About UCEA

President's Letters

Empirically-based Hunches

I wonder if you, like me, would confess to sharing the dilemma of the German mathematician who wrote: "I have had my results for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them." We should not be reluctant to acknowledge -even celebrate-the role of intuition, informal judgment, and hunches in the decision-making process. We do this every day-sensing what we "feel" is the right decision, absent clear and complete evidence that might make others more certain. It is said that George Soros, the international financier, changes his position in the market because his back starts killing him.

Notwithstanding the compelling value of our hunches, in our unforgiving era we are increasingly called to account for our decisions based on empirical evidence. The strengthening trend for accountability-fueled by legislators, accreditors, investors, publics, and our bosses-favors data-driven decision making and rigorous empirical evidence of intended outcomes. We all sense the intensity of this movement in higher education and many of us are rather good at satisfying such expectations; some of us even lead our institutions with respect to data-driven strategic choices.

So what is the role of our Association in gathering and communicating useful data for our purposes? Many of UCEA's seminars, workshops, conferences and institutes are organized around the analysis of empirical data. The UCEA Summer Institute, hosted at Boston University again this summer, spent a good bit of time on the importance of "hard" data. So too did the highly successful new Executive Leadership Academy which was recently held in association with New York University.

Beyond these forums, the Association publishes its Lifelong Learning Trends every two years, aggregating data relevant to our areas of activity. And, as most of you know, the association distributes its "Management Survey" every two years. This survey is undergoing a number of revisions in preparation for distribution next month. I hope you will participate in this bi-annual survey since the broader the participation of our 440 institutional members, the richer the data for the analysis shared with our members.

Given the expressed interest of our membership in expanding our research agenda as an association, we also have formed a Task Force on Research. The Task Force, chaired by Robert Dupont (University of New Orleans), is charged with assessing the priority data elements of our membership and proposing a phased strategy for research to support our collective needs and interests. Your president-elect, Barbara Scott, shares a commitment to this effort as she looks ahead to next year.

Our intention is to build the capacity within the Association to collect and disseminate useable data on a regular basis, accessible to the membership according to their specific on-going needs. We will focus on data that will help us capture the value we add to our institutions, our students, and our communities. Aside from the use of data to strengthen our "case statement" inside and outside of our universities, we also hope to gather operational benchmarks that will help us assess the efficiencies of our work.

The quest for more and more data is essential, despite the associated risks. The futurist John Naisbitt observed: "Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data." However, as an association, I am convinced we need to expand our efforts to collect viable data useful for our profession, our operations, and to those we serve, all the while remembering the old saw that an ounce of intuition is worth a pound of tuition.