School trusteeship and administration are difficult work, and are not getting any easier. In a world of increased regulation, complex legal issues, financial turmoil, and overwhelming expectations from all constituencies, it is a wonder that anyone is still left willing to take on these challenging jobs.
One of the few bright spots in this picture is the codification of time-tested principles that can help schools navigate the shoals and ride out the tempests. From NAIS to Independent Sector, from Richard Chait and Barbara Taylor to Jonathan Schick, organizations and experts have laid out clearly and plainly how boards and heads must work together. We know all about the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest, keeping governance and administration separate, making sure our boards are mission-driven, remembering that our duty is to the institution, the value of taking the long view, and so on.
Yet every head and association director I know can tell “war stories” in which each of these principles has been violated. Why is this so?
The majority of problems stem from two almost reflexive behaviors, which I would label the St. Augustine and the Cousin Vinnie syndromes. Even knowing the rules and standards, we fall prey to these two well-meaning but destructive behaviors, often with appalling results.
Interpreting Saint Augustine
St. Augustine famously said, “Love and do what you will.” He was not actually giving license to unbridled freedom, but saying that an action, like chastising someone who has erred, should be done from love, not vindictiveness. But like many other sayings (e.g., “Good fences make good neighbors.” “To thine own self be true.”), his words have been taken out of context by others, from Rabelais to Aleister Crowley, to mean “anything goes, as long as you’re a loving person.”
Most of us aren’t thinking of Augustine when we make board or administrative decisions. But this mantra appears to me to be behind much of what goes wrong in schools. Put at its simplest, we say to ourselves, “What I’m doing must be right, because I’m doing it out of my great love and affection for the school and its mission.”
Take an example. One school annually sponsored an international trip for a particular grade. The trip was no mere excursion, but intrinsically connected to the school’s mission. The school charged for the experience, raising money to be sure that any student who wished to go would not be shut out for lack of funds. A month or so before the trip, the head of school was dismayed to read an e-mail that had been sent to the full board by a former chair. The e-mail read, “My wife and I were recently at a party where we heard about two members of the class [let’s call them Peter and Paul, though they were correctly named in the e-mail] who will be unable to take the class trip without financial help. We need to raise $3,000 for these deserving boys. I am ready to put up $500, and I hope some of you will also help so that the boys can join their classmates.”
The head checked with the director of development and learned that she was unaware of this e-mail. The development office was well on the way to raising all the needed funds for that year’s students, and, in fact, one of these families had declined to request aid, saying they would manage, while the other’s need would be met along with that of a half-dozen students in similar situations.
Now, however, the administration had to contact the full board, explain that the school had the matter in hand, and point out that donations made under these circumstances, that is, for specific named students, would not be tax deductible. The result: tension and embarrassment all around. Yet who can doubt that the action was taken out of love?
Another form of this problem is when love of the school causes trustees to overstep the board-administration boundaries. How often have we heard a trustee say, “I know this isn’t technically a board matter, but I’m very concerned about…”? To many trustees, the degree to which an issue is important to them determines the propriety of their getting involved. Whether the matter is an admissions decision, a staffing problem, academic decisions, or athletic results, when the board member’s temperature rises high enough, the issues boil over into his or her domain. The logic here seems to go like this:
The board deals with the really important issues at the school.
This issue is really important to me.
Therefore, this is an issue the board should deal with.
The problem is, of course, that “important” and “important to me” are not the same thing, though they may seem so. It is the common consensus of many years that makes certain matters important to all boards, and the specific mission of the school that makes other matters important to particular boards, but even when a number of trustees think the school’s football record or the quality of some of the lunches is an important issue, these remain within the administration’s purview.
My favorite extreme is the case of the “parent representative” to the board. Working with boards, one often finds that this member is seen as most likely to bring up matters not appropriate to the work of governance. Yet the very job description makes the problem highly likely, if not inevitable. One parent rep said to me, “I know they think I bring up too many trivial things, but they don’t know what I leave out. I have parents calling me to ask me to tell the board that the pizza slices are not being fairly divided on pizza day.”
What Does Cousin Vinnie Really Know?
The second, and somewhat related problem gets its name from a very different realm. In the movie My Cousin Vinnie, two young men, falsely identified as killers and standing trial in an Alabama court, call on “cousin Vinnie” from New York, a novice personal injury lawyer, to defend them. Only the fact that Vinnie’s fiancé comes from a family of auto mechanics and can provide crucial expert testimony prevents the boys from being found guilty.
Schools also face their trials. Some are true crises, others routine challenges. Prevailing in these trials is much more likely with the right advice, but, all too often, the first response of boards — and administrators — is to call on Cousin Vinnie instead of seeking qualified help.
Like the two young men in the film, this response is often due to a perceived lack of money, but that motive is often combined with the feeling that an insider understands and cares about the school in a special way.
Take the school lawyer. Many schools now retain attorneys with strong backgrounds in employment and not-for-profit law. Heads are fortunate indeed to work with the many outstanding attorneys who are devoted to independent schools and knowledgeable about their issues. In discipline cases, hiring and firing, and other conflicts, these attorneys draw on years of experience and make clear to head and board what the issues are and how the problem can best be resolved, protecting the school’s integrity first, and shepherding its resources as well.
Yet, frequently, the board turns to its own membership for opinions before, or instead of, turning to its paid experts. Board attorneys, like Vinnie, may have specialties completely unrelated to the issues faced by a school. They may also have leanings that stem from their own area of expertise or interest, which they project onto entirely different situations encountered by the school.
