Call to Purpose

Mission-Centered Change at Three Liberal Arts Colleges

Matthew Hartley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317849469
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A decade ago, the majority of liberal arts colleges, suffering from a decline in resources, drifted from their traditional missions. This study looks at three insitutions and suggests that a clear mission is more than a common goal.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: More than Just “Mission”

ON AN OAK-CROWNED QUAD, JUST INSIDE THE LOBBY OF THE MAIN academic building is a bronze plaque on which is written the mission of a liberal arts college. That plaque is emblematic of how institutional missions tend to be viewed—impressive and immutable, a distillation of the aspirations, loyalties, and interests of a collective into one statement. But the plaque and the words upon it are merely a remnant, an artifact of a complex and powerful socio-cultural phenomenon. A mission statement describes the fruits of that process as a catechism captures the evolution of a living faith across a multitude of adherents—imperfectly.

Colleges and universities are expressions of faith in certain idealistic notions. America is an idealistic country. Throughout our history we have served as a haven for hundreds of Utopian communities and social movements (Kanter 1972; Pitzer 1997). America has also given birth to thousands of institutions of higher learning under the premise that individual lives and the larger society can be improved—perhaps even transformed— through the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Some colleges and universities have developed very specific notions about what constitutes a worthwhile education. They have created distinctive missions (Townsend, Newell et al. 1992). However, the efficacy of liberal learning, instruction in a useful trade, or preparation for enlightened citizenry are themes common to most founding documents (which read more like manifestoes than legal contracts).

In each generation, the heirs of these institutions face questions of purpose: Whom do we serve? How shall we serve them? What is our reason for being? The future of our colleges and universities depends upon the answers to those questions. I offer this observation not as hyperbole but as bedrock fact: Our institutions necessarily reflect our educational philosophies, whether explicit or tacit. We are therefore faced with a choice: we can either actively work toward realizing our ideals or passively allow our institutions to be shaped by impersonal and perhaps inimical forces. Without a well-defined mission, our ability to safeguard, never mind advance our own visions, is compromised. As more and more constituents lay claim to our services, there is a danger that we will drift from our core purposes.

Those forces have grown stronger during the past century as higher education has emerged as an enterprise central to our knowledge-based society and economy. Today, state legislatures and Boards of Education seek a better-trained workforce and “more relevant” research for their money (Lazerson 1997; Carlin 1999). In the aftermath of Bayh-Dole, corporations now establish partnerships with universities in return for a share in the profits when products come to market. Corporate partners may secure a say in the type of research conducted, as in the much-touted deal between U.C. Berkeley and Novartis (Blumenstyk 1998). Rising tuitions coupled with declining public support, have led our institutions to embrace more and more business-like practices—auctioning “pouring rights” to Pepsi and Coke (Noble 2000), outsourcing functions to private firms (Kirp 2002), and using sophisticated discounting models to yield the preferred students. For-profit institutions build degree programs around conceptions of convenience and drain students away (Marchese 1998). Colleges and universities have adapted themselves to remain competitive and viable but the mad scramble for students and dollars has exacted a toll. Robert Zemsky and associates (Institute for Research in Higher Education 1999) note:

Probably the most lasting as well as troubling effect of this increasing reliance on the market to distribute students and resources among institutions is the erosion of guiding purpose in institutions themselves.… Having lost sight of the bearings that had earlier guided them, many institutions find themselves at a loss of how to resume course (p. 6).

In such a tumultuous and competitive market, what internal compass enables them to retain their bearings and not lose their way? The answer is mission.

The central argument of this book is that academic communities benefit from a shared sense of purpose, and that it is possible for institutions that have lost a clear sense of purpose to regain it. This book describes the experiences of three such communities: LeMoyne-Owen College, in Memphis, Tennessee, Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan, and Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee. A decade ago these three liberal arts colleges were in crisis. The environment had grown increasingly competitive and hostile. Enrollments had declined or stagnated. Communication between the administration and the faculty had devolved into bickering and even infighting. Stale and incoherent curricula, the decay of the physical plants, widespread anxiety about the future, and a fierce defense of the status quo by the administration (and some senior faculty members) all had degraded institutional life. As one faculty member expressed: “We just didn’t know who we were anymore.”

Yet, at each institution there emerged an unexpected rekindling of idealism. Individuals sought meaningful change and their efforts triggered a larger collective effort to envision and implement a new and compelling educational purpose for their institution. These purpose-centered change efforts animated prodigious transformations—new academic calendars, the dismantling of distribution requirements and the creation of core curricula, and a range of new programs and policies. They also brought about the re-patterning of institutional relationships. As a majority of institutional members came to embrace the new vision, relationships between previously estranged groups and individuals were restored. These three cases offer key insights into how mission matters for academic communities and how a new, compelling sense of purpose is created.

