Friday, March 09, 2007

free advice!

One of the things you do when you work in development (which I did for eight years) is that you read a lot of articles and go to a lot of conferences about how to make things happen. Usually the thing you want to happen is to part people from their money out of excitement for the cause at hand, but also just: create a stir, make something desired.

I ran into the following story while clipping articles for my development job. I tell it a lot, but today am finding it newly applicable to my life. I hope you find some use in it too.

So. I once read an article about Adele Simmons, who is a former president of the gigunda MacArthur Foundation (btw: I didn't get this week's genius grant stipend; could somebody check on that?), and actually a MacArthur, maybe a granddaughter. (Development research also means you squirrel away a lot of genealogical information that looks like Social Register climbing, but it's really the nerd instinct run amok. Lots of Data.)

Anyway, to paraphrase badly, in this article she talked about the process of taking tenure as president of Hampshire College, which if I remember rightly is one of the serious party schools according to the Preppy Handbook, and at that time, not an unrelated time, experiencing a drop in enrollment. Everyone at the college was concerned, wanted to lower standards, drop the minimum SAT score, reduce entry requirements. It was thought that by doing this -  opening the gates further - it'd increase enrollment. Make the place more popular and sought-after.

Ms. Simmons, however, said: NO. If we want to make this place popular, and desired, and hard to get into because we are overflowing with people banging on our doors - if we want to make our enrollment rise - then let's make it HARDER to get in. Raise our standards. Raise minimum test scores, ask more of people.

And the point, from the very most completely pragmatic, phlegmatic POV? Is that it worked. The school got better, but it also put the asses in the seats. The school got more popular, much more so, it pulled the people out of the woodwork, increased enrollment. Asking more of people got the college more response, rather than less.

Standards...whatever that word means...can feel very arid and arbitrary in the terrain of the human heart. Especially when we're talking about incremental differences in behavior, the stuff that separates someone you find really interesting from someone you really like. It's not a b&w Oprah world of badness on one side and the good on the other. Or, occasionally, it is, actually, but you get older and also know we are all, including our closest friends, in the process of being forgiven for our awfulness. So where you draw lines seems random. But one shouldn't be afraid to employ them, standards, in the affairs of the heart. Among all the other reasons for doing so, you never know--it may actually put more asses in the seats.

2 comments:

Demandra said...

Amen. Preach it, sistah! I really think we're all at our best when the bar is set high and we have something to strive toward. And really, when it comes to affairs of the heart, shouldn't we all strive to give our best to others and expect it in return?

Kirsten said...

You ask for more, you get more. And: setting standards is the way of keeping your front door nicely kept to attract the right kind of visitor.