One attorney, for example, had spent a career in an arena where government oversight and media attention made her hyper-vigilant. Having faced the cameras and committees on more than one occasion, she constantly warned the board about actions that might bring down the wrath of the local journalistic or regulatory community. So, when the school attempted to develop a summer camp, this trustee insisted on a lengthy review of whether the mission statement, or the articles of incorporation, needed to be altered to allow for such a program, since it did not seem to her to constitute “education.” The rest of the board, despite being shown that all of the school’s competitors had such programs under similar charters, felt it necessary to spend a great deal of time placating the concerns of one trustee before moving ahead.
I experienced the reductio ad absurdam of this sort of caution when I once suggested, following the model of a previous school, that we send a gift to alumni new parents. How about a newborn outfit with “Future Eagle” (the school’s nickname) on the front? Two people raised the question whether we might be setting up an implied contract with such a gift. I e-mailed the school attorney to ask if this concern was as misplaced as I thought, and received this reply: “Of course it is. On the other hand, you could play it safe and put on the seat, ‘This onesie does not constitute an offer of admission.’”
The Habit of Excellence
The problem, of course, is two-headed. For every trustee who is overly scrupulous, another is all too free with the Augustinian doctrine that “we’re only doing this for the good of the school, so what’s there to be concerned about?” This is especially true when dealing with the subject of conflict of interest.
Schools, as we all know, perceive themselves as families in many respects. With generations sending children and grandchildren to the school, parents serving as trustees, and employees often giving a lifetime in service to the institution while sending their own children there as well, these multi-generational institutions naturally take a familial view of many issues. This often implies for the school family what Robert Frost’s couplets give as definitions of home:
Home is the place where, when you
have to go there,
They have to take you in.
I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t
to deserve.
In the school context, this often means taking someone in, or keeping them in, despite their detrimental effects on the school. How hard is it when we have to say that our duty to all the students means that we can no longer keep a pillar of the community who has completely lost effectiveness?
Even worse is when family and school lines are literally blurred. This is a common failing among boards and schools, sometimes to an astonishing degree.
I once received a call from a school head seeking advice. The process of nominating new board members had run into a seeming impasse. At the center was a board chair who did not want to step down, though the head and many trustees felt his time had come. Why was this a problem, aside from hurt feelings? Well, the head explained, the chair of the nominating committee was the board chair’s spouse, and was naturally reluctant to deliver the bad news. I pointed out that this was a pretty unusual situation, only to learn that the full board, which numbered 15, contained three husband-wife pairs. That meant that 40 percent of the board shared the sensitivity of the embroiled couple.
Boards, of course, are not the only ones who create this problem. Time out of mind, independent schools have depended on having couples working in the school. It’s simpler for benefits, especially where housing is concerned, good for loyalty and morale, and often, to be sure, the right people for the jobs. But, just as with boards, administrators can create untenable situations when family members work too closely together. Consider the school where the head’s assistant is constantly being visited by her son, who teaches in one of the divisions. The son is unhappy with his division head, so administrative team meetings often have an added layer of tension, and the assistant regularly points out to the head the deficiencies of the division director. Or take the school head who, against advice, hires the spouse of the finance committee chair as his personal assistant, then has to dismiss the employee two years later for poor performance, losing a probable future board chair in the bargain.
These cases can place the employee in a completely untenable position. At one school, an employee was the direct supervisor of his spouse. All seemed well until the couple suddenly announced a divorce. Within a few days, the subordinate partner revealed that her former spouse had failed to follow vital legal procedures for the past several months. The supervisor admitted to the facts and departed immediately, but pointed out that his partner knew the facts for some time before coming forward. Fire both? Acknowledge that, whatever the motive, the subordinate partner did, in fact, become the whistleblower, and that the school should never have created such a situation, and bears its share of the blame?
Nor do the “cousins” have to be conventionally related. For some schools, the notion of “family” extends to the community of those with historic attachments to the school of different sorts. Again, there is merit in having some employees of the school who know its history intimately and from several sides. But carried too far, the model of “hiring our own” can lead to what Robert Bly once said of the trouble with young gang members — they are a group of people who all know the same things, whether the things are true or not.
Take one school where the head, lower school head, dean of students, communications director, and alumni director were all graduates; the business manager and tech director had been hired from the parent body, and the upper school head and admissions director had most or all their experience at the school or a sister school. The one outlier, the middle school head, said that after 10 years at the school he still didn’t feel part of the community because he hadn’t come from within, while others found it was simply impossible to offer ideas that came from outside the local experience.
Examples of both the Augustine and the Vinnie problems can be found at most, if not every school. But how to avoid these errors? There’s a wonderful story about the local agricultural extension agent who considers it his responsibility to get help and information out to every farmer in his district. One local farmer, however, never attends programs, applies for assistance, or even responds to calls and letters. Finally, the agent makes his way to the farm and introduces himself.
“I know who you are,” says the farmer.
“But why don’t you ever use our services?” the agent says. “They could help you farm better.”
“Don’t need ’em. I already know how to farm better than I do.”
We all — heads, trustees, and other administrators — know how to farm better than we do. But the board and head must agree to constantly remind each other of best practices, so that it becomes a cultural habit to say, with NAIS, “Are we separating the best interests of the school from the specific needs of a particular child or constituency?” Or with Jonathan Schick, “Is this governance or management?” Or with the Association of Governing Boards, “When in doubt, [do we] consult our paid professionals”? As another heavy hitter named Aristotle once said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” Only by making these concepts a habitual part of our thinking can we inoculate ourselves against falling into the Augustine or Vinnie traps.