Liberal Arts Institutions: Bellwethers of Change

Liberal arts colleges comprise only a modest percentage of our institutions of higher learning (Breneman 1994). Nevertheless, their impact in higher education has been disproportionate. In part this is because they are the archetype. In the popular imagination, education occurs on a residential, self-contained, ivy covered campus with Mr. Chips teaching students inside the classroom and shaping their characters outside of it. James Garfield’s famous dictum that the perfect college is President Mark Hopkins (of Williams College) at one end of a log and a student on the other suggests the powerful allure of an education predicated on personal attention and dedicated to the life of the mind. As David Breneman notes, liberal arts colleges are “single-purpose institutions, with no rationale for existence beyond their capacity to educate undergraduate students” (Breneman 1994 p. 4). This ideal dominated American higher education for much of the past 350 years and it continues to exert a powerful influence. Even at larger universities (many of which began as small residential colleges), the use of house systems and other residential devices for dividing large campuses, the growing phenomenon of learning communities, and calls for faculty to embrace anew their roles as teachers and mentors are all examples of efforts to recapture some the vibrancy of the small intellectual community dedicated to learning for its own sake and a broad educational experience whose primary end is enlightenment rather than competency in a trade.

Liberal arts colleges are invaluable to educational researchers because they have historically been bellwethers of change. They are the “indicator species” of American higher education, signaling the health or fragility of the overall system. Most are tuition dependent and therefore keenly attentive to shifts in the interests of students or the needs of their localities. In the early nineteenth century, “Geographical expansion, political populism, and religious denominationalism all threatened the classical curriculum of the liberal arts college” (p. 286). The response was a reaffirmation of the liberal arts ideal in the Yale Declaration of 1828. “Another [challenge] came in the fourth quarter of that same century when the example of German scholarship guided the emergence of the research university” (p. 287). For many institutions, this signaled the beginning of their shift from college to university, although most “[pledged] fidelity to the traditions of ‘liberal and humane learning’” (p. 287). In the twentieth century, the upheaval of the Sixties brought an end to in loco parentis and increased student choice in terms of curricular offerings and greater autonomy outside of the classroom. Warren Bryan Martin (1984) comments, “The record… shows modern liberal arts colleges to be a curious mixture of traditions and innovation, or as Pfinsterputs it, ‘a study in persistence within change, continuation within adaptation’” (p. 286). Liberal arts colleges have continually adjusted to meet current contingencies. In the late twentieth century, however, these adjustments imperiled their sense of identity and purpose.

The Erosion of Mission at Liberal Arts Colleges in the 1980s

The 1980s were particularly difficult times for many small colleges. There were growing fears about enrollment shortfalls. Demographic shifts indicated a sharp decline in the number of “traditional-age” students (Leslie, Grant, and Brown in Zammuto 1984). The economy was in a seemingly intractable recession and inflation was high. Many institutions were forced to reduce expenses through layoffs, and retrenchment damaged morale. Experts painted dire scenarios for higher education. George Keller, in the opening salvo of Academic Strategy (1983) asserted:

A specter is haunting higher education: The specter of decline and bankruptcy. Experts predict that between 10 percent and 30 percent of America’s 3,100 colleges and universities will close their doors or merge with other institutions by 1995. On many campuses the fear of imminent contraction or demise is almost palpable (p. 3).

In an effort to compete for students, many colleges began pursuing enrollment-driven strategies—adding programs and services based on their presumed ability to attract or help retain students. Shifts in the labor market and student attitudes rendered pre-professional programs far more popular than the traditional liberal arts and ultimately displaced them at many, if not most, liberal arts campuses (Knox, Lindsay et al. 1993; Breneman 1994; Delucchi 1997). Although many colleges continued to profess a commitment to liberal learning, the vast majority were graduating humanists carrying briefcases, stethoscopes, or the Wall Street Journal.

This shift in mission exacted a price. One observer warned that, while the expansion into professional programs was a promising short-term strategy for bolstering enrollment, it also threatened institutional focus, which might ultimately “cause these institutions a number of problems during the 1980s and 1990s” (Zammuto 1984, p. 209). What Zammuto foresaw was a crisis of purpose stemming from the abandonment of these institutions’ core missions as liberal arts institutions. In time, many small, independent colleges were loosed from their traditional academic moorings and drifted away from their founding purposes (Breneman 1994; Delucchi 1997).

