Fall 1980: Finding HOPE in Kansas

Honor for the Outstanding Progressive Educator (HOPE) Award. Let's be clear, "progressive" in this use has nothing to do with the way that term is used today by liberal, socialist, Democrat politicians. Setting that confusion aside, this was a pretty remarkable nomination.

In the fall 1980 semester, I had been at the University of Kansas just over two years, having arrived in August 1978. In the spring of 1980, I was named the Assistant Dena for undergraduate programs for the business school. I had taught a total of eight classes, about 250 students prior to that appointment. That included an MBA course or two, bot primarily the undergraduate "Organizational Behavior and Administration" course and the elective "Management" course. The former was modeled after the introductory course at Harvard and the method for the course was typified by an iconic Harvard MBA, Frank Pinet, who had been teaching at Kansas for years. Pinet wore the same outfit to school every day: grey slacks, white shirt, blue blazer and a crimson, had-tied bow tie. The tie was his brand and his trademark. He was also a proponent of the case method, as Harvard used. And the introductory "OBA" course was all he taught other than the executive education seminars he led. As for me, I had no experience with the case method, as a student, and a teaching assistant, or as professor. But being a good 'soldier,' I tried to emulate Pinet. I even sat in on one of his class sessions, copiously taking down notes as much on how he taught as what lessons he conveyed. [A few years later, when I was in charge of the graduate students teaching this course, I'd sit in on one of their class sessions, again scribbling down not only what they said, but also my notes about what I though of their content and process. We'd discuss both later.]

I thought I was really struggling, so much so that the idea of managing the undergraduate program and reducing my teaching load seemed very attractive. Yet it was unheard of to put such a young, untenured assistant professor in this position. My predecessor had held the job for more than two decades, another iconic figure like Pinet, Arno Knapper. Knapper thought me to be a young whippersnapper, a new generation of faculty that threatened the stolid ways of the business school, the university, and the state of Kansas. Nonetheless, as one of his last decision before leaving the KU deanship to run a regional grocery chain in Wichita, Joe Pichler appointed me on his way out the door. [Pichler later became CEO of Kroger and wrote a blurb for my leadership book in 1992.]

Barely over the shock f taking on this assistant dean post, I learned within a month of the start of the 1980-81 academic year that I was first a semi-finalist then a finalist for this award. Shortly after the article in the photo was published, I was invited to attend a Kansas football game and to be announced at halftime as a finalist. Standing at mid-field for a few moments, it was a heady experience, having just turned thirty. Who eventually won the award? I can't recall. And I think I know how I had made it as far as I did, but these were only suspicions, not insights.

That academic year was a revelation. Besides getting out of the classroom and being an administrator, I felt unhappy with the absence of research tools I had been led to believe would be present when I arrived. When I interviewed on campus in late winter 1978, I had been shown a schematic of the behavioral lab I needed to do my research. I had also received an affirmative response when I asked if the school had APL, the IBM computing code I had used to write simulations for my research and dissertation at Penn State. Neither the lab nor the language ever materialized. I made a stab at using a hard-wired terminal in my office to use some existing computer simulations to assess the impact of things like goals, rewards, stress and task complexity on performance -- a kit logical extension of my dissertation -- but that approach was unwieldy enough to make it impossible to conduct a study with sufficient number of subjects to be meaningful. Plus the method for recruiting or compensating subjects was problematic. My research went nowhere and by the end of the third year -- my first as assistant dean -- my career was in trouble.

I was informed late that spring by the promotion and tenure committee -- of which I was also an elected member, another unique situation for a third-year, untenured prof -- that my career progress was less than satisfactory. I obviously had to recuse myself from the deliberations that produced that evaluation and while I was a bit surprised by their evaluation, I could not have really been shocked and I could not claim bias or unfairness on the committee's part. So I quit the assistant dean position.

A year later, after another year struggling as an assistant professor, I accepted the one-year appointment at Laramie. I probably had the easiest year of my life and spent way too much time with Bobby Friedmann. And by March 1982 it was time to consider moving on....