If something like “Williams needs a military historian” is low on your list of interests, you need to attend to your tone when you raise it. When I’m talking about something that I think is modestly interesting but non-urgent, I really try to be more tentative, exploratory, curious, etc. in my tone so I don’t mismatch my rhetoric to the level of my actual engagement. The more demanding, urgent and adversarial my tone, the more that I think the issue I’m talking about is at the top of my list of priorities. And thus (hopefully) the more I’ve done my homework before ever raising it in the first place. That’s a consideration we all owe each other.

As always, I appreciate the time you take with your answers and the insight you offer as to how the process works. I suspect that we agree on 90% of all of this. Some clarifications:

My original observation was that given that you care so much about that position . . .

I care some but not that much. This isn’t even in the top 20 things that I would change about Williams. It has come up only a handful of times in 6+ years of blogging. (If you want to read about something that I really care about, consider the books-worth of material that I have written about the Williams housing system.)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a presidential salary survey every year that goes into considerable detail.

True, but irrelevant. I am pretty sure (corrections welcome) that this survey did not, at least 20 years ago, provide the data for every single College president. And, even if I am wrong about that, the issue is not the availability of that specific data-point, but the willingness of Swarthmore/Williams to be transparent.

All private institutions of all kinds (businesses, non-profits, community groups, hospitals, etc.) treat most of their institutional data as private.

True, but the non-profits among them should not, especially the educational ones. First, if I want data from McDonald’s and they won’t give it to me, that is OK. But then McDonald’s won’t keep on asking me for donations like a non-profit would. Second, even though a community group like ACORN or the NRA won’t give me such data, that don’t claim to be an organization committed to the academic virtues of open discussion and intellectual inquiry. So, I think that Williams/Swarthmore have much more of an affirmative obligation in this regard.

More on your points 1-3 later.

My original observation was that given that you care so much about that position, and believe so strongly that it is something vital for a college like Williams to have to be a quality institution, you seem remarkably bereft of an intellectual or programmatic justification for the urgency of your belief.

If Williams does things roughly like we do, upon retirement of a tenured faculty member, the host department of that person will prepare a request for replacement of that position. Whether they want to replace that person in the same field that they taught or some other field, they’ll generally touch on the following points in their written argument for replacement:

1) The status of the field(s) they’re requesting in the discipline, and why current research and teaching directions in that field are intellectually exciting and important. Even if you’re replacing the retiring faculty member’s field, that field has doubtless changed somewhat since they began teaching at the college, so you want to describe what’s new and exciting in that field as well as what’s continuously important about it.

2) The synergies which a person in this field might have with other departments and programs at the college. Sometimes you do this by describing the service that the retiring faculty member provided to other parts of the curriculum, sometimes you sketch out some new possibilities or describe needs which have arisen more recently. This is really important for SLACs especially: we really need people who can wear more than one intellectual and institutional hat.

3) Long-term enrollment data for classes in this field taught by the retiring faculty member; maybe also if there are classes in this field taught by others at the college, you’d include those to get a complete survey of student interest.

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3 is often the least important part of the argument unless there has been a dramatic and long-term upsurge of student interest (a good example of this in recent years at most high ed institutions is Arabic language courses) or there has been an equally pronounced ebbing of student interest over a long period of time. In the latter case, it’s still often possible to make a highly confidential argument to a provost and planning committee that this loss of interest is more due to the individual faculty member than the field.

You and anyone else can make arguments on 1 and 2 easily enough, no proprietary information required. To be convincing on #1, you’ll have to do enough legwork to understand how military history fits into the academic discipline of history, what the exciting intellectual trends in that field are, and so on. But if you care about the field, you should not only be willing to do that work, you should have done it already. Otherwise, why are you so convinced of its importance? #2 is also easy to think about without any special inside data. Just look at Williams as a whole: what other departments, programs and fields already benefit or potentially benefit through the presence of a military historian?

So don’t get hung up on #3: it isn’t where the strongest arguments lie anyway. If you actually care about this issue, do the work for #1 and #2. If you don’t care enough to do that work, don’t complain about this issue, because you don’t have any particular reason to be obsessed with it except that you’ve heard somewhere that academics supposedly hate military history.

All private institutions of all kinds (businesses, non-profits, community groups, hospitals, etc.) treat most of their institutional data as private. This is not news, nor does it distinguish higher education from those other institutions. I think greater transparency for all such institutions is a good idea, and I’d like to see it come about. But preparing some kinds of data for people to read and interpret requires non-trivial labor. So if we expected private institutions of all kinds to make more kinds of information available, we’d still want to be responsible about not burdening them with a task that would effectively require a full-time position to carry out. (Among other things, you’d need an administrative computing system that readily pushes ready-to-consume data out, and I know the balky system we and many other institutions use is not really suited to that.) Moreover, at least some of that data is potentially entangled in federal privacy laws or other privacy requirements, and you’d have to figure out how to not to run afoul of those.

I don???? think it would be too difficult, actually, to get 10-15 years worth of comparative data about presidential salaries if you wanted to just do a bit of legwork. If I had some reason for wanting that data, I could get it myself with some research: I don???? expect my administrative colleagues to be at my beck and call to provide data whenever I have some personal need for it.