Zammuto’s prescience was confirmed in a study conducted by Ellen Earle Chaffee in the 1980s. Chaffee examined fourteen liberal arts institutions that had experienced serious financial difficulties: “One set made a dramatic recovery; the other set did not” (Chaffee 1984, p. 213). In comparing the two groups, Chaffee found that the colleges whose strategies were primarily opportunistic or “adaptive” to market demands were less successful at overcoming their financial difficulties than institutions whose adaptive strategies were “tempered by interpretive approaches” (Chaffee 1984, p. 217). To Chaffee, institutions engage in interpretive work when they make decisions by “interpreting” the institutional mission and pursuing strategies that are consonant with that mission. Chaffee found that such institutions were “selective in responding to opportunities and invested heavily in conceptual and communication systems that guided and interpreted any organizational change” (p. 213). The shared sense of mission helped members determine which policies or programs conformed to (or contradicted) their articulated mission. While good news for colleges that have a clearly defined sense of purpose, those without that sense face a more guarded prognosis.

The Challenge of Mission Making

Colleges and universities are called upon to articulate their missions repeatedly. It is a central aspect of admissions and development work. Accreditation agencies require a statement of purpose during the self-study process. Strategic planning activities begin with a description of the institution’s “mission.” Why is it, then, that mission making is most often met with raised eyebrows and more than a touch of ennui?

During the 1980s, countless organizations expended enormous amounts of time drafting mission statements, only to later quietly file them away.¹ Organizational researchers have identified myriad examples of mission-centered change efforts that have come up short (Kotier 1995). Either the rhetorical pyrotechnics were viewed by institutional members as wholly divorced from reality or they handsomely stated what everyone already knew. Such fruitlessness is reflected in the higher education literature as well (Davies 1986; Boyer 1987; Newsom and Hayes 1991). Although Newsom and Hayes (1991) eloquently state that a mission statement should be “a revelation of [a] college’s reason for being” (p. 28), their analysis of 93 mission statements led them to conclude that most are “amazingly vague, evasive, or rhetorical, lacking specificity of clear purposes” (p. 29). A member of one prestigious liberal arts college interviewed for Boyer’s landmark study on undergraduate life ruefully described the futility of the purpose-making efforts at that institution:

We’ve had half-a-dozen committees at different points in the past looking at what our goals are, were, and should be. Then, sometimes, they get as far as making a statement, which doesn’t provide for any action, and of course is lost or forgotten by the time someone else decides in a year or two that we really need a committee to set goals (p. 59).

It is tempting to conclude that such efforts are worthless—in fact, it may be more appropriate to term them meaningless. Though the research that spurred these activities had concluded that successful organizations were clear about their institutional missions, it was a mistake to presume that simply writing a mission statement could produce a collective sense of purpose.

And yet, as late as the mid-1990s, the AAC reported that 80 percent of colleges and universities were making major revisions in their mission statements, goals, curricula, and general education courses (Author 1994). These halting efforts suggest that we have an impoverished understanding of the complexity of purpose making and a limited view of how mission matters. Though the benefits of having a clear purpose have been described (Clark 1972; Keller 1983; Chaffee 1984; Tierney 1992) and recommended (Rice and Austin 1988; Austin 1990; Smith and Reynolds 1990), the process by which colleges and universities might go about clarifying their academic missions remains largely unexplored (Delucchi 1997 p. 424). This gap exists in the literature on organizations more generally. James March and Johan Olsen (1981) note: “There is a need for introducing ideas about the process by which beliefs are constructed in an organizational setting” (p. 256).

Efforts at mission making have been careful, logical, direct and utterly ineffective. Irwin Sander’s, in exploring the idea of the academic community remarks, “Members of an organization have no sense of community if they do not agree in general on the purpose of that organization” (Sanders 1973 p. 58). As an organization dedicated to rational inquiry, a college or university tends to approach mission by articulating strategic goals and formulating complex plans, but these efforts fail to generate much excitement. They satisfy the head but not the heart. Henry Mintzberg notes, “The problem is that [our] planning represents a calculating style of management, not a committing style.” (p. 109) (Emphasis in the original.) How, then, does one produce commitment?

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her sociological study of Utopian communities, identified a number of “commitment mechanisms”—means by which individuals are bound to a collective effort (Kanter 1972). Andrew Pettigrew, in response to Kanter’s work observes:

[Studying] commitment mechanisms begs the question of commitment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Introduction: More Than Just “Mission”
• Chapter 2 A Thematic Account of the Development of Institutional Purpose
• Chapter 3 The Search for Purpose as Institutional Revitalization
• Chapter 4 The Power, Politics, and Pathology of Ideologically Based Change
• Chapter 5 Sustaining A Sense of Purpose and the Social Construction of Success
• Chapter 6 Conclusion
• Appendix A Research Design and Methodology
• Bibliography
• Index