But—and this is the point of this blog—there are also a batch of good things to note, and while confronting problems we must not lose sight of the real positives. Enrollment for next year is, in most categories, extremely strong. Freshmen applications and numbers were up; retention seems very good, which is particularly encouraging; new graduate enrollments are up sharply overall. We had some problems in this area a year ago, but thanks to lots of dedicated effort and a very positive overall profile, things have been turned around. We don’t know the precise figures yet, but the auguries are excellent.

Global news is also good. We’ve had tremendous support from governments and partners in Japan, Turkey and China, providing exciting new study opportunities for our students. A recent visit with India’s ambassador was very positive, and new opportunities will open from this. Plans for opening the new campus in Songdo, South Korea, are now moving ahead rapidly, and again the University’s strongly favorable image has been crucial in the progress here.

And of course, modest as it admittedly is, faculty and staff will get a raise for once.

This season also brings welcome news of student awards and achievements, ranging from admissions to top graduate schools to awards such as the Boren fellowship. The fact that our Honors program once again has overshot its target among new freshmen is another positive talisman for the future.

The big point is that most of the achievements of the sort noted here reflect the dedication and talent of the Mason community as a whole. As we wind down from the semester, and as many of us look forward to some change of pace for a bit, it’s legitimate to self-congratulate as well. And then we’ll try to tackle the next set of challenges.

I’ve had occasion, as a dean and now provost, at two different institutions, to watch the complex dance of administrator departure. The phenomenon is complicated enough to warrant some comment.  Obviously, I’m thinking of best practices for myself, among other things (though I’m not gone for a while).

I was talking with a colleague recently, from yet another institution, who will be stepping down as provost before long, and this reminded me of the issues involved.  He thinks the only proper course for him is simply to leave his institution and, probably, academic life. He can’t stand the idea of being around while a successor alters his achievements.

The point is valid. One very good way to leave administration is simply to go away, at least for a while. George Mason has a terrific example of a former, and very powerful, president who retired pretty completely, allowing his successor to establish himself, and returning to attend events with every appearance of pleasure but staying resolutely out of university life otherwise.

But this is not the only viable course. A former dean at my previous place went back to his department and stayed completely away from administrative issues (until ironically, much later he was called back for a consulting role), even though the president implicitly but publicly criticized the school’s operation during his tenure. He did his job as a faculty member with every appearance of satisfaction and almost never, and then very privately, commented on other issues.  His contributions were real, and had nothing to do with reminders of his previous role.

But challenges abound. Many administrators face the dilemma of not having taught, or researched, regularly.  Some are able to use a leave to re-prepare themselves—we have one example currently in the works—but others may assume they can jump back into teaching with no particularly timely materials available.  Pretty obviously, if one contemplates a return to faculty after an administrative stint, it’s really desirable to maintain an active teaching role (which has other advantages): otherwise one risks high-paid, and highly visible, lack of utility.

And there are the more obvious issues of tone and politics for ex-administrators who hang around.  Some, impatient with the real or imagined stumbles of a successor, and galled by being out of the limelight, simply race back into unit politics—in my opinion, quite inappropriately, even when some of their critiques are valid—and stir things up as a not-so-loyal opposition.  Others, less politically engaged, merely make it clear in conversation or even public body language that their successors are not up to the mark and that attention should still rivet on their own prior, superior achievements.

Effecting the transition constructively is, in sum, a really difficult test of personal balance and control, and surrounding colleagues have a role to play in encouraging propriety as well. The obvious guidelines (for those who don’t simply retire altogether) are:  remember you’re no longer in charge and that things will inevitably change, make sure you’ve retained the capacity to contribute in other than an administrative role, keep a low profile. If one can’t take true joy in faculty pursuits, probably it’s best to consider some other option.  But we can all recognize that there are real adjustments involved. Ultimately, it’s a test of personal flexibility and generosity of spirit.  Since I intend to hang around after administration—but at a distance from administration, it’s a test I hope to pass.

To avoid any confusion, I think that’s a splendid goal, to which I subscribe fully.

It does make us a bit different from many schools to which we would otherwise like to compare ourselves. I was reminded of this tension today when we went over our report to US News. The US News survey has a clear category that invites ambitious schools to increase the number of applicants so that a lower and lower percentage will be accepted. That is not our game, and we need to be clear that on this point, as on some others, we’re charting our own course and will have our own sources of pride.

Of course, inclusiveness is not intended to be open enrollment. It is irresponsible deliberately to admit students who are unlikely to make the grade, and we are not doing this. In point of fact, over the past decade, the on-paper qualifications of our entering students have gone up, particularly in terms of high school grade average, and I don’t think anyone is advocating reversing this. The only question might be whether we still strive to some further incremental changes, or merely seek stability, and that’s a discussion still to come.

