Expulsion, Attraction, Expulsion

Some administrators have the hardness to clear out deadwood by imposing new standards of evaluation. For institutions trailing behind the national curve, this task can be vital, but then problems arise once the clearing out has been completed—how does the university fill the new positions made available.  Those same administrators who chased out the old guard will now find it difficult to attract and retain quality replacements. If they start imposing the same standards they used to remove the unproductive colleagues in evaluating the newly acquired productive scholars, they will soon find that they have done nothing more than create a cycle of expulsion, recruitment, evaluation, and expulsion.  Nurturing a creative environment is quite different from weeding a rotten one out. 

Administrators may be satisfied that they have established a cycle of expulsion, recruitment, evaluation, and expulsion wherein a handful of applicants survive and the majority are removed.  But the real question—how has the institution improved qualitatively—remains unanswerable by this self-replicating process.  In today’s academic market, administrators can almost always assume that they will have a better pool of applicants with the next search.  However, as soon as restrictions and rubrics are imposed on the hiring process, the very best candidates are chased away, because the innovative thinkers do not fit the standards used to chase out the dead wood. 

The most successful administrators facilitate rather than evaluate. They allow their clever colleagues to go about their business without constantly asking how smart they are and how much business they  have completed lately.  An associate dean may hire the digital genius from Cork and attract the Belgian designer, but as soon as the university starts evaluating them according to generic rules, where one rubric judges all, these immigrants will drift away to friendlier, more inspiring fields.  To the administrator, it will seem that the Irish genius and Flemish designer just did not measure up, and so the university will never even recognize what they have lost. Instead they will go out, hire new recruits, and start the same process over, without ever seeing what they are missing in qualitative improvement.