In a ballroom at George Washington University, Kathryn Kleppinger watched her peers stand on their tiptoes. The associate professor of French studies and international affairs had been told to reach as high as she could. Then, she and her colleagues were told, reach even higher.
The exercise was a tiny part of the administration’s attempt to improve the culture at George Washington. Last year, the university paid the Disney Institute, a consulting arm of the Walt Disney Company, to administer a climate survey to faculty and staff. The results shed light on what the institute called a major disconnect between managers and their employees, a lack of transparency, and a “debilitating fear” of making a decision or a mistake.
After the diagnosis came the treatment. This fall, faculty and staff have attended training sessions where they learned about newly selected university values, like courage and respect; watched videos; and completed quick group exercises, like reaching as high as you can.
So far, the rollout of the effort has been bumpy. The chair of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee called it the best thing George Washington has done in her 28 years at the institution. But a skeptic said he’s so confused by what’s going on that he’s calling this term the “semester at sea.”
The whole point of a university is that we are not in a fantasy world.
Faculty critics told The Chronicle that they aren’t opposed to improving GW’s culture. But they object to having what they consider abstract ideas dictated to them. That practice might be appropriate in a corporate setting, they said, but is inappropriate, or even infantilizing, on a college campus. And they question why Disney — a billion-dollar company synonymous with images of Main Street, U.S.A., and Mickey Mouse — was chosen to help the university at all.
In the ballroom, Kleppinger was told that the reaching-higher exercise was meant to demonstrate that no one has to go the extra mile alone. If everyone goes an extra inch, we go the extra mile together.
Though the activity seemed fairly benign, Kleppinger said, it’s based on a “kind of dangerous” principle. It tells people that they need to do more, she said, without dealing with the workplace hurdles that make them struggle in the first place.
‘We Don’t Really Talk About Culture’
When Thomas J. LeBlanc interviewed for the presidency of George Washington, he heard a common refrain. The culture there was too “bureaucratic,” very “risk averse,” he told The Chronicle.
“It’s important to note that a number of the major, major scandals and crises in higher education, they all point to culture,” he said. “And yet, we don’t really talk about culture in higher education very much.”
After he took office in 2017, he put together a committee to look at companies that could help. They recommended the Disney Institute, he said. He’d previously worked with the institute while he was provost of the University of Miami. That institution did not respond to a request for comment.
LeBlanc told George Washington’s student newspaper, The GW Hatchet, in the fall of 2018 that Disney’s consulting services cost about $300,000. He said that amount is “not inexpensive” but is “a measure of how important this issue is to us.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, he declined to provide an update on the project’s price tag. “I would simply say to people who are concerned about the cost: I heard more about this issue than anything else in coming to GW,” he said. “What is it worth to actually improve our culture?”
In October last year, the survey, conducted by the Disney Institute, was sent to all full- and part-time faculty and staff. Respondents were asked to rank their level of agreement with statements like, “The university acts on stakeholder feedback it receives,” and, “I am proud to be part of the university.”
The statements insulted some faculty members, who found them vague and unhelpful.
“It is hard to overstate the frustration and anger we have heard,” Ivy Ken, an associate professor of sociology and then-president of the GWU Faculty Association, a grass-roots faculty organization, wrote in an op-ed in the student newspaper. The survey seemed like a corporate device, and very “ill suited” to a university environment, said Katrin Schulteiss, an associate professor of history who chairs the department.
“No instrument is going to be perfect,” said Sylvia Marotta-Walters, chair of the faculty senate’s executive committee and a professor of counseling. But, she added, “when we saw the results, I didn’t hear one person that said these results weren’t valid.”
Disney concluded, from the survey results and also from in-person interviews, that a “pervasive, long-held, and debilitating fear of making a decision or a mistake” grips “most everyone in their daily routines — staff, leaders, and faculty alike,” according to a January internal email that summarized the feedback.
There is “long-held resentment” among “leadership/faculty/staff because the supposed ‘role models’ of the university act differently/inconsistently,” the email says.
“An absence of transparency” exists at the university, Disney found, along with a “debilitating apathy in the workforce,” widespread “values” misalignment, and a highly “transactional” nature in the student experience.
Now the university has a roadmap that can guide its next steps, and a baseline against which to measure its progress, LeBlanc wrote in the email. Those next steps also included the Disney Institute, he announced in February.
But by the time the survey results had been announced and next steps were put into place, the effort had already turned some people off. The only thing more dangerous than evidence compiled from a poorly designed survey, said Gregory D. Squires, a sociology professor, would be acting on the basis of that evidence.
And the Faculty Assembly, a body of all faculty members that meets annually, wants to know more. Its members called on LeBlanc to release the data that undergirds the culture initiative, the Hatchet reported.
Among the questions professors say they want answered are: Are the results of the climate survey and related focus groups scientifically valid?
