There’s a little management technique gaining some traction called the “Listening Tour”. In the US, over the past eighteen months, new Presidents at Carnegie Mellon and James Madison have used this to inaugurate their terms. At Princeton, new President (and erstwhile Provost) Chris Eisgruber decided to embark on an entire “Year of Listening”, though why he needs a whole year when he’s been provost for the past nine is unclear. Here at home, the pioneer of this is new Dalhousie President Richard Florizone, who began his term with “100 Days of Listening”.
It’s easy enough to see why listening tours are all the rage these days. They combine a need in collegial organizations for Presidents to at least be seen to be inclusive in determining directions, with a certain management philosophy about the need for new leaders to size up their organizations’ strengths and weaknesses quickly in order to make big strategic decisions. Michael Watkins’ book, The First 90 Days, is the most prominent of these; in Dal’s case they seem to have thrown in an extra 10 days to come up with something more Rooseveltian.
I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the outcomes of the American listening tours, but the Dal one is interesting because Florizone has – unusually – gone and penned quite a lengthy document about his experience, which you can find here.
Now, listening tours at universities are all going to sound pretty similar: everyone wants to be more prestigious, be good at research and teaching (no choosing!), be more collegial, yadda yadda, all of which Florizone duly conveys. On the basis of his listening, he makes some useful observations and commitments to improve Dal’s less-than-stellar reputation within the Halifax community, and its inclusiveness of the province’s African and Mik’Maq communities. (He is also – I think – a little too credulous about Dal’s research strength, but leave that aside for now.)
But Florizone also manages to slip some interesting data into his document – stuff he hasn’t so much heard as discovered via some intensive work with his institutional research shop. Those are the most interesting bits of the document because they more directly reflect his thoughts: his observation that Dal has more programs per undergraduate student than any other U15 school, that its retention rates aren’t very good, that the pension plan’s still a bit of a mess, and that weak government financing and the demands of an aging infrastructure mean cost reductions are clearly going to be the order of the day. Again, nothing shocking there, but Florizone has done a nice job of folding some unpleasant realities into a “report on consultations”, in order to put them on the institution’s agenda.
Bernard Shapiro once said that University Presidents could either come in as Gorbachev or Deng. The first type told everyone that everything had to change, which tended to raise opposition and nothing would get done. The second type told everyone everything was going to be the same, but then managed to change everything anyway. By the looks of it, Florizone is going Chinese on this one.
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UVic’s new president Jamie Cassels did the same thing, incidentally, saying as much in the story / press release announcing his appointment back in January 2013:
“I’ll be spending my first months as president listening intently to what the university and the broader communities have to say about UVic’s future,” he says. “I expect to have extensive consultations both on and off campus.” (https://ring.uvic.ca/news/cassels-appointed-uvic’s-next-president)
Not sure about the public availability of his report from all the listening, but it’s interesting reading.
Thanks for the tip – hadn’t heard about that one.
Isn’t listening something that effective managers do and have always done? I hope they are not simply doing this for PR and to placate faculty and other university staff who have grown tired of the top-down management styles of many senior administrators. A return to the older, collegial style of university governance would indeed be welcome by most people in the university community.
Thanks for the post.
However, a question / comment on Florizone being “incredulous” about Dal’s research strength.
I followed your link, and took a look at your 2012 rankings. Your conclusion that Dal may rely heavily on its medical research is entirely possible — I don’t have data– but then I was surprised that you also found it was “overrated” as a U-15 member.
While its performance on your ranking for science/engineering was, indeed, lukewarm (I would argue Dal medical which is what you’ve excluded, is where it leads). However, it much better on social sciences/humanities, particularly normalized funding scores – 12th overall) and also finished in the top 15 in the “overall” ranking score.
Just wondering how you find Dal “overrated” if it’s falling within the top 15 and is a U-15 member? I assume you were expecting a higher rank based on Florizone’s comments? Also, one could make the argument Dal, in addition to medicine, also relies on its social science/humanities/earth sciences for its prestige. That’s supported by your rankings, as well as the Leiden rankings:
http://www.leidenranking.com/ranking Here, Dalhousie ranks 7th among Canadian universities in its Social Sciences/Humanities & 5th overall in Life & Earth Sciences.
FWIW, I’m also a fan of the ARWU ranking because I think it eschews PR-influenced reputational surveys and instead looks real metrics: academic outputs. And on that ranking, Dal is consistently ranks higher because (as Florizone notes in his 100 days report) it actually has better outputs/citations than reputational surveys suggest. This year, ARWU has Dal ranked 8th among Canadian universities: http://www.shanghairanking.com/World-University-Rankings-2012/Canada.html
Anyways, yeah, just a few thoughts.
Hi James. Thanks for writing.
14th in humanities, yes. But 32nd in science and engineering. Behind Trent, UBC Okanagan, Rimouski, Chicoutimi, UNB…really not where you’d expect a U-15 institution to be. I think what it points to is that Dal’s U-15 membership is a) based on having a med school and b) partly based on geographic considerations (I would say the same for Manitoba, I think).
Re: Leiden. Not sure what categories of indicators you;re looking at, but I make Dal out at between 14th and 16th overall on the various Impact measures (campus-wide, field adjusted). And that’s *including* medicine. And Leiden doesn’t adjust for size. That’s one of the main differences between Leiden and our ranking
Re: ARWU (of which I am an advisory board member) – remember that ARWU does not weight citations for academic field. So it has a bias towards physics, biology and medicine, which have more active publication cultures. (like Leiden, it;s also not adjusting for size, usually). Having a decent med school goes a long way in those rankings and can cover up deficiencies elsewhere. And Dal is not ranked 8th. It is simply first alphabetically among the group ranked between 8th and 13th (I think 13th, anyway, ARWU site is down at the moment). Below the top 100 globally, ARWU simply groups institutions because it doesn’t think differences are statistically significant. The 8-13 group are all in the 200-300 grouping globally.
Thanks for the response, Alex! Appreciate you taking the time!
That *is* surprising about Dal science and engineering on your ranking. Not sure the problem there is.
Agree that a few others in the U-15 are underwhelming– Calgary, Western, and even Waterloo, IMHO.
On Leiden, I was using the default indicator of ranking, which is PP(top 10%) and Impact. If you use that, Dalhousie ranks 7th among Canadian universities in its Social Sciences/Humanities & 5th overall in Life & Earth Sciences.
Also, one further question— wondering about how law faculties play in your ranking (and perhaps Dal’s placing in U-15). Dal’s law faculty is the oldest university-based law school in the commonwealth, and consistently ranks 5th or 6th among Canadian law schools. The law faculty, like the med school, might also explain Dal’s membership in U-15. The problem with law schools, is that they don’t bring in the research dollars like other faculties (slowly changing), so I’m assuming they don’t play a very big role in influencing rankings.
most You’ve kind of hit it on the head here – law’s not really a research discipline and so doesn’t count for very much on most research metrics. Our research metrics are a bit different because we’re comparing every single prof to the average of his/her discipline and then aggregating up, so no discipline is worth more than any other. I don’t have the raw files with me so I can;t tell you where Dal sits in the law hierarchy – 5th or 6th is plausible. that might have contributed to a better showing in arts/social sciences.
Once again, many thanks for the reply!