The Vision Thing
It does not mean what you think it means
In September, I’ll start my 22nd year as a professor at Union College, a fact that still kind of blows my mind. It’s really hard to see myself in the “grizzled veteran” class of faculty, though realistically, I’m very much one of the old folks these days. I am to a new faculty member starting this year as someone hired in 1980 would’ve been to me when I started, and just typing that out makes me want to crumble into dust.
One of the consequences of this longevity-in-place is that I’ve been through multiple changes of administration at the college. Our current president is the third I’ve worked under (and in a bunch of ways is the best of the three, though I know some folks feel differently), not counting the one year we had an interim president, and we’re on at least the fourth iteration of the various Deans between me and him. That’s mostly a neutral fact, neither good nor bad, though I did get a really useful piece of advice out of one of those transitions in administration.
This was circa 2006, during the first search for a new president that I was here for. Said search involved the usual barrage of meetings, with the search consultant firm coming in to hear from the faculty as a whole, and the various academic divisions, and selected students and staff about what qualities they wanted to see in the new hire. Near the end of the process, there was a meeting for junior faculty only, to allow those of us who didn’t have tenure to speak a little more freely, without fear of ruffling the feathers of more senior folks.
I went to this because I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, which regularly gets me in trouble, and it started off more or less like the others: with colleagues saying that they hoped we could bring somebody in who would bring a strong vision for the college, and a dynamic plan for moving us in that direction, and blah, blah, blah. The consultant listened for a few minutes, then stopped us and said, “Look, I’ve been in all of these meetings, and all of you faculty keep saying this, and I want you to know, you’re wrong.”
She pointed out, quite correctly, that most of the grievances the faculty had with the outgoing president— which were many, at that point— were because he (and the then-VP) already did have a strong vision for the college, and were enacting plans to move us in that direction. “You all say you want someone with a strong vision,” she said, “but that’s not true. What you each want is someone who shares your vision for the college, and will do exactly the things you want them to do.” Those specific visions, though, differed very strongly between faculty in different departments, and even between faculty in the same department.
This struck me immediately as a really good summation of the situation at that particular moment for Union— her narrow point was that given then-current conditions on campus, we really needed someone who was more of a peacemaker, who would back off any ambitious transformations and just generally lower the temperature for a few years at least. How well that worked out or didn’t is a completely different debate, of little interest to anyone who hasn’t been around at least as long as I have.
That comment has stuck with me, though, as really good advice to consider in all kinds of leadership searches, both in academia and in the wider world. When people talk about wanting dynamic leaders with vision, they almost never mean they want to sign on for somebody else’s program of ideas. What they want is someone who shares exactly the same program that they already have, but who has the personal characteristics and charisma needed to put that program into action. Calls for bold action aren’t calls for boldness per se, they’re calls for someone to boldly do exactly and only the things that the speaker wants.
This might seem obvious, but there’s a subtle problem in the way these kinds of things are often discussed, namely a tendency to presume that your personal policy goals and preferences are in fact universal. Which, as that long-ago consultant was pointing out, is not necessarily the case. You want a bold leader to implement your particular set of goals and preferences, but even people who are on the same side as you, broadly speaking, will have a different set of goals and preferences that they want implemented. And often, those will conflict with each other at a surprisingly deep level.
When you create, or try to create, the conditions for somebody to take bold and decisive action on some issue of interest to you, it’s important to remember that you won’t necessarily like the result. Or you might like the immediate result, but getting there will allow some future decisive action that you won’t find as congenial. This happens again and again in politics at all different levels, from relatively insignificant academic politics to enormously consequential decisions on the scale of nation-states.
That’s not to say that immediate and bold action is never appropriate, mind. There will always be situations in which something needs to be done right away, to head off a worse crisis. Sometimes those decisions are things you may not personally agree with, but it’s entirely possible to agree that inaction would be even worse. Politics in a diverse population inevitably involves this kind of trade-off, where you accept the possibility of bad actions in one area in order to achieve good things in another.
All too often, though, I feel like people are calling for swift and decisive actions that they agree with (and expressing outrage at the lack thereof) in ways that don’t give enough consideration to the possibility of similarly swift and decisive actions that they don’t agree with. Or loudly expressing outrage about somebody contemplating doing a thing that they disapprove of, and simultaneously expressing outrage about inaction on something they would like, without recognizing that the two are related. Often times, if the people in power were given the ability to do the thing you want to have done nowNowNOW, they would also have the ability to do the thing that you don’t want in a similarly immediate manner. No system short of personal dictatorship is going to ensure that nobody ever does takes an action that you don’t like, but way too many people who are otherwise very smart and perceptive delude themselves into thinking that there’s some magic way to get exactly and only the vision that they want.
I’m trying to walk the line between “Generic enough to be safe” and “Annoyingly vague,” here, and not entirely certain I’ve succeeded. If for some reason you enjoy watching me attempt this tightrope act, here’s a button you can click to get more of it in your email:
If you would like to acknowledge my use of crumbling-into-dust political-culture references, or even disagree with something I (vaguely) said, the comments will be open: