The Acting Chair
by Art Kleiner

Nearly every university I have spent time wandering around, including Harvard and MIT, has a melancholy quality, as if everyone there is weighing the reality of the place against the idea they hold, buried in their hearts, of what it could be like. Unable to make headway in changing the politics of the institution, they create small bailiwicks, and hide in them, hoping that when their time comes they will be taken seriously.

"Yes," George Richardson sighed. "We had to separate them again." Graduate students and undergraduates just couldn’t take part in the same ceremony together.

George was talking about the graduation exercises at the State University of New York at Albany, the university that is supposed to be called "the University at Albany," and he was speaking not just as the professor he had been for years, but as the administrator he had just become. He was now the acting chair of the Rockefeller School of Public Policy and Administration, the most prominent location in the world for applying system dynamics to government and public-sector issues. He had been in this role three months. Authority, and the ability to get something done, was like a suit he hadn't been sure would feel good on him, but now that he had tried it on, and walked around in it (and he is an innately dapper person), he was loathe to take it off.

And it looked good on him. As we were talking, a more voluble faculty member poked his head into George's office to ask about a graduate student, who had failed a critical test – a dissertation test? – twice, and needed permission to take it again. "Can we fit this on the faculty meeting's agenda this week?" he asked.

"Ron," said George, "send me the necessary paperwork and I'll put it on."

"But will there be time for it?" Ron asked. (His name wasn't Ron, but I'll use "Ron" here.)

George looked up at him and smiled. "Your time is my time," he said simply.

"Boy," said Ron admiringly. "You know just what to say! You're making a terrific dean!" And he loped out of the office. George turned to me and smiled again. "For every one of those I get," he said ruefully, "there are a dozen times when I find out, only too late, that I've said the wrong thing."

That's the kind of healthy self-deprecation that I've learned to trust over the years. Oddly enough, many people see that kind of statement as phony. Glib, perhaps. I see it as a social nicety, an acknowledgment that something, somewhere, is bound to go wrong when you are arrogant about life.

George Richardson is flaxen-haired, genial, a bit formal in his manners and posture, with very bright eyes behind his glasses; small in stature, he is like a man with military training who has left the army because he prefers academia. He is an alumnus of Jay Forrester's system dynamics program at MIT; one of the critical points on his resume, as he made sure to tell me, was that he and Peter Senge had once taught a course together, and used the textbook he had written as a graduate student. I knew him primarily for his own book, Feedback Thought, a remarkably comprehensive history of the ideas of systems thinking. He writes, in that book, not just of the origins of understandings of systems (evolving from understandings of hydraulic and electronic machines, and moving far beyond them), but of the revolution that this produced in the social sciences, a revolution that is still going on, albeit with dramatic slowness. We reviewed Feedback Thought in The Dance of Change.

Now I indulged myself in a rare pleasure; to pull out a review written of someone else's book, show it to the book's original author and watch that person read it for the first time. Every book review is a cryogenically frozen conversation with the book's author, and watching an author read a review is like watching that conversation come to life.

George's eye immediately went to my last sentence. "A dense and academic book that rewards immersion." Then he paused. "Dense," he said, a bit ruefully. When the book first came out, he said, a review appeared in one of the university library journals saying essentially that this book was too difficult and dense to gain a big audience. He had felt wounded, until his friend and colleague David Andersen had told him, "What would you rather have when you come up for tenure? A review saying this will be a best-seller, or a review saying it would be `dense and academic, but reward immersion?'"

Then George told me that the book was out of print, even though it was published by a University Press. A sad comment on publishing. He gets two or three requests a week, and cannot even help them find copies. I'm glad I've got mine. I'm still kicking myself for not having bought a copy, years ago, of Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. [A few days after writing this, Amazon.com came through and fulfilled my request for a used copy. And I’m told that used copies pop up in Cambridge, Massachusetts bookstores all the time. Still, it’s very irritating to know that it’s out of print.]

As it happens, I knew the university well; I am an alumnus of SUNY Albany. I graduated from there in 1975, with a degree in English Literature and Mass Media. It was the high-water era of liberalism in education, and I never had to take a distribution course – no science, no languages, no phys ed. I never realized until much later, when I went to UC Berkeley for a graduate degree, how poor an education I had had at Albany. George laughed.

"It still might be a poor education," he said. "One measure is the commencement." The undergraduates laugh and heckle the commencement speakers. They toss a beach ball around in the crowd."

George didn't say so, but I knew these students. I was, once, one of them. They would naturally behave as if the graduation exercise were a coda to a four-year-long party, like a morning-after beer run. The graduate students, meanwhile, would have struggled for five or six years — some pursued a public policy degree for ten or twelve years, I was told. And they'd know that, likely as not, they'd never get a job commensurate with the effort they put in. No job could equal that effort. Many of them would be forced to take adjunct positions for a while, and they would scramble for the few academic jobs available to them. Commencement was one of the few tokens they get of the dignity that they deserved; and the undergraduates tore apart that dignity in a shredder made of catcalls and howls.

"They wouldn’t act that way," George said, "if they had great respect for the university." Of course, because the undergraduates act that way, they’re treated as immature; and as its reputation as a party school grows (this is me talking, not George), people follow that reputation to "the University at Albany," until its immaturity becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. A negative Pygmalion effect. And a difficult conundrum to untangle for those who care about the university's future.

It occurred to me, riding home in the train, that I have rarely heard anyone wax enthusiastic about their school. Only two schools seemed to me to be happy places; the University of Cincinnati, and the University of California at Berkeley. Every other university I have spent time wandering around, including Harvard and MIT, has a melancholy quality, as if everyone there is weighing the reality of the place against the idea they hold, buried in their hearts, of what it could be like. Unable to make headway in changing the politics of the institution, they create small bailiwicks, and hide in them, hoping that when their time comes they will be taken seriously.

Academic people seem to lose sight, all too often, of what it means to be serious; it doesn’t mean to specialize. It means to take the relationship seriously, the tripartite relationship between research subject and teacher and student; Albany has no respect for that relationship embedded in its ways, and the students know something is missing. They’ve never been trained to ask for it, and they only realize the gap, as I did, years later — when they are called upon to dredge up an understanding from inside themselves, and it simply isn’t there.

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