Our real educational mission is to take able students from a variety of backgrounds—not, however, selected toward maximum exclusivity—and then provide an education that serves them well and adds clear value. It’s worth noting—and this is another US News observation—that we already retain and graduate students at higher rates than the survey would predict, which probably means that the survey is unduly snobbish but arguably also means that we already do a superior job in education and related support. I think this is an achievement in which we can take pride, and which we can use as a spur to even better results in future.

All of which reiterates the point that we have, and can extend, goals that are much more interesting than finding out how many applications we can attract and reject.

Elements of the situation are clearly getting worse. The current higher ed climate in the United States complicates global goals in at least two ways. First, sheer distraction: the burden of attending to the mounting criticisms and budget challenges risks pulling leadership away from global interests that they otherwise would sustain. But there are more direct contradictions as well, the second point: the pressure to get students to get degrees more quickly, and efforts to cut costs to the bone easily threaten study abroad goals, to take an obvious example.

In this circumstance—a challenging framework getting more so—a couple of thoughts. First, it remains important to emphasize the basic validity of global educational goals. Giving students the tools for global citizenship reflects a key purpose of contemporary higher education, and there’s no reason to back off.

Second, we surely need to explain better some of benefits of global programs. Study abroad, for example, not only provides more international exposure. It also improves student access to some of the soft skills now so highly touted for their job relevance: skills in communication, in critical thinking, in collaboration.

And third, we need to encourage further innovation to link global education to contemporary needs and opportunities. Study abroad remains great, but let’s work also at internship possibilities that will help tie the global more directly to current job concerns. Let’s work on programs to help the growing number of transfer students include global activities as part of their transfer package, making such activities an advantage rather than an impediment.

And let’s use technology. There’s a legitimate concern that growing attention to online education may be another challenge to global educational activities. But technology can also facilitate study abroad: online programs can help study abroad students, for example, maintain contacts with essential elements of the home curriculum. Distance programs can prepare collaborative opportunities for students with international counterparts, in advance of an (often otherwise shorter than desirable) actual trip abroad, and they can correspondingly develop follow up linkages so that the foreign visit has continuing educational ramifications. Technology makes it easier to get international groups of students together, and we should build this into an active, imaginative global educational framework.

Again, we do face some new threats, but there are some new creative possibilities as well. The basic agenda remains vital.

It’s relevant to note, finally, that as Mason turns to its strategic planning process we benefit from a strong basic vision of the University’s global role, and the opportunity to match vision, and current challenge/opportunity, with appropriate new specifics.

Mills Kelly, in our History Department, has twice offered a course that involves students preparing a plausible public hoax and disseminating it (Wikipedia, etc.) for 10 days, after which it is explicitly disavowed. The course has drawn diverse external reaction. One can understand how exciting it is for student participants, and how much it teaches about the nature of historical evidence and analysis.

Mills proposed that the course be regularized, in terms of a standard optional offering, and the Department committee decided it would only agree if the hoax was not publicized externally. I have no basis for commenting on the merits of the decision—I can certainly understand it, given concerns about ethics, undermining confidence, etc.—though I probably would have voted the other way.

But the case raises complex concerns about academic freedom. Mills, in a carefully phrased blog, notes that department committees don’t vote on whether to allow research projects, implying that they should have no greater rights when it comes to teaching. And his account has raised cries of “censorship” even from colleagues here at Mason.

Open to discussion, but here’s my take. Teaching and research differ. Research ultimately gets checked in terms of wider professional reactions to the work—reviews, referees decisions in journals, etc. (And if research is never published, this has consequences, too.) Teaching just goes to students, who can’t judge on the same professional basis. I have had occasions when it turned out a course was using consistently outdated materials, and on the basis of colleague oversight we had to tell the instructor to change. There are recurrent cases, though I have not faced them directly, about teaching pretty demonstrably false stuff—holocaust denial, for example, and while judgments here are difficult students do ultimately need the protection of faculty peer evaluations.

All this must be done gingerly, with maximum latitude for faculty freedom; but I don’t think the system itself is faulty. At most, if cases multiplied, one might wish an appeal process, to some higher faculty committee that could take a second look, outside the confines of a single discipline.

But there’s no question that the issue is interesting, and may well warrant further debate. In the meantime I have every confidence that Mills’ creativity will generate something else to challenge our thinking about history teaching.

My reason for blogging is on the experience of visiting Islamabad more generally. A few disclaimers. I’m not an area expert, and I visited for only two days. Pontificating about Pakistan, from a brief trip to its more secure city, would be ridiculous. The nation faces many problems and harbors some undeniable risks or dangers to travelers—though it’s fair to note, given current debates back home, that this is not the only place that hasn’t managed to get a full handle on periodic bursts of violence.

