With dinner in the oven and my family otherwise occupied, I sat down to take the Values and Culture Survey that Penn State Administration sent to all faculty and staff in late October.
The purpose of the survey, according to the introduction and the FAQs “is to help University leadership gain a fuller understanding of the values and experiences of the people who learn and work at Penn State every day.”
Further down in the FAQs, it mentions that the survey is being distributed “in part” because of the recommendations of the Freeh report. If you’ve been living under a rock, the Freeh Report was the summary of the investigation, commissioned by the Penn State Board of Trustees, into the Sandusky crimes which suggested a “football culture” at Penn State.
Let’s see. We haven’t had a national championship football team since 1986 and our graduation rate for athletes is among the top in the country and yet we have a football culture.
Who exactly did Mr. Freeh talk to on this campus?
The survey opens by saying that it will take about 20 minutes to complete and that all responses will be anonymous. The introduction goes on to say that the survey data will be used to assist Penn State in developing the core values of our institution moving forward.
The use of the term “core values” is a relatively new trend in business that differs from the agency or corporation mission statement. The mission statement basically outlines what the business or agency intends to do. The core values are more about the way that the company goes about doing that; it’s a prioritization of the important values for that entity in working toward the mission. (In my experience, most of these fancy “core values” statements seem pretty similar. Who would admit that their values are getting ahead, mistreating their employees, beating the other guy, winning at all costs, etc.?)
Penn State, like most universities has a mission statement related to teaching, research and service. This recent survey of Penn State employees is designed to identify what makes us “Penn State.”
I can tell you up right up front that my core values never included a pedophile and former employee using his position and status to harm children.
The survey starts out with asking some questions about our “unit” on campus as well as our position. In other words, we had to identify ourselves as staff or faculty and then what “faculty rank” we have been designated as well as the College or department where we are assigned.
I immediately thought “so much for anonymity.” It seems that data would make a respondent pretty easy to track.
The first series of questions identified 8-10 values and asked us to rank those values for Penn State. These included things like honesty, excellence, transparency, integrity, sustainability, etc. You then have to pick your top five.
It’s important to point out that it took me about 20 minutes to answer the first several questions because the website is really slow. It takes a long time for each page to upload. (I yelled over to my husband “I think I may have accidentally been directed to the Obamacare website” which I found highly amusing at the time).
There were a series of questions that asked us to identify where we stood on the Penn State pride thing. Do you identify with Penn State? When? At sporting events? At work? I wasn’t exactly sure what they were trying to measure with this set of questions. Perhaps they meant “Even if you are gung-ho about Penn State athletics would you do the right thing?”
The survey then asked the respondent to choose from a list of categories designating who we identified as “administration.” The choices included the Board of Trustees, the President, the VP and Provosts, Deans and Department Heads and a few others that didn’t make sense to me (e.g. what is “other” in administration?). I picked Dean and Department Head. From that point on, we were told to answer all questions about culture and values related to the level of administration that we had identified. None of my responses were therefore in response to the Board of Trustees, President, etc. I was happy to report that administration at my level meets most, if not all, of the core values that I had prioritized.
If given the chance to reflect on those higher up the food chain, my answers might have been a little different.
The survey got a little weird when it began asking questions about things that I had observed in the workplace. “Have you observed bullying?” Discrimination? Substance Abuse? Violation of Academic Integrity? Violation of the Code of Conduct? I said yes to all. In 20 years of working with students, I could check yes in every category.
Unfortunately, with no space to make comments, the survey didn’t allow me to clarify which of those that I had witnessed with colleagues or which of those I had witnessed with students. It would seem to me that a colleague with a substance abuse problem means different things to our “culture” than a student with the same issue. Similarly, a colleague who “cheats” impacts culture very differently than a student who cheats. I was then asked if I reported those observations to the higher ups and my impressions of how the report was handled. Without the differentiation between employee and student, the data seems pretty suspect to me.
And then came the question to beat all questions. “Do you believe that Penn State has a football culture?”
I checked yes.
On those six Saturdays every fall, the whole community becomes a football culture. We become the third largest city in Pennsylvania. We wear Blue and White. We go to tailgates and cheer on our team. Our alumni and visitors come to town. It’s a great time to be a Penn Stater. We also have a basketball culture, a wrestling culture and even a THON culture.
And then on Mondays, we go back into the classroom and deliver our mission. We return to our labs and our centers. We return to our jobs and our offices. We don’t give As to kids just because they are the stars of the team. We don’t get pressure from coaches to look the other way. We discipline all of our students by applying the same policies and procedures. We teach classes, conduct research and provide service to our local and global communities. We hold ourselves and our students to the highest standards and, if you don’t believe me, ask those organizations who rank our students and our university among the top in the world or who look first to PSU to recruit our students.
Core Values? Go ahead and cross “cultures and values survey” off the list of Mr. Freeh’s recommendations.
Asked and answered.
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