Empower Those on the Front Lines

The Great War was riddled with absurdities. One of them was the amount of information that the general staff demanded of junior officers while they were in the trenches. Struggling against weather and apathy and enemies, preparing for attack or slinking along to avoid snipers, junior officers faced a flurry of forms and surveys. The volume of this reporting distracted them from the events at hand. As Edmund Blunden describes it in Undertones of War:

Now this was the tendency of our brigade; one’s mind was more filled with one’s relation to superior beings behind us than to those who were not losing the war in front of us. Such questions as these, ‘Have your men had Porridge this morning?’ ‘Have you your Gas Message in your pocket?’ and ‘What is the number of Loan Boots in your company?’ were never far away from the young officer, even as a German bomb burst beside him; they impeded, shall I say, his ‘offensive spirit.’ This awkwardness pervaded trench war. Even when our headquarters were wildly calling for information and co-operation on the stormy occasion of our mine, and urgent message came in demanding an immediate return of the number of picks and shovels on our sector, or something still wider—the usual ‘Please expedite.’

High-ranking and staff officers were confident that strict discipline and continuous assessment would lead to victory. In Undertones, Blunden recounts being subjected to “shows of discipline,” including “three rifle inspections daily, and a programme including two hours’ compulsory sleep,” while positioned in a trench subject to daily bombardment. On one trip to the rear, he was sent to a riding school for officers, though there was never any risk of him serving in a cavalry attack. These absurdities did little to encourage junior officers or advance the cause of victory.

To compare great things to small, higher education is in the midst of a great struggle that bears some structural similarities to this military situation. Universities face a decline in public confidence, a shrinking student population, budget challenges, AI disruption, and internal divisions on grading and culture. Most universities are led by a near army of administrators, sometimes exerting a high degree of control. At many institutions, their approach resembles that of the general staff during the Great War.

Like British junior officers, faculty are often flooded with excessive requests for information and various measures to ensure discipline. While we are tasked with teaching and helping underprepared and exceptional students, maintaining dwindling departments, and publishing, we have constant surveys and tasks and checklists to complete. We report on student progress, take online trainings, acknowledge internal policies, and attend workshops. While students struggle, we ensure that all of our pieces of paper align properly and our electronic signatures are where they are supposed to be. Some of it serves the assessment regime, some of it serves institutional objectives.

The constant reporting accumulates significant data but does not necessarily improve faculty readiness or excellence. Faculty are more likely to have phishing training, Title IX training, or active shooter training than training on academic instruction or advising. We are also subject to unproven schemes to increase conformity and institutional alignment. At some universities, faculty must conform all syllabi to a single template and offer uniform assignment rubrics. Even worse, some universities are forcing faculty to provide AI summaries of courses and integrate AI chatbots into curriculum—despite unproven value and active hostility from students.

The insistence on spit and polish could be extreme in the Great War, too. In one passage from Undertones, Blunden and his men were making their way to the rear from a fierce sector when a general rode up and ordered Blunden to arrest an NCO for unauthorized “super-structures” on the vehicles. Blunden was initially confused but complied. These structures “consisted chiefly of the illegal extra blankets which the batmen had contrived to the winter campaign; and once again one innocent suffered while many guilty went free.” These “super-structures” may well have increased offensive readiness, and there were likely alternatives to arrest for intervention.

What makes a meaningful difference is not always what superiors want measured. While tracking student success can indeed be useful, there is a tipping point at which the time spent on tracking decreases the time available for interacting with students. As Blunden put it, “one’s mind was more filled with one’s relation to superior beings behind us than to those who were not losing the war in front of us.” The needs of those in front of us—the students—are not always at the forefront. Faculty are sometimes held more accountable for getting in book orders on time and matching syllabi with templates than they are for grading or holding office hours or achieving excellence in teaching. There is often more departmental anxiety about accreditation requirements than there is about anything else.

The highest-ranking officers are rarely in the trenches, but, in some wars, they still maintain extreme control. Many of the most foolish attacks during the Great War could have been avoided by asking for more input from men in the trenches. This is one reason why so many refer to the soldiers of the British Army as “lions led by donkeys.” Serving under a simpleton of a general, a colonel who Blunden served with carried “with him habitually a letter of resignation. One day some unforewarned and desperate order led to the display of this letter.” It achieved its purpose, and a foolish general reconsidered an ill-advised attack. There were too few cases like it. In 1914, General Horace Smith-Dorrien was ordered to retreat by John French, but instead he fought at Le Cateau. That protected the wider retreat and saved the lives of many men—it also resulted in Smith-Dorrien falling out of favor and being relieved of command of II Corps.

Where officers and enlisted men are primarily afraid of breaking rules or displeasing authority, they underperform compared to empowered opponents. As pointed out in Stewart Brand’s new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, the contrast between excessive centralized authority and control plays out in the conflicts between Egypt and Israel in 1973 and now between Russia and Ukraine. Consistently, more successful militaries give junior officers some latitude in decision-making. This does not mean operating without rules, but it does mean operating with some autonomy.

All leaders should be able to recognize that a gap exists between them and the operations on the ground. This is precisely why generals and administrators gather data from the front lines. The surveys and requests sent to junior officers during the Great War were meant to improve the army’s readiness and performance. Instead, they distracted and discouraged junior officers. The same can happen in higher education. Universities now excel in asking academic-equivalent questions to those about loan boots and porridge.

To survive the current storm facing higher education, we have to get beyond porridge questions. The task at hand has to be prioritized over informing the people who are not on the scene. That will require gathering insights, not just information, from faculty. The people on the front line have to be empowered for the work at hand—and primarily held accountable for what happens there. We need clear-eyed leadership that sees beyond surveying and assessment to the real struggle at hand.

Image Credit: Grant Wood, “Schoolhouse” (1939)