The "non-profit leadership deficit": are we still this silly? Really?

If you're on staff at a U.S. non-profit organization or foundation you have likely heard something about “The Nonprofit Sector’s Leadership Deficit”. That's the title of an early-2006 study published by a think-tank called the Bridgespan Group, which has been written about endlessly in all manner of media. I've personally attended a couple of gatherings where the report was discussed, and the group's president has made appearances at a number of conferences to talk about it.

As far as I can tell the report's conclusion -- that this sector will in coming years be drastically short of qualified leadership-level staffers -- has been accepted as fact. Put another way: if anyone has yet doubted the report's overall logic and conclusion I haven't read or heard of it.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that, because the report is nonsense; I've seen stronger logic in the pages of the John Birch Society newsletter. What comes to mind from reading it is a broad-based critical-thinking deficit.

It's easy to spot specific logic problems in the thing, for example their assumption that the growth in the number of staffed non-profits will indefinitely continue to be as high as it was in the late-1990s boom economy. They also keep repeating the canard about how the public sector in the U.S. is increasingly offloading services to non-profits, and appear unaware of the fact that top-level professionals in the non-profit sector enjoy their work and tend to keep working by choice well beyond age 62 or 65. And they clearly are still working from the assumption that non-profit salaries are lower compared to the same jobs in the for-profit sector.

On the supply side they seem to think that business schools are a key source pool for all this, I have no idea why. (I've helped hire several development directors and executive directors and program directors, and the idea of an MBA degree being a major qualification would just get a chuckle from the search committees I've been on.) So they basically conclude that since the number of MBA's isn't growing as fast as the non-profit sector as a whole, one more looming crisis for the perpetually-struggling non-profits! needs to be added to the list.

Sigh. This whole thing rests on the idea that supply and demand are somehow disconnected in real life: it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that a visibly-booming economic sector tends to attract more top-level talent. Is it not obvious in seventeen different ways that smart educated young Americans nowadays are flocking to make careers in this sector? (Yes it is, to anyone who's paying attention.) Is that not evidence that salary levels are not actually penurious around here and/or that a lot of the kind of folks we want are motivated by things other than owning a Lexus?

I notice no comparative context either: does not every growing economic sector have to reach farther to find the talent it needs? Isn't that basically normal? Is this sector having a harder time with that than have law or medicine or investment banking or whatever? I have no idea, and neither does anybody at Bridgespan Group.

I hope to be around long enough to see this marvelous sector learn to expect more logic and common sense than is being displayed on this subject.

Women in higher education (including science)

The presidency of Harvard is something like a symbolic top of the heap in American higher education, and so the uproar that drove Lawrence Summers out of the job last year made national headlines. The authors of a new book on women in science recently made some interesting comments about that episode in the online magazine "Inside Higher Ed".

Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, professors at Cornell, report that "some scholars felt that they could not contribute (essays to the book) because their views were scorned, and had resulted in personal attacks against them on their campuses. If you read between the lines in several of the essays, you will detect this theme even among those who did contribute essays...." In other words, the professors re-discovered what Summers arguably should have known: that even wondering something like whether the gender imbalance in higher education might not be due to discrimination is a third rail on today's campuses. In a word, yecch.

Much more positive was the news (to me anyway) that women have in just the last decade or two become drastically more prominent at the top levels in higher education. Three Ivy League universities now have female presidents (Brown, Penn and Princeton) as do plenty of other well-known schools (hundreds of four-year colleges and universities in the U.S., according to one study). Actually Harvard's world-famous law school is now led by a woman (who is, according to the New York Times, on the short list for the university's top job). One might see progress, of a sort, in things like the female president of the University of New Hampshire being headhunted away by Temple, or the female president of the University of Colorado getting hounded from her job partly for being tonedeaf in much the same way Summers was (on a different topic). No glass ceiling here, for good and ill. (Including the ultimately tragic story of the chancellor of the University of California.)

I also did not know that women are now earning more than half of all bachelor's degrees, 43% of all master's degrees and more than a third of all doctorates in science and engineering in the U.S. If those trend lines continue up (the doctorate fraction has almost quintupled since 1966) then obviously that will filter up through academia (it's already led to sharp increases in the percentage of women employed in various scientific and engineering fields, in some cases to more than half.)