George Keller: Intellectual Whirlwind

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wilfred M. McClay writes about visiting SCUPer George Keller at his home in Maryland as George was dying of leukemia: (That's George on the left.) "George was absolutely straightforward about the fact that he was going to die, there was no cure possible, and then ... it was on to more interesting things; there was conversation to be had and ideas to be wrestled over." You'll need a Chronicle subscription and registration or the purchase of a day pass to access this article.

Thanks, Wilfred.

There is an image that we in the professoriate have of people who do the kind of work George Keller did, not unlike Thorstein Veblen's brutal comment about administrators, when he declared that "the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate." The cliché has some truth, but not as much as we faculty members would like to think, and in George's case, it was completely false. He was an intellectual whirlwind and always remained true to his old-Columbia sense of what intellectual life was about.

Higher education lost one of its most humane and farsighted analysts with George's death earlier this year at a very youthful 78. His résumé was lengthy and diverse, including a term of service as a professor and chairman of the program in higher-education studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and as editor of Planning [for Higher Education], the journal of the Society for College and University Planning. After retiring from Penn in 1994, he worked as a consultant and writer, producing several notable books, including Higher Education and the New Society, to be published next year by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

***

George roundly disagreed with those who charged that the use of strategic planning was in effect treating the college strictly as a business. No, he insisted, it treated the college as an organization. A properly functioning college, he believed, is better regarded as an organic unity, animated by a sense of common purpose — one that is qualitatively different from the aggregate ambitions of individuals and the imperatives of their disciplines. To be sure, a good college seeks to provide all its employees with the fullest range of opportunities for their own advancement. In higher education, self-realization and institutional goals are seen as complementary, not opposing, forces. But something else is required: a strong sense of the college as a collegium, as the organization to which one's most primary loyalty is owed.

A strategic plan cannot succeed when institutional loyalty is not cultivated, rewarded, and exemplified from the top down. It certainly cannot succeed in an atmosphere in which careerist executive leaders are no sooner hired for one job than they are laying the groundwork for their next jump.