The Metamorphosis of Narcissism
My attention was drawn today to a paper in the journal Research Policy. It’s an Elsevier journal so the article is behind a paywall, and the methodology looks very dodgy, but the abstract is worth reading for amusement value (the emphasis is mine):
Universities hold a prominent role in knowledge creation through research and education. In this study, we examine the effects of VC narcissism on university performance. We measure VC narcissism based on the size of the signature, in line with a methodological approach which has been widely used in the recent literature and repeatedly validated in laboratory experiments. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment of VC changes and employ a Difference-in-Difference research design, which alleviates concerns related to endogeneity and identification bias. We show that the appointment of a highly narcissistic VC leads to an overall deterioration in research and teaching performance and concomitantly league table performance. We further identify excessive financial risk taking and empire-building as possible mechanisms explaining the main results and provide evidence on the moderating role of university governance. Our findings are consistent with the view that narcissism is one of the most prominent traits of destructive leadership; they also have practical implications for leadership recruitment and the monitoring of leadership practices in the higher education sector. The results of this study extend prior research in several ways. Extant literature on executive leadership and narcissism yields inconclusive findings; this literature has mainly focused on for-profit organisations and has not considered universities. In addition, prior research in higher education on the determinants of university performance has not yet examined the role of leadership personality traits.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2023.104901
I chose the title of this post – an allusion to a famous painting by Salvador Dalí that plays with the themes of hallucination and delusion – reading a sentence in the introduction to the paper:
Over the past few years the complexity and challenges of running a higher education institution have changed beyond recognition.
In other news, I am dismayed that, because of my absence from campus on sabbatical, I am unable to attend today’s long-awaited launch event for the brand new Maynooth University Strategic Plan (which will be accompanied by a protest by postgraduate students at Maynooth about low stipends and poor working conditions). The latter seems to me to be of far greater importance to the future of the University than the former.
In the Dark 
October 24, 2023 at 12:24 pm
The abstract was hilarious. Today in meeting we talked about needing to disable rules in Firewall, in order to be able to save assessments in a web application. In order to find a better solution were told needed to talk to a “Microsoft blackbelt”, lol
October 24, 2023 at 8:48 pm
I remember one man at a physics conference describing (in conversation) someone else – who was not present – as “a black belt in physics”. I thought it was a brilliant phrase and have occasionally plagiarised it.
October 24, 2023 at 5:38 pm
Quiz
(a) “Our people are our greatest resource. Working together, we create and our people are our greatest resource. Working together, we create and nurture the unique attributes of our University community experience. We live our values through our actions as we strive to reach our individual and collective potential”
(b) “Much of the work of the University will focus on people, for people are at the heart of everything we do. People are the means and the ends of the work of a university. It is people who animate the community of scholars, and people whose imaginations and ambitions fuel the impact of the public institution.”
(c) “People are the foundation of the University’s success and the quality of our academic, research, professional and support staff is critical to our future. In order for us to remain a world-leading institution for research and teaching we must continue to attract, recruit and support talented individuals and provide a diverse, inclusive, fair and open environment that allows staff to grow and flourish.”
Cambridge University, Maynooth University, Oxford University.
Can you match the meaningless mission statement with the correct University? No googling.
October 24, 2023 at 8:46 pm
Pass the sick bag…
October 26, 2023 at 6:12 am
a) Maynooth (it’s a bit clumsy, as Peter’s general comments may lead us to expect), b) Oxford (most likely to use the world ‘scholars´c) Cambridge (most likely to use the phrase ‘world-leading’. And if that’s right I’ll be back tomorrow with my rugby predictions.
October 26, 2023 at 11:14 am
Correct answer is a) Maynooth, b) Cambridge, c) Oxford.
You are right that Maynooth’s is noticeably clunkier.
Poteen versus vintage port.
I prefer poteen.
October 26, 2023 at 12:57 pm
I feel that ChatGPT would definitely have done a better job than the Maynooth one!
October 27, 2023 at 7:29 am
Well I guess my choices fro Cambridge and Oxford were a bit arbitrary haha
October 24, 2023 at 8:45 pm
This work appears to show a correlation between handwriting size and administrative capability in VCs. An assumption is needed to correlate handwriting size (and therefore adminstrative capability) with narcissism; this assumption is asserted in the paper and argued for in the references. I wonder if this is one for J Irrep Results.
Off the top of my head, illegibility rather than handwriting size seems likely to me to characterise self-importance. But even that would only be so if the name is not also typed immediately beneath it.
October 25, 2023 at 8:10 am
It seems a lot like graphology to me, i.e. a pseudoscience.