‘Not Aiming to Make Students Smile’
This fall, employees in managerial roles, like department chairs, were asked to attend a training session led by the Disney Institute’s staff, George Washington’s student newspaper reported. Other faculty and staff were encouraged to attend slightly shorter sessions led by faculty and administrators.
The attendees watched videos and were given cards printed with seven core values (integrity; collaboration; courage; respect; excellence; diversity; openness), three service priorities (safety, care, and efficiency), and a common purpose (Only at GW, we change the world, one life at a time.).
Those values, service priorities, and the common purpose were developed by administrators and faculty members who have been meeting regularly to strengthen the university’s culture. Pamela R. Jeffries, a member of the “culture-leadership team” and dean of the School of Nursing, emphasized that Disney is not “pushing” any values on George Washington. University employees, she said, are creating the roadmap.
Still, Disney’s involvement frustrated some faculty members. “The whole point of a university is that we are not in a fantasy world,” said Bernard A. Wood, a professor of human origins, in GW’s paleobiology center. “We deal with real problems. We are not aiming to make students smile all the time.”
One professor refused to go to the trainings and instead has begun photoshopping cartoons, for his own enjoyment. One depicts LeBlanc’s face superimposed on a statue of Walt Disney.
It is difficult to accept Disney as a guide, said Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology and international affairs, when it is known that “behind the costumes and the curtains, the Walt Disney Corporation has a ruthless corporate culture.” Its theme parks “perpetuate ethnic and gender stereotypes” and “sanitize world histories,” he wrote in an email, “all in the service of profit.”
Kleppinger said she wondered why an outside corporation was hired at all, when George Washington has a department of organizational sciences and communication. The department educates its students on “the interactive relationships between individuals, organizations, and the environment,” its website says.
One moment during the training, Kleppinger remembers, really bothered her. In a video, a university employee was praised for staying late to finish an important task. After the video ended, Kleppinger said her colleague asked, in essence, How do we square this idea of going above and beyond with the possibility that we’re also glorifying exploitation? The attendees didn’t get a satisfactory answer, Kleppinger said.
Some professors objected to how the values and priorities were delivered. They were presented as, “We cooked up the solution for you. Here it is,” said Schulteiss, the history-department chair.
The cards printed with GW’s values included statements like “I keep areas clean, well-maintained, and inviting,” and “I follow a principled approach with sincerity, truth, and honesty.” Grinker challenged professors to read the cards without thinking of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Some people found the exercises condescending. In Wood’s session, participants were asked to point north. People pointed in different directions, he said, which was supposed to be an illustration of “some sort of guiding principle.”
Through email, the Disney Institute declined to comment.
Critical faculty members said the trainings were not all bad. Schulteiss said there were moments of thoughtful discussion. Wood said it got faculty and staff together in one room, a rarity. But, he said, it’s “like the side effect of a drug.”
That outcome might be good, he said, “but the drug will otherwise kill you.”
Disney University
For all the criticism that’s been lobbed against them, Disney’s efforts do have some supporters on campus. Some faculty and staff were sent on trips to Orlando as part of an immersion program that provides, according to an email, “an inside-look at Disney’s approach to a service-centric culture and field experiences at Disney parks and at Disney University.”
Marotta-Walters has gone twice. She was impressed by the language Disney uses with its employees. “Coming from a culture of compliance, where I’m used to hearing ‘no’ and ‘don’t,’ Disney managed to implement their values with very positive language that showed they understood the roles of their employees,” she said.
Candice Chen, an associate professor of health policy and management, traveled to Orlando for her immersive training with a bit of “healthy skepticism,” she said. But then she got to know the other George Washington employees on her trip. She learned how Disney maintains its “magic” by, for example, landscaping at night, when no visitors are around, and replacing trees when they grow too big.
The culture at Disney World is not necessarily the culture that GW wants, she said. “But it is an intentional and successful culture for what they’re trying to achieve.”
Marie Price, a member of the culture-leadership team and a geography professor, said the fact that the Disney Institute was involved turned off some faculty members from the start. “I get that,” she said. “I would say I was skeptical as well. But I also wanted to be open minded about it, and also to see what we could get from their experience.”
The workshops, she added, are supposed to be the beginning of the process, not the end.
“Trying to change culture is not easy,” Price said. But, she said, this type of effort is a first for George Washington. “We are talking about things that we’ve never talked about before.”
LeBlanc said he can appreciate the concern that Disney is different from a university. “I agree with that,” he said. But “I don’t think it’s fair to say we can’t learn anything from Disney.”
George Washington will take from Disney what it can learn, LeBlanc said. But the lessons will be applied to the university’s specific circumstances, using “our people,” and “our best judgment.”
“Our values are not Disney’s values,” LeBlanc said. “And we’ve written down what our values are.”