Obviously also, I’m hardly the only American to visit Pakistan—I met a number going and coming, including several of my own colleagues at Mason and including far more regular travelers than I. So I’m not trying to puff myself up in these brief comments (though I took personal pride, when the passport control officers on my return noted that I seemed to visit lots of places that many Americans wouldn’t care to go to).

Finally, I have real respect for diverse local reactions to the possibility of visiting Pakistan. Each individual must make up his or her own mind about risk, and I’m not trying to suggest a single formula. Nor am I trying to demean some understandable caution.

But I do think we have some interesting issues around Pakistan and our mutual relations. At the policy level, the issues surface clearly in discussions with American diplomatic officials, who obviously must recognize that the State Department explicitly discourages travel through its advisory, but who equally obviously wish that more Americans would show up.

In the case of my visit, local reactions to the prospect of the trip were the second most interesting feature of the whole venture. Slightly shocked “ohs” were a mild version. Detailed recollections of past violence, such as a church bombing a few years back, were more graphic. I’ve never been sent off with so many expressions of fear, some of which struck me as revealingly discourteous—why send someone off by suggesting the worst?—from normally polite colleagues.

Of course, the most interesting part of the trip was that I got to see various parts of a distinctive city and culture that I found quite intriguing—love the painted trucks—while encountering nothing otherwise eventful, and meeting a bevy of uniformly kind and gracious locals, academic and other. Some police presence was obvious, but I felt no particular anxiety once I actually got there. When we walked around it was clear that we had some oddity value—lots of folks in a park wanted to have their picture taken with us, but the context was friendly curiosity, not threat.

My NUST hosts, understandably upset by arguably distorted and needlessly selective foreign reactions to Pakistan, insisted on their commitment to safety and, again, impressive hospitality, and legitimately hoped that these qualities might be more widely understood. American diplomatic personnel (and those I met were an impressive group) informally echoed.

So I would argue for some rethinking of sometimes careless reactions, and for greater balance from a disaster-obsessed American media. Prudence is compatible with lessened anxiety and some real respect for the many Pakistanis who disagree with aspects of American policy but have no animus toward Americans. I had a great time, one of my most interesting brief excursions both professionally and personally. I truly believe that our national interests, and those of this important global neighbor, would benefit from redefining our preconceptions.

All of us, as the Pakistanis insist, should pay real attention to prospects for our mutual relationships after 2014. My new academic friends expressed a fascinating mix of optimism and pessimism about the results of American pullout from Afghanistan, and there’s no question that the United States faces some serious responsibilities here—another reason for fewer knee-jerk reactions to Pakistani realities. Developing some mutually beneficial academic relationships, which is what Mason and several other American universities are trying to do, sets a basis not only for new contact but for greater objectivity, which otherwise risk being in short supply.

I’m not a big fan of all the conference shuffling and many of the motives behind it, and obviously Mason is now, if modestly, a participant. I’m not the one to be commenting on the athletic motives involved, except to note that they were serious and carefully considered.

But I think it worth noting that I was included in all the discussions. I say this not to toot a personal horn, but because I know that in many comparable circumstances provosts were left out entirely, and academic considerations given no explicit attention at all. Our process really was different in that regard, and I think this is to Mason’s credit. We looked at academic implications, and have worked hard to make sure there is no direct impact on student fees—another important consideration.

The new alignment does give us some interesting opportunities to renew or build some regional rivalries, which can be good fun if kept in perspective. For the moment we will continue with the Colonial Academic Alliance, which at least for a few years will allow us to maintain these advantages.

This is an athletic decision, and should not be blown out of proportion in terms of what it means for the University. I do think it was a decision responsibly made (if by the nature of things not publicly debatable). And, hopefully, it will help generate some good competitive entertainment in future.

This is not, I hasten to add, a column about my emotional life, which would be presumptuous and probably dull, but rather about the anger topic itself. As some of you know, I first cut my teeth in the history of emotions field by writing about anger, with considerable focus on the growing efforts that developed in the United States from the 1920s onward to make anger at work an unfashionable, blameworthy expression. The results have been important—one of the passages of Robert Reich’s autobiography that I valued was his note about being advised never to show anger in Washington—and I think they continue in the main.

But the anger control emphasis has its weaknesses. In my case, I think the most obvious downside is an occasional (sometimes more than occasional) need to vent—not to get angry outright but to tell somehow why I would have liked to. I have, and cherish, a couple of colleagues whom I can burden in this way, and of course my wife puts up with me (usually; sometimes she quite properly tells me to get over it). Another downside is a certain vulnerability in the face of overbearing interlocutors, who do use anger more aggressively. I don’t think one has to yield unduly in such passages, but there are some clear tensions stylistically as well as substantively.

