There is a specific kind of institutional failure that does not arrive suddenly. It accumulates. It is staffed by people who mean reasonably well, who work reasonably hard, who attend the workshops and read the newsletters and quote the right language about “resilience” and “psychological safety” and “empowering their teams.” And yet the institution quietly rots: students fail in ways no one measures, staff burn out on invisible labour, and the people who are supposed to be in charge guess, constantly, systematically, confidently guess, about what leadership actually requires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the paper-crown problem. And it is most visible inside public-sector institutions, where the consequences of guessing are buffered for years before the bill comes due.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A paper crown is authority conferred by org chart and HR rather than by competence, formation, or earned trust. It is given, not built. It announces a title before the person inside it has any coherent model of what they are actually supposed to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The people wearing them in mid-tier public institutions, college vice-presidents, department heads, program coordinators, continuing education managers, typically arrived at their positions through a predictable path: they were competent at something (teaching, administration, subject-matter expertise), and that competence eventually attracted a promotion into a role that requires entirely different skills. The Peter principle, named by Laurence Peter in 1969, describes exactly this mechanism: in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. In public institutions where budget cycles and political goodwill insulate leaders from rapid accountability, this process can continue for decades.[^1][^2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They are not cynics, for the most part. They simply were never taught what systems leadership in a complex institution actually involves. Preparation for academic administration in Canada, where it exists at all, tends to be narrow: HR law, budget cycles, strategic planning templates, equity and diversity compliance training. What it rarely includes is genuine formation in systems thinking, institutional ethics, or the kind of structural analysis that would let someone look at a failing program and ask the right questions rather than the comfortable ones.[^3][^4]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Into that gap walks pop culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the absence of real formation, middle-tier administrators reverse-engineer leadership from what they have most reliably consumed: television, film, LinkedIn posts, TED talks, and podcasts with titles like What Ted Lasso Can Teach You About Empowerment<\/em> or Breaking Bad’s Walter White and the Dark Side of Visionary Leadership.<\/em> These are not crib sheets. They are mood boards. They teach administrators to perform gestures of leadership without understanding the structures underneath those gestures.[^5][^6][^7]<\/p>\n\n\n\n The gestures include: projecting toughness (until a factual counter-argument makes it collapse), invoking “standards” while selectively applying them, deploying the vocabulary of innovation and quality while enforcing rigid compliance, and treating subordinates either as extensions of the leader’s own ego or as threats to be neutralized. These behaviours recur across prestige television precisely because they are legible archetypes. In a college corridor, they are mistaken for management.[^8][^9][^10]<\/p>\n\n\n\n LinkedIn compounds the problem. The platform is the world’s largest aggregator of decontextualized leadership slogans: bullet points about “authentic leadership,” “servant leadership,” “psychological safety,” and “trusting your team,” authored by consultants and executives whose own institutions often behave in directly contradictory ways. An administrator who derives their leadership philosophy from LinkedIn is not drawing on theory, experience, or evidence. They are borrowing someone else’s guesses and presenting them as frameworks. It is, quite precisely, LARP: Live Action Role-Play as a leader, using other people’s lives and futures as the props.[^10][^11][^12]<\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes this survivable, for the administrators, if not the institution, is the buffer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In competitive private markets, the consequences of sustained leadership incompetence are relatively swift: falling revenues, departing clients, staff who can find work elsewhere, investors who withdraw. In the public sector, and particularly in publicly funded post-secondary education, the feedback loops are long and heavily damiated. Institutions do not close quickly. Funding is political, not purely performance-based. Students and staff have limited alternatives. And the metrics by which administrators are evaluated, budget balance, complaint volume, ministerial relations, enrolment figures, award wins, are almost entirely disconnected from what is actually happening inside classrooms, on staff mental health, or in long-term student outcomes.[^13][^10]<\/p>\n\n\n\n This means an administrator can guess wrong for years, and the cost will show up not in their performance review but in attrition, burnout, and eventually, if things go badly enough, in a parliamentary committee report or a provincial audit. The Conestoga case is illustrative: an institution that awarded itself prizes, hit the top of enrolment rankings, and received civic accolades in 2023 was placed under a provincial administrator by 2026 after auditors found what internally had always been visible to those living it. The consequences were buffered for a decade. When they finally arrived, they arrived for the students, the laid-off staff, and the communities, not primarily for the leaders who had been guessing.[^14][^15][^16]<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not a Conestoga-specific pathology. A direct, comparative look at four Ontario colleges over more than two decades reveals the same class of actor operating across different institutional contexts, generating four different failure modes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At\u00a0Sheridan<\/strong>, a reasonably organized institution with genuine faculty-development infrastructure, leadership periodically behaved like a prestige-television boss