An open "letter" to President Karen Whitney, Provost Ron Nowaczyk, and the Council of Trustees, 9/2/2013

1. Against the Clarion
Workforce Plan
An open letter to President Karen Whitney, Provost Ron
Nowaczyk, and the Council of Trustees
—Herb Luthin
Department of English
September 2, 2013

2. On the Workforce Plan
• I can sum up the Workforce Plan in 12 words:
• That quote is famous for a reason, and not a good one.
• We should not be reenacting it at Clarion, or anywhere
else in the PASSHE system.
"It was necessary to
destroy the village in
order to save it."

3. Divide & Conquer
• The Workforce Plan is the culmination of the RCM
diagnostic engine President Whitney brought to this
university.
• The legacy of the RCM, at least in the hands of this
administration, has been to pit college against college,
department against department, faculty and students
against administration, even employee against
employee.
• As the sign over the door of Hart Chapel last week
suggested, the RCM has made Clarion into the Hunger
Games capitol of Pennsylvania. Not good.

4. Garbage In, Garbage Out
• The RCM has gone rogue. How do we know? Because
the solution it spat out is not compatible with the history,
mission, and values of this university.
• When your algorithms give back results that are orders
of magnitude off from the ballpark estimates you
should have been expecting, do you just blindly run
with that suspect solution, or do you step back, open
up the hood, and ask what may have gone wrong?
• You have done the former; we are asking you to do
the latter.

5. Garbage (cont’d)
• The RCM is a complex instrument, and like any accounting
tool, the integrity of its answers depends on the integrity of
the data and the presuppositions that weight its
calculations.
• Everyone on the receiving end of the RCM has been able
to see the flaws and inconsistencies that have gone into
the so-called "scorecards"—except you and your
implementation team.
• No matter how many times we point out the problems—
oversights, errors, unintended consequences, basic
unfairness—the model goes essentially untouched.

6. The Operation Was a Success...
• Unfortunately, the patient died.
• You and your team are like surgeons who think they are
operating on a frog. The problem is, the patient on the
operating table is not a frog.
• LESSON 1: You can't cut out Music; it's a vital organ.
• LESSON 2: You can't cut out Modern Languages; it's a
vital organ.
• LESSON 3: You can't cut out Academic Support; it's a
vital organ.

7. The Operation (cont’d)
• More specifically, Clarion has always been a Liberal Arts
institution. Even if you go back to the days of the Clarion
State Normal School, which actually was a professional
school, a look at the faculty and curriculum is sufficient
to show the integration of sciences and the arts.
• MORAL: Even acting in good faith, if you don't have a
solid grasp on what it is you are trying to fix, the
outcome of your labor is doomed.
• We are a university, not a factory, nor even a vo-tech—
much less a frog.

8. Recommendations (1)
Scrap the Workforce Plan.
• Seriously.
• That can't undo the damage to the University
that has already resulted from the rollout, but
it will forestall what happens next, which will
be structural and permanent, not reputational
and ultimately (one hopes) transitory.

9. Recommendations (2)
Give us your line-item budget, so we can see where
the 55% goes.
• As other writers have emphasized, you know
everything about the 45% of the budget that
goes to instruction, but we know virtually
nothing about how you spend the rest.
• This situation calls for openness and
transparency—ironically, one of the core values
of the RCM philosophy.

10. Recommendations (3)
Give your faculty access to the algorithms of the RCM.
• In short, open up the black box to scrutiny.
• Let people who better understand what this
university is help you correct the flaws in the RCM’s
programming and see what it then can tell us.

11. Recommendations (4)
Trust people.
• You are surrounded by a faculty—and staff, and
community—who want to see Clarion stabilized for
the future.
• We can all see the numbers on the wall. But trust in
people to make the final judgments based on those
numbers, not your algorithms.
• People use numbers, not the other way around.
Thank you.