Happily, at Mason I have not faced the worst downside, but I encountered it at a previous institution: a boss who welcomes the opportunity to insist that subordinates keep cool while indulging in rants of his own. Too much meekness can exacerbate workplace inequalities that are not good for the job and certainly no fun for the subordinate.

The main point, which I do value, is to have the opportunity every so often to think about work and anger and to make some conscious choices about preferred styles—for oneself, and in terms of encountering others. The workplace anger that must be most consistently reproved involves that directed against staff colleagues lower in rank (sometimes with a gender factor tossed in as well). We see this at Mason periodically, as elsewhere, and I fully subscribe to the anti-bullying concerns that seek to keep the problem in check.

Beyond this, however, there are some options. And this brings me back to my initial musings: I do wonder whether I should let myself be openly annoyed a bit more often, as part of establishing positions I find important. I actually doubt I can change styles at this point, and by this point in my career I actually don’t like the sensation of being angry at work (as opposed to experiencing the emotion when driving, watching sports events, or listening to politicians, where a certain level of anger is clearly fun). But whatever the personal decision about effective style, the subject is interesting. We have clear varieties in anger usage among certain units at Mason, as at any big institution that is not rigorously hierarchical. Again, some thoughtful contemplation of usages and avoidances adds spice to the management game. Awareness—of one’s own anger approach and that of others—surely remains a component of leadership.

Take, for example, the issue of time to graduation. Concerns about costs have generated renewed pressures to hold colleges and universities to a four-year graduation model. It is true that we need to be aware of the desirability of making sure that some students can move through quickly, in order to minimize expenses including the cost of not having paid employment. But there are also students who neither want nor need this kind of schedule. They have jobs, sometimes directly relevant to their field of study. Their personal economies and prospects will be best served by a longer trajectory. A solid public university, in my view, needs to accommodate, even encourage, this kind of diversity of options—while accepting the need, ultimately, to account for the graduation rates that result from different specific patterns.

The big issue, in terms of coming complexities, obviously involves teaching modes. We have technology advocates who imply a future of online offerings, with little attention to anything else. We have some faculty at the other extreme who shudder at the very thought of shifting their classroom styles. The actual evidence, at least for the moment, must encourage a more diverse approach overall.

For we clearly have student audiences who want online deliveries, in whole or in part, because of their convenience and flexible timing—and universities must increasingly figure out how to serve these audiences while maintaining quality standards. We also—and this is the part the disruptive folks tend to ignore—have lots of talented students, and their families, who want an essentially conventional classroom and college experience, in some cases explicitly rejecting even a hint of online delivery. These students, also, must and should be served.

Some institutional specializations have emerged around these complexities, and more will develop in future. There will be entirely online operations, and there will be entirely conventional settings. And a few conventional trappings—the lecture repeated year after year, rather than being captured in favor of more participatory classrooms—probably should go by the way of the dodo; the proponents of radical change make a few good points relevant to all but the most hidebound institutions.

But to me the real excitement, again at the public university level, involves developing the multifaceted approach, the capacity to serve different types of student needs with a common commitment to quality and a common opportunity to inform teaching in all the relevant modes  with the excitement generated by university research. All-or-nothing formulas, in this rendering, are misleading, and universities should be taking the lead in helping relevant publics understand the desirability of a new level of complexity.

Over time we’ve undertaken several initiatives toward pooling information around regional interests and, even more ambitiously, to try to create some effective central register.

Thanks to the Global Office and active collaboration with the Provost’s IT staff, we now have a new instrument, an interactive global electronic portal called the Global Register, now up and running and available for consultation and expansion. The Register is intended to make it easy for units and individual faculty and staff to identify colleagues and programs with complementary interests. It will also serve as a window through which external communities, locally but literally around the world, can become better acquainted with Mason’s scholarly and creative activity in the global arena. This will position Mason to pursue additional opportunities more readily, and it has significant potential to broaden our network of partners around the world.

The Global Register provides information about current international agreements, our active partners abroad, relevant unit activities and faculty/staff expertise (including international degrees and linguistic competence). In the near future it will be expanded to include information on international student numbers and organizations, study abroad, and international alumni groups. It also links to U.S. Department of State country websites.

The Register can be accessed through links on the University Resources page and on the Office of Global and International Strategies home page. Of course the Register will be, or should be, constantly in the process of becoming—we invite interested faculty and staff to add and update information regularly. We’ll also face the gardener’s challenge of regular pruning, to make as sure as possible that outdated materials are removed. Even at present, however, the technical sophistication and range expressed in the Global Register exemplifies Mason’s commitment to being a university for the world.