Yours truly does a “Mitchell’s Musings” weekly blog for the
Employment Policy Research Network (
http://www.employmentpolicy.org/)
of which he is senior academic editor.
Normally, this blog and that one don’t cover similar topics. But in this case they do so I cross-post
below.
Could there be some lessons for
UCLA that emerge from the UC-Davis pepper-spray incident? Could there even be some linkage to UCLA’s
proposed hotel/conference center?
Might be! Fair and balanced; you decide!
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Mitchell’s Musings
4-30-12: The Real Pepper-Flavored Lessons of Hindsight
Daniel J.B. Mitchell
By now, the world has become aware of the University of
California-Davis’ “pepper-spray cop,” thanks to YouTube videos and even a song
by radio comedian Harry Shearer.(1) The
cop became an Internet “meme,”(2) appearing in photo-shopped format in famous
paintings and photos.(3) Just in case
you are not of this world, here is a brief rundown of what occurred. UC-Davis is located near Sacramento,
California and is part of the University of California (UC) system. Various campuses in the UC system had
“Occupy” type demonstrations in the fall quarter of 2011, partly linked to the
national Occupy movement and partly connected more locally to protests against UC
tuition hikes that resulted from California’s state budget crisis. In particular, a student demonstration was
broken up by UC-Davis police on November 18, 2011 which included an incident in
which demonstrators - who appeared to be at most passively resisting - were
pepper sprayed.
There was general public outrage at the YouTube videos and
at the related news photos and there were calls for the chancellor of UC-Davis
to resign. She didn’t. As is often done
to defuse such situations, a commission was set up to study the event with the
benefit of hindsight and make an evaluation and recommendations. There was some delay in releasing the
resulting commission report because of objections by the police union to the
naming specific officers (other than the pepper-spray cop whose name was
already public). In the end, after some
litigation, the report was recently released with police officer names removed.(4)
The study commission was chaired by a former justice of the
California state supreme court and had representation from university
administration officials and from students.
Much of the actual investigation was undertaken by Kroll, a consulting
company specializing in police and security matters. The supplementary Kroll report was quite
lengthy and includes a very detailed chronicling of the events and of who said
what to whom in university and police leadership circles prior to, during, and
after the pepper-spray incident.
I will provide a few highlights of the commission’s report
but like all reports that benefit from hindsight, it also has the drawbacks of
hindsight. The logical progression of
events recounted and the failings described were much clearer after the events
than they were to the people involved in real time. Although the report says the chancellor is
ultimately responsible, much of the blame is laid on the police chief (who unlike
the chancellor did resign subsequently). Officers under the chief did not seem
to respond to her commands and in any case exactly what she wanted from them
was not always clear. She also is
portrayed as not making higher-ups in the UC-Davis administration aware of her
concerns about how the demonstrators should be handled. No one, including the police, could identify
what law demonstrators were violating, if any.
The higher-ups above the police, including the chancellor,
were concerned that non-students had, or soon would, infiltrate the student
demonstrators who had set up tents on campus and provoke violence. At some point, the higher-ups became deaf to
suggestions that there might not be such outsiders present among the
demonstrators. Apparently, top
university administrators were concerned that violent events such as had
occurred in Occupy demonstrations in nearby Oakland could occur on their campus. Should that situation arise, they would be
held accountable to parents of students who might be injured. They also did not want to have a repeat of an
incident that occurred at UC-Berkeley in which campus police batons were used
on demonstrators. A form of groupthink
appeared to characterize the deliberations of the higher-ups at UC-Davis whose
consultations with each other were ad hoc
and informal. The upshot was that the chancellor – apparently fearing
outside infiltration and Oakland/Berkeley-style violence – ordered that the
demonstrators be cleared in mid-afternoon rather than in the wee hours of the
morning as the police chief had advised (but not very forcefully). In that
context, the pepper-spray cop seemingly made up his own rules of crowd control
and utilized a form of pepper spray he was not authorized to have and for which
he was not trained to use. Since the report is available on line, I won’t go
further with the description of its findings.
But I will make the following observations.
The report does not go into why there might be a police
chief on a university campus who in the commission’s view was evidently not
competent. How did a person who is portrayed not up to the job obtain the position
initially and then remain in it until something untoward happened? On the other hand, the report refers to the
various UC-Davis administrators repeatedly as a “Leadership Team” dealing with
how to handle the demonstration. Given
the report’s description of what occurred, “Leadership Team” seems to be an
overly-formal appellation for a group of individuals who were only in loose
contact and probably did not think of themselves as a “team” that had been
formed to deal with a potential incident.