I bet that you are wrong. I bet that, were you to ask the Swarthmore administration for presidential compensation for the last 20 years, they either a) Would not give it to you or b) Would not allow you to share it with others, even though this data was publicly filed with the federal government in the year that it came out.

In fact, I will donate $100 to a charity of your choice if I am wrong.

Now, this may not be reason enough for you to bother. You are correct that about the need for sensitivity when we ask our colleagues to do something for us. You are right that we should not ask someone to do “substantial work” for us for no reason. But two points:

1) I predict that this will require no substantial work on anyone’s part. Once you ask, they will tell you “No” even before they do any work to try to gather the data. So, in this case, there will be zero effort expended, except some e-mails among administrators bemoaning that trouble-making Burke fellow. Why not just send an e-mail asking if this data is available/publishable (while telling them not to bother to gather it just yet)?

2) Needless to say, I don’t care much about presidential salary at Swarthmore. I just use this as an example of the sort of opaqueness that is endemic to places like Williams, Swarthmore and so on. Not just presidential data but almost everything remotely controversial is under lock-and-key, at least as far as outsiders are concerned.

I think that Swarthmore is much less open about data-sharing then you think it is. If you want other examples, I can provide them.

So, let’s take a step back. You write:

About enrollment data, my point is that if you can???? do anything but cherrypick, then it???? often better to do nothing at all. At the very least, when that???? all you can do, it???? best to make exceedingly modest claims.

What is your definition of “modest” in this sentence? My claim is that Williams ought to hire a military historian to replace James Woods when he retires. I make this claim without access to enrollment data (the college won’t provide it). I admit that, if I had enrollment data, I could make this claim stronger. I concede that I am not 100% certain that this would be a good idea, that resources are limitted, that reasonable people might dsiagree and so on.

Is it reasonable for me to make such a claim? Or is this not “modest” enough? It sure seems that your argument is not that my particular claims/opinions are immodest but that anyone who is not an employee of Williams (and has access to the key data) is not in a position to offer any opinions about what courses Williams should offer, what sorts of faculty it should hire and so on. What would be an example of a modest (and non-trivial or overly subservient) claim that someone like me might offer?

Recap: I think that there are two reasonable opinions that one might hold.

1) Don’t offer strong opinions on topic X (like whether or not Williams should hire a military historian) unless you take into account the key data (like historical enrollments) associated with that topic.

2) Colleges (like Williams) should not share data about enrollments (and other matters) with outsiders. (In this particular case, Williams restricts enrollment data to “policy makers” at Williams.)

I think that both of these are defensible positions. You seem (?) to believe both. But, in that case, doesn’t it follow necessarily that alumni like me should not offer any opinions on topics like faculty hiring and course opinions, that we should just write our checks and shut the heck up?

That seems problematic to me.

About enrollment data, my point is that if you can’t do anything but cherrypick, then it’s often better to do nothing at all. At the very least, when that’s all you can do, it’s best to make exceedingly modest claims.

So, for example, the fact that you believe a certain type of class at Williams is or has been “popular” is a claim that’s worth virtually nothing if you don’t really know how popular those classes were in relative comparison to other classes. I’ve had a chance in my administrative duties to see a good amount of enrollment data across the college, and I can tell you that individual faculty I know sometimes mis-estimate whether their own courses are typical, less or more enrolled than most, and so on. Knowing that, I tend to be politely unconvinced by anyone claiming they’re teaching unusually heavy loads until I have something to measure that against. I’d advise you to the same skepticism: if you don’t know, don’t claim.

Besides, it’s a relatively weak kind of claim for why you think a given field of study is essential to include in the Williams curriculum. If I go into a conversation with colleagues trying to argue for why I think we need a particular field of study and all I’ve got in my quiver is, “It’s popular with students!”, I’m going to lose out on two fronts. First, that puts my claim into a large generic pool of fields that can make similar claims, and offers no distinction between my favorite and those others. Second, I’m not offering anything about the intellectual or practical merits of the field of study I prefer, which is central to how scholars legitimate the study of any given subject or the use of any given methodology. You want to persuade academics, you need to have some of the coin of the realm on hand. “It’s popular!” is a weak and impoverished claim if you don’t have anything else to offer.

You write:

Yet another example of where you could benefit by being more curious and stop cherrypicking information that???? friendly to a fixed conclusion: you????e interested in the popularity of courses in these fields when they????e been offered. Ok. What???? that based on? Some past students telling you they were popular? Do you have a really complete comparative knowledge of relative popularity of courses over the past decade in history?

Excellent point! I asked for this data just a few months ago and the Registrar was happy to provide it, until senior administrators forbade him from sharing it. I think that you dramatically underestimate how hard it is for anyone, especially a knowledgeable critic, to get any sort of information out of a place like Williams (and, perhaps, Swarthmore).

Don’t believe me? Here is a test: Ask Swarthmore to provide you (and give you permission to publish) the last 20 years of salary for the president of the college. I bet that they won’t give it to you, even though this data is, in some sense, public since the last few years are available via the Form 990.

It is very hard for an outside critic to do anything but cherrypick because the institutions are so loathe to provide information.