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A Few Words About Bureaucracy
and Personal Integrity
Commencement Speech, Georgetown College
Richard Ekman
President
Council of Independent Colleges
May 11, 2002
Members of the Class of 2002, members of the faculty, President Crouch,
members of the board of trustees, distinguished guests, parents, and friends:
Let me begin by congratulating you, the graduating seniors. You have
completed a rigorous course of study at Georgetown College, and your teachers
and parents are very proud of you. What may be overlooked today is that
you had the good sense to choose this institution in the first place,
four years ago-or, for some of you, five or six years ago. Each of you
could have chosen to enroll at any one of 3,500 colleges and universities
in the United States. You chose Georgetown, with its small classes, dedicated
faculty, flexible arrangements for tailoring the interests of each student
to the resources of the college, and a tremendous emphasis on personal
interaction, and on the ethical values that undergird good citizenship.
Unlike Georgetown, most colleges and universities, businesses, and government
agencies-indeed most of the institutions of modern American life-are very,
very large. Large scale has many advantages, of course, including greater
cost-effectiveness. There are good explanations why most of the institutions
of our society have evolved from small "mom and pop" stores,
family farms, and local government agencies of a few employees to today's
international mega-corporations that employ tens of thousands, agribusiness
conglomerates, and government agencies of massive proportions. This "great
transformation," as Michael Polanyi has called it, has been accompanied
by growing bureaucracy and depersonalization.
Why is this "great transformation" not, on the whole, a good
thing? The great 19th century German scholar of bureaucracy, Max Weber,
has told us that anyone who works in a large, bureaucratic organization
tends to take on the narrow values of the particular niche that he or
she occupies. The person you call in the billing department of a national
chain store, for example, probably does not care about the quality of
the product or the reputation of the company as a whole, but cares mainly
about the immediate matter of whether there is proper documentation for
the question you are raising about a charge on your monthly bill. You've
also seen this when you try to call the state department of motor vehicles.
After having been left on hold for a long period or transferred from one
voicemail message to another and another, you can quickly understand that
decentralization of authority and separation of function can lead to a
situation in which nobody except the head of the organization seems to
care about the whole enterprise. As Walter Bagehot, the 19th century English
economist, observed: "It is an inevitable defect that bureaucrats
will care more for routine than results."
This is the world into which you are graduating, a world dominated by
large organizations in almost every aspect of our lives-as workers, consumers,
users of health services, and citizens.
But you have had, thanks to your years at Georgetown College, the advantage
of seeing how well at least one small, flexible, and responsive organization
can function. Will you be able to bring this understanding to the institutions
in which you will be involved after graduation so as to make them as effective
as Georgetown College? You already know the value of doing your job reliably,
so that a colleague, with an equally specialized function in the organization,
can count on you and therefore do his or her job well. You already know
the value of collegial working relations. And, of course, you know the
importance of being honest, moral, and forthright in everything you do.
Here's my prediction of how this will work in your lives. I don't know
about your first job, but your second job will be as a mid-level manager
in a department of about a dozen people, and you will quickly find that
there is a lot to be gained by getting to know your fellow employees,
by networking, and by drawing them into your confidence. You will soon
discover that there is an expectation for you to be the one who articulates
the group's consensus, who defines the middle ground that can be found
among any group of people who need to make decisions about a course of
action. My prediction is that you will be very popular and successful
in both your place of employment and your community involvements. For
those of you who enter government service, you may well find that you
are the one who can most readily articulate the compromise position to
which all will rally as a basis for agreement.
Then, in about five years, you will probably be promoted to a higher
professional level, or perhaps elected to the position of chairman of
the school board in your town. A little older and with more experience,
you will recognize that a compromise forged on today's issue may be inconsistent
with the compromise on a related issue a few months or years ago, and-in
your mind-also inconsistent with the best circumstances of what a future
course of action ought to be. In short, you will discover that deep down,
you do in fact hold some beliefs about what is in the best interest of
your business or your community, of what is right and wrong. It will become
more difficult for you to gauge the range of opinions in your department
on the job or community organization, and much more difficult to articulate
a view merely because it appears to have near-universal popularity as
a compromise.
The beliefs you find within you may come from experience as you learn
that some things work better than others. But you will-I predict-also
rely increasingly on even more fundamental views of what is right and
wrong. Some of this will come from what your parents taught you, from
religious beliefs, and from things you learned in courses here at Georgetown
College. As you struggle to advance what you believe even when it is not
popular, you will master techniques of persuasion and cooperation, and
you will learn to be very articulate in writing and in speech. You will,
for example, learn that the most important, most useful form of written
communication is not the ten-page term paper, but the two-page memorandum.
And if you learn these lessons well, you will be promoted even further
in your place of employment and be chosen for greater levels of responsibility
in your community or church. By the time you are in your late 30s, I predict
that you will be operating at a level of responsibility where relatively
few cues can be taken from the dynamics of your organization. Instead,
you will rely almost entirely on your fundamental views about the direction
of the organization. What is good for humanity? How will you achieve it
in institutions that are highly bureaucratized? How will you persuade
your colleagues who see the world-as Max Weber warned-through the values
of the niche that they occupy, nothing broader?
This is hardly an original idea of the 21st century. The early 20th
century essayist James H. Boren understood this when he issued the following
"three guidelines for bureaucrats: 1) When in charge, ponder. 2)
When in trouble, delegate. 3) When in doubt, mumble." Winston Churchill,
the source of so many pithy quotations on a wide range of subjects, in
describing the qualifications that are desirable in a prospective political
leader, said, "The politician should have the ability to foretell
what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year,
and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it did not happen."
I hope it is clear that I am not urging you to reject the ways of the
world. Just the opposite. Bureaucracy is a condition of modern life, but
it is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It is like the air we
breathe-some is good, and some bad. It is nevertheless the way modern
societies choose to organize themselves in almost every realm of human
activity. And our challenge as occupants of this planet, your challenge,
is to make bureaucracy work. I am confident that you will make it work
because you have a firm foundation of personal integrity and clarity of
purpose drawn from direct experience in this college. You already understand
what John Adams, our second president, meant when he remarked in 1776
on the eve of the American Revolution that "In politics, the middle
way is none at all."
My own experience illustrates these tensions. In my first mid-level
administrative job in my late 20s, I was motivated mainly to make things
work. If I could find a way, for example, for three people from three
departments to agree on a course of action, the compromise that was forged
was a result in which I took pride. It almost did not matter what the
substance had been in order to reach that compromise.
Somewhat later, in my late 30s, I came to feel very strongly about certain
issues, matters of policy, and national directions. And I found that,
in order to achieve results that reflected my principled views on these
issues, I was willing to make compromises in other areas, but not these.
That is, I came to understand that some battles are worth fighting, while
others are not-some goals worth pursuing without ever wavering, others
more acceptable as grounds for compromise.
Most recently (I am in my 50s now), I have become still more committed
to certain principles that inform my work-in my case, higher education-and
I am even more inclined to oppose actively those developments that move
colleges and universities in other directions.
While this evolution may be natural and may suggest an inherently moral
nature to human beings, a developmental view of human progress is not
enough. Any valid principle for the conduct of your life must surely be
grounded in a larger framework of right or wrong.
Of course, worthy objectives are sometimes in competition with one another,
and we also know that our views evolve as we learn from experience. Personal
integrity is not a protective shield from the ambiguity of bureaucracy,
but it is the best basis for decisive, well-informed judgment in the conduct
of every aspect of our lives.
I thank you for allowing me to share in the joy of your graduation day;
and I wish you every success in your efforts to make the world a better
place.
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