One of the blessings of my current physical situation has been the opportunity to nventory anbooks on the d catalogue more than forty years of collected files and academy. While working full-time I never had the time to review all the files and books that I was collecting. These files and books were just piling up in my university offices and in my home offices and the storage areas of our homes. I had some idea of fwhat I possessed, but I didn’t know for sure. This led to duplication of files and books. As I have discovered these duplicates, I have given them to individuals who can ake good use of them.
However, the process of inventorying and cataloguing has also created a problem. In Chinese philosophy, this dichotomy, where opposite but complementary items form a complete whole, is known as yin and yang. The same situation is viewed by some people as a problem and by others as an opportunity. A modern western idiom attempting to express this is the question, “Do you see the glass as half-full, or half-empty?” I must admit that as I have inventoried and catalogued my collection of files and books, I have experienced both feelings. At times I am elated at the long hidden jewels of ideas and thoughts that I am finding in my files and books. As I consider these ideas I am easily distracted and start trying to track down more about the given topic. I find myself creating more files to add to my already abundant collection. When I try to return to where I was when I was distracted, I can’t find my place or I can’t get back into the flow of things. I am pleased that I have been reintroduced to many ideas that I had abandoned. However, I am frustrated that I can’t excavate around these ideas more fully. I am almost convinced that a life-time of thinking will take a second lifetime to explicate it.
One of the dangers when an academic picks up a book or an article is the temptation to scan it. Whenever I start to scan a book or an article, I find it almost impossible to put it down. It happened again and again as I went through my books and files. At one point, I came across a somewhat dated book with the intriguing title of Rural Development and Higher Education: the Linking of Community and Method, published by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. While I have been laid up, I have been reading and thinking about the development of American Higher Education. Recently, I was reading about the effect that the Morrill Acts and the establishment of Land Grant Colleges had on the overall development of rural America. My curiosity got the better of me, and I started scanning the Kellogg book. I was trapped. Soon I found myself reading the last chapter which was a summary of the nine Kellogg funded projects that were outlined in the book. The first section of this chapter was entitled, “Learning from others.” It began with a great story about “a city fellow who bought a thriving farm that had a new brood of baby chicks. A week later all the chicks were dead.” At this point the city fellow went to the neighboring farmer to find out what had happened and if there was anything he could do to prevent this from happening again when he bought some new chicks. The neighbor in all innocence asked the city fellow, “What did you feed them?” The city fellow was shocked and he stammered, “Feed them. I thought the old hen nursed them.”
The conclusion of this story is obvious. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be very dangerous to make faulty assumptions. In the setting of this book, the authors continued by suggesting that university faculty can’t hope to deal successfully with rural development if they presuppose full knowledge of the local needs, wants, and conditions of any given location and any given group of people. This led to the standard operating procedure within all Kellogg funded projects of forming a citizens’ advisory committee at the very beginning of the project. Everyone was constantly reminded that “Teamwork is critical.”
In higher education this is not only true when we are working on projects outside the institution, such as rural, urban, or industrial development. It is also true when we are working on a project inside the institution with our own students. How easy is it to assume we know what people need and what they already know? We can save a lot of time by just plowing in and developing assistance programs for them. Why should we ask students what they need? How absurd, they are only students! How many colleges and universities have set up student assistance programs to help students and find these programs don’t address the needs of their students?
Today almost everyone gives lip service to the adage that cooperation is the best policy. People know that generally you’ll get better results if you involve other people, seek their advice and help, early in a process. People are more willing to help and accept change if they have ownership in the process.
If teamwork was the most important lesson that the Kellogg Foundation learned from these projects, there was one more lesson that was a close second. This second lesson was that every project needs a project director who possesses the appearance of neutrality, “the statesmanship of a Disraeli, the leadership abilities of a wagon master, the selflessness of a missionary, and the energies of a long-distance runner.” These are great lessons for any organization to learn and master.
John Laudun,
Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on my posting. I am sorry that I can’t help you in pointing you to where you might get a copy of the Kellogg Foundation book. I remember I got my copy from a foundation officer when the college I was at was working on a grant proposal related to helping urban kids succeed in primary, secondary schools and then go onto college. ALthough we didn’t get the grant from Kellogg, we submitted a similiar gran proposal to the Lilly Endowment and it was approved.
I greatly enjoyed scanning your blog. I recommend it highly to those that follow my blog. I am planning to go back and read your posts more carefully. The one that really caught my eye was the Grand Rapids, MI “American Pie” posting. I had to read that one right away. I live near Grand Rapids and it is interesting following the local response to beiing classified as a “dying city.” WHen hte insitution where I was working on the above mentioned Kellogg grant, I lived in Indiana. I got a laught out of the way INdiana classified it towns and cities. If it had both a major and manager and sufficient population, it could be called a city. If it didn’t have a minimum populaiton, it could only have one of the two offices of major and manager. Because our city was on the low end ot the allowable population range, we were classified as a “THird Rate City” How would you like to live in a third rate city? That classsification didn’t create as much of a todo as the Dying city moniker. I suppose part of that had to do with the fact that no national newsmagazine was yelling “third rate city.”
By Baylis