There is repeated reference in the commission’s report to
NIMS and SEMs which stand for National Incident Management System and
(California) Standardized Emergency Management System. NIMS and SEMS are protocols for government
and police officials handling “incidents.” The commission report suggests that
university officials – particularly the non-police officials – should a) have
been aware of these protocols (in part because they are available on the web)
and b) followed the formal steps contained within the protocols.
As readers may by now have guessed, I read the commission’s
report somewhat differently from the way the commission intended. At the level
at which the commission focused – what went wrong at UC-Davis on November 18,
2011 – an alternative view is that you had a bunch of well-meaning
administrative people with academic (not police) orientations who did not
follow protocols of behavior with which they were unfamiliar and probably
unaware – whether or not the protocols were on the web. (Almost everything official is on the web
nowadays, but if you don’t know about something, you are unlikely to go looking
for it or find it.) Much of the blame,
again at the level at which the report was focused, lies with the police chief
who could not communicate effectively with her officers or with her superiors.
In the real world, police chiefs are more likely to be
familiar with NIMS and SEMS than the UC-Davis Chancellor whose background is research
“in electronic circuit design (that) has led to numerous national and
international awards…, 19 U.S. patents, and an additional five U.S. patent
applications (and who) is the author or co-author of 10 book chapters and about
650 refereed publications in journals and symposia proceedings.”(5) University
chancellors and presidents are not hired based on their familiarity with NIMS
and SEMS. So what the report suggests to me is that there needs to be a rethink
about top university management. Who should run universities? What qualities in
university managers should be sought?
How do you integrate the academics in high-level managerial positions
with non-academic managers who have (or are supposed to have) technical
knowledge about their functions?
Although many in academia are not happy with the idea, the
outside world increasingly views colleges and universities as the route to
better jobs. Public universities in
particular are seen as paths to upward social mobility. They are subsidized in various ways to
accomplish that objective but those subsidies have been declining –
particularly since the Great Recession - and university management is expected
to do more with less. Efficiency has
taken on increased importance.
University and college campuses have aspects of small
cities. Note that UC-Davis, for example,
has its own police department. There are
folks employed on university campuses repairing sewers and pipes, maintaining
roads, and providing park-like landscaping.
Campus presidents or chancellors are expected to engage in fundraising,
be it charitable giving or extracting money from recalcitrant legislators and
governors. They set “policy” and make “strategy”
but in fact rely on others to carry out day-to-day operations. In effect, there is likely to be a top
official – a president or chancellor - who corresponds to a company CEO and a
second-tier person corresponding to a COO (chief operating officer).
If both the CEO and COO are academics, the third tier of
officials (other than deans and department chairs) is likely to be composed of
individuals such as police chiefs and those looking after capital projects,
campus enterprises, and maintaining the plumbing. The third tier of non-academics can easily be
unmoored from university norms such as academic freedom. It is a structure that invites
empire-building (which is costly and unsuited to the current distressed economic
environment). There is also a likelihood that the top academic officials will
assume that the third tier of non-academic officials is competent and will operate
with them on a call-me-if-you-have-a-problem basis. Of course, subordinates are not keen on
telling superiors they have created a problem.
So the system can generate problems that don’t receive the attention of
top academic administrators until they evolve into crises such as the UC-Davis
pepper spray affair. That organizational
design flaw (i.e., the call-me-if-you-have-a-problem management approach) is
the underlying reason for what happened at UC-Davis although the pepper-spray commission
report does not say so.
No managerial structure is perfect and none can be designed
that will avert all crises. But
improvements are both possible and necessary in the current era of economic
stringency in academia. Autonomous fiefdoms
are expensive when in a period in which money is scarce. For example, new buildings - which are the raison d'être of autonomous university
construction empires - are put up, even when their long-term costs of
maintenance and use are not covered.(6) Physical
capital is favored over the human capital on which universities are based.
So who would be the ideal COO of a university? Academics are not the obvious candidates,
even though they are commonly appointed.
Some folks would suggest recruiting university COOs from the business
world. The appeal of putting
universities on a “business-like” basis has a certain appeal (although probably
not to most faculty!). Unfortunately,
someone coming into academia from for-profit organizations that are ultimately
command-and-control in style will find universities, and particularly public
universities, to be alien environments.
Faculty cannot be fired and insist on having a voice - as do
students. Political realities impinge on
decisions. External interests, such as
alumni and neighbors, constrain available choices.
The requirements of the university COO job – if one is
looking to the outside labor market for model candidates – most resemble those
of city managers. A good city manager is
used to working in a constrained, political environment in which the ability to
fire is limited. And an experienced city
manager would be knowledgeable about running the small cities that universities
campuses are. He or she would know, for
example, something about hiring and evaluating police chiefs. It’s fine to think about increasing
university efficiency through technical fixes such as online courses. But until good management is in place in
universities, the other fixes will have only minor impacts.
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Footnotes
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The original posting of this item is at:
