A Foggy View from Olympus

Date01 January 1969
Published date01 January 1969
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/eb009628
Pages3-18
AuthorANDREW W. HALPIN
Subject MatterEducation
THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL, ADMINISTRATION 3
VOLUME VII, NUMBER 1 MAY, 1969
A Foggy View from Olympus
ANDREW W. HALPIN
(A paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Southern Regional Council
on Educational Administration, November 14, 1967.)
In the United States in 1957 a fresh intellectual excitement
emerged within the field of educational administration; high
hopes were held for the potential contribution of theory-oriented
research. But in retrospect from 1967 the promise of the decade
does not appear to have been fulfilled. Vast Federal funding has
proven to be only a mixed blessing. An obsessional preoccupation
with "change" has diverted efforts away from basic research, has
induced intellectual homogenization within the academic com-
munity, and has bombarded administrators with so many exigen-
cies that their planning efforts have been increasingly concen-
trated upon short-term perspectives, at best. Never before have
politics, education and welfare been commingled so incestuously.
Four serious concerns that must now be dealt with in our gradu-
ate programs are: the mythology of human motivations; the
juggernant of "the Technological Society"; the mythology of
change; and the impact of existentialism upon modern man.
Fortunately I am not harassed by Banquo's ghost, but even as
every man is haunted by one or two spectres in his life, so too do I
have a few that nibble at the edges of my soul. And one spectre in
particular nags me with Socratic questions about my profession,
about those years of my life that I have given to the field of educa-
tional administration, and those that I even now give to earnest,
but often fruitless efforts to understand what has happened to my
profession, what is happening to it now, and what probably will
happen to it in the immediate years ahead. Nor can I speak only of
educational administration, for that discipline—or art, if you prefer
—is empty and meaningless apart from the social matrix of Ameri-
can education within which it is embedded; and in turn, American
education itself becomes little more than a nonsense syllable if I
PROFESSOR ANDREW W. HALPIN is Research Professor in Education at
the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. He was previously an Associate
Professor at the University of Chicago, Director of the Bureau of Educational
Research at the University of Utah, and Professor of Education and Psychology
at Washington University, St. Louis, and later, at the Claremont Graduate
School. He obtained his Ph.D. from Cornell University, and his publications
include: The Organizational Climate of Schools (1963), Theory and Research in
Administration (1966), and Administrative Theory in Education (1958, 1967).
4 Journal of Educational Administration
should pretend to examine it as if it could be extirpated from the
baffling social complexity of "The American Scene", circa 1967.
Indeed there are always those dreary days when I find myself hung-
up;
when, despite my every vain effort to take into due account the
sundry interaction effects that obtain between "The American
Scene" and American education, I am yet forced to confess, albeit
reluctantly, that what is going on in our schools and in our univers-
ities still looks like a nonsense syllable. Especially am I dismayed
by a few trends that I see in educational administration as a pro-
fession, and in what we as professors in this field are doing, and
what we are not doing.
Ten years ago to this very day, the first seminar on .Administra-
tive Theory in Education,1 sponsored jointly by the University
Council for Educational Administration and the University of Chic-
ago,
was being held in Chicago. By then the eight CPEA2 Centers,
sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation, had all gotten into at least
second gear. The Campbell and Gregg book, Administrative Behav-
ior in Education,3 had just been published. Hemphill and his col-
leagues had started on what later proved to be one of the more
monumental research contributions in educational administration.4
The Midwest Administration Center, at the University of Chicago,
was aflame with fresh ideas, and the men gathered there during that
period—both professors and students—were fated to make import-
ant contributions to American education. For example, the present
deans at Chicago, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Ohio State were, and
are,
all members of that Midwest Administration Center fraternity.
There was an excitement in our profession at that time. There was
zest and many of us were zealous. And in a mere ten years the
scene has changed in strange ways. Certainly we are not more
impoverished than we were then. The unprecedented Federal Aid
Bill of 1965, the liberalized provisions of the National Defense
Education Act (NDEA), and the many new programs sponsored
by the Office of Education, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and
other Federal agencies, have all spawned fresh frenetic activities
and accounting procedures new. We now have enshrined in many of
our schools, in most State Departments of Education, and assuredly
in all of our universities, a new job, a sparklingly bright, new pro-
fessional role, that can be described best as "The Vice-President in
Charge of Goodie-Bundles".
Furthermore, it is no longer necessary for an independent
research investigator to submit his ideas for basic research to the
Office of Education. Basic research has ceased, by Federal fiat, to
be the "in-thing". Now we all must burn incense before the altar
of "change", and now we are all exhorted, hourly it seems, to be-
come "agents of change". The new lexicon is as brash as the TV

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