HIGHER EDUCATION IS IRREDEEMABLE.

A consultant who heads a company modestly named Gordian Knot Consulting takes to the pixels of the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education to offer "The Scourge of Avoidant Leadership in Higher Education." The secondary headline contends, "If leaders refuse to confront threats directly and act with courage and conviction, institutions risk irrelevance or collapse."

College Fix cartoonist Joshua Masterson has these people diagnosed perfectly.

It's not as if universities haven't always attempted to conduct affairs as if in a Quaker Meeting.  "As long as there's general agreement on what it is the administration is selling, the endless wordsmithing achieves nothing substantively different yet leaves everyone believing they've said their piece." Unfortunately, process with a lot of nuance leads to failure, which is what the columnist might have in mind with that "avoidant leadership" (a politer way of saying building consensus by kicking inconvenient cans down whatever road is available).

Read her essay, though, and recognize that perhaps the Gordian Knot to be cut is the mindset of higher education's poo-bahs.

The 1978 movie National Lampoon’s Animal House, set in the 1960s at fictional Faber College, offers some unexpected leadership lessons. Despite the problematic and unconscionable scenes, there is one bit worth noting. ROTC Chip Diller (Kevin Bacon) stands amid the chaos caused by the Deltas. Diller, in a fit of hysteria, clenches his fists, jumps up and down and screams, “Remain calm! All is well!” while the crowd stampedes, eventually knocking him down and flattening him like the Road Runner in a Warner Bros. cartoon. The scene is funny because it’s not funny—Diller, trying to stay in control, is hilariously out of control. Lately, this scene loops in my head whenever I think about the crisis of higher education leadership amid monumental unrest in the sector and the world.

My inappropriate sense of humor aside, I seriously contemplate what higher education leaders must do to ensure the longevity of their institutions and uphold their mission. I try to identify which leadership styles and traits are least helpful in a crisis. I think about Chip Diller. He relies only on his position for authority. He believes his word and uniform should be enough to wield power and influence, yet he is ignored. He doesn’t recognize the size and scope of the problem. He lacks empathy. He takes no decisive actions. He is an avoidant leader.

Relatedly, I’ve seen leaders insist on everyone getting along rather than leaning into conflict to untangle complex issues, make decisions and create lasting, beneficial change. Whenever I hear a leader make a statement like “we all must work together” in the face of problems that require deep thought about the moral, ethical and legal ramifications of a situation, I do an internal primal scream.

Let me refresh your memory, dear reader.  Chip "Thank you Sir!  May I have another?" Diller represents the Establishment.  He's in cahoots with Dean Wormer and the rest of the "Hitler Youth" whose efforts to stay in control got one of them fragged by his own men in Vietnam and another one sent to prison in the wake of Watergate where, well, boys in prison do what boys in prison do.  Recall, also, that the Deltas were sort of countercultural types a few years before the long hair and acid rock became signifiers thereof.  Finally, if you want to fret about problematic scenes, contemplate the homecoming parade the Deltas disrupted, complete with numerous Camelot tropes that at the time looked optimistic only with hindsight proving to be foolish.  (Speaking of "Camelot tropes," the columnist wraps up invoking Marion Pritchard, Malala Yousafzai, and Eleanor Roosevelt.  When I accuse Inside Higher Ed as all wokeness, all the time, it's such passages that make the case for me.)

And it might be that all the tension over "leaning into conflict" as opposed to "developing consensus," it might be universities have long been failing at their mission and uprooting the entire academic ethos as currently understood is what's in order.  Yes, yes, I repeat myself, and perhaps I do so because we've had another upsurge of traffic the past few weeks, and there might be new readers wondering why I keep on as I do.  But the columnist doesn't recognize the Gordian Knot that has to be cut.

Platitudes like “we all must work together” can have immense value in the academy, especially in enacting shared governance and upholding the ideals of collegiality. In a community of scholars, peer collaboration in decision-making is important. It represents a partnership between administrators and faculty. The basis of collegiality is respect and civility. However, some leaders believe this means avoiding conflict entirely. For some, collegiality becomes a veiled excuse for indecision and a lack of accountability. It can mask fear and a need for personal survival over ethical responsibility.

Collegiality can be avoidant leadership in disguise, providing a false sense of harmony. In times of crisis, which higher education now faces—government threats, political operatives, mounting public distrust, a broken financial model and civil unrest—this type of leadership can be especially dangerous. It is only a matter of time before conflict breaks the bounds of false harmony, leading to chaos or dissolution.

It came to this, dear reader, when the poo-bahs of higher education broke faith with the Normals who noticed things going wrong that a winning football program could not conceal, and when the faculty abdicated stewardship of the curriculum and let the crazies of Student Affairs usurp faculty roles.

Going into Faculty Senate intending to die on the hill defending access-assessment-remediation-retention isn't going to end the chaos, the dissolution, the mounting public distrust.