With regard to giving lip to university technology transfer work, perhaps we really do live in a “who cares?” administrative environment. You know, as in it’s all petty idealism to actually think that public statements should reflect what is happening rather than put a spin on what everyone expects is happening, or what we sincerely want to happen, or what we are hoping, hoping, hoping will accidentally happen even if we are clueless and inept about it. In this world, everyone expects the spin. It’s not a misrepresentation, just an optimistic overstatement that puts the best foot forward, to inspire people to join in and create such a world as we envision. We are too important to fail, too impressive to be doubted, too strong to be resisted. The world will conform to our desires. Public overconfidence is a virtue. At least, so the spin goes.
There are two directions one can take this. One is the Frankfurt direction–On Bullshit is a fine treatment of the theme. From this direction, folks aren’t lying. It’s worse than that. It’s impossible to lie if one doesn’t have a good idea of the truth, or a regard for the truth. Lying is actually a step up. With lip, that there might even be a truth is so effaced that the pragmatics of winning popular support and looking good are much more compelling.
In bozospeak, “nobody really knows anything here, so it’s best to put on a good face (or, be organized, or copy something important).” That is just like a bozonet, in a moment of what it takes to be honesty, to think the default is that no one knows much at all. Of course, it is true that the bozonet couldn’t tell expert practice from novice incompetence, so it is no wonder that a bozonet thinks it’s all a matter of opinions, and dedicates itself to making sure its opinions win out–that, after all, is its definition of survival.
More, in such a big spin society, it’s just not convenient to find anything out that could be thought of as truth–on the street, at least, through experience. Epiphany, like conversion, is not a virtue. A learning organization would be one that is inconsistent, confusing, unstable, and probably headed for a tragic end. Much better to keep things constant.
This leads to the second direction, one that we might ascribe to Todorov, that in doing history there aren’t primitive narratives. Todorov’s proposition is that there is no single, special “true” account of actions and intentions that is built only on the facts and nothing else, once all the fictions, inaccuracies, patches, and spins are removed. Perhaps it is turtles all the way down. And this may be quite the challenge to the idea of “truth” philosophically, and yet we work with an idea of truth that doesn’t go away. We can hold a truth, and still have some humility about its expression, expecting that expression to also carry artiface that we will be unsuccessful in stripping away.
But artiface isn’t spin, it’s scaffold. This by the way is also a problem for science, as we learn to see things with theory-laden expectations. Despite this bit of philosophy, the expert manager wants to know how things are going in the mechanics of it, not merely in the vocabulary of the desired outcomes. One finds this in performing arts–music–and game–football. The descriptions of outcomes used by coaches are shaped by a knowledge of how things actually work.
In big spin society, leadership has no time for such details. Details are complicated and ambiguous and hard to follow. They may be layer on layer of turtles. They may require, like, 10,000 hours of experience to make sense of. Better to level the playing field and work from power point summaries than to have someone out there on the ground who knows anything. In a lip and spin management world, it is much better to have battling opinions over unknowns and win the side with prestige and pundit rhetoric and a show of sincerity than by reasoning anything through on the street facts. In such a world, performance is an accident and expertise is the ability to position it as a feature or a tool or a success. There is logic to this. It’s not irrational.
There are metrics and then there are metrics. It’s not so much that we measure, but the smarts to know what to measure, and why. There’s a big difference between producing metrics that mean nothing or metrics to look good, and producing metrics that evidence what is happening, for better or worse. The latter, perhaps, is way too hard for most universities to contemplate. Wouldn’t you expect more from universities, where the search for knowledge is given such importance? Ah, yes, I see, that only applies to published scholarship, not to administration. That’s the challenge–one has to change the norms by which administration understands how things work rather than how they are maintained. As Kerr called it, a “politics of caution.” One might add, with an inclination for lip. That’s the root challenge for university research enterprise.