be status-seekers who have given large sums of money to an educational institution for selfish reasons (or selfless reasons, when those donors are anonymous). 

Business leaders report to investors and/or shareholders, though they have (and most feel a powerful) responsibility to employees. Military leaders report to superiors, though they have (and most feel a powerful) responsibility to subordinates. These are more essentially knowable relationship patterns, predictable in that one understands what drives them; leadership often comes down to balancing their competing needs, and with the limited inputs, that is, if no less stressful, at least more predictable. Paying workers more means less profit, and soforth. In the military, maintaining an aggressive pace of training in garrison means lower morale in the short term, but better performance in combat the long term (and greater esprit de corps).

What is to be done about leadership in academia? It is likely, given that most of the people in leadership positions are in fact managers and not leaders the way anyone in the military would understand the term, or perhaps to a certain extent politicians (people who represent interests and engage in politics rather than management or leadership) that the field will slowly adapt to market pressures, however those market pressures express themselves. At some point, universities with visionary leadership will surge ahead of those without it, as has happened in the past. One hundred and fifty years ago there was barely any difference between Wesleyan, Denison, Harvard, Trinity, and Yale; now, great gulfs separate them.

Meanwhile, the military is suffering from its own crisis in leadership — one created by the absence of the Secretary of Defense, apparently precipitated by a medical emergency. While this dayslong breakdown in communication and accountability is nearly unfathomable, and certainly outrageous, it is also a testament to the resilience of the military’s system — so filled with redundancy and expertise that, while it’s not correct to say that nobody noticed the SecDef’s absence, it is correct to say that the edifice did not break because of it. If the crime lacks a victim, can a crime truly be said to have occurred?

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TOP READS AROUND THE WORLD

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HUMOR

The Onion got its hands on the list of people who went to Epstein Island and, brace yourself, it’s not who you’d expect.