William Marvel: Deaning America

Last summer, as the Conway School Board approved the latest shuffle in the administrative shell game at the high school, no one seemed to catch the import of Randy Davison's objection to gilding each of the two new assistant-principal positions with the exalted title of "dean of students." The responses from fellow board members settled along the lines that it made no difference what the positions were called, but if their opinions were not disingenuous, they must have resulted from a failure to grasp the point.

Davison might have had better luck had he been more blunt in voicing the nature of his complaint. As I understood him, he was objecting to the pretentions of an educational bureaucracy obsessed with the faux prestige of inflated credentials and exalted titles. That appeared to be a subject that his fellow board members were anxious to ignore, especially with our district's academic performance having sunk to historic lows, but isn't it understandable that they would be sensitive to the appearance of so universally ridiculed a response to failure? If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with — well, you know with what.