Testy, Testy

By Jim Clark, Psychology

Unnamed workers renovating Wesley Hall bathrooms discovered a Senior Administrator Questionnaire (SAQ) designed to select people for the U of W’s top positions.  Sample items appear below. The correct answer is always agreement, and I include possible rationales.

1. When funds are limited, spending on administrative hiring and functions yields the greatest benefits.  The rationale is a variation of trickle-down economics; spending at upper levels allows for maximum benefit downstream.

2. A fragmented faculty is better than an integrated faculty.  The free market logic is that multiple units working in competition with one another for students and associated benefits, notably faculty members, is the best road to success.  Fragmenting academic units has the added benefit of furthering objective #1 because the appointment of more intermediate administrators justifies additional administrators above them.

3. In evaluating new academic units, only the total number of students enrolled matters, irrespective of whether or not students have been poached from other departments.  Although programs built on poaching will increase costs with no increase in revenue, true administrative minds recognize the fallacy of such simplistic arguments.

4. Senior administrators should make all decisions about the goals and processes of the institution, with minimal input from faculty, students, or the Board of Regents.  Chosen as leaders for their special qualities, administrators are best able to generate and evaluate different courses of action, ideally without interference from people not so endowed.

5. Challenging societal problems have not been solved simply because there has been a lack of concern, effort, and political will, not because of any lack of knowledge that requires basic research and scholarship by disciplinary experts. Scholarly research into the putative complexities of national and international inequities, for example, is irrelevant and serves only to perpetuate the “ivory tower” view of universities that we want to escape.

I trust these questions will help colleagues aspiring to administrative positions to behave appropriately.