persuasion

Recently I responded to a post by the historian Tim Burke, and today I’m going to return to Tim’s writing. This is from a recent post of his:

I think public and private institutions are going to slow-roll any shifts in their policies and in the process they’re going to have to abandon compliance as the predominant logic of policy-making. That is not just a change for administrations. It’s also a necessary, maybe even overdue, change in how campus progressives and liberals (students, faculty and staff) think about their institutions. The long intertwining of left-liberal goals and regulatory activity (whether governmental regulations or institutional rules) has made most of us unaccustomed to articulating our motivating values in clear and transparent ways and in trying to tie those values to our voluntary practices and our persuasively-articulated expectations for others. We’ve all fallen into the habit of demanding a policy for this and a policy for that, of insisting that we restrain and restrict, that we require and sanction.

But as administrations have rested on compliance most, they will feel the shock of its loss most intensely. The articulation of values has become unfamiliar for some of us, but for many administrators, it has wholly atrophied into oblivion except as a strategy for placating or as a component of crisis communication.

The passages I’ve highlighted lead nicely into this post I’ve just written for the Hedgehog Review on trying to get Management to take your side — and the alternative, which, meme-maker than I am, I have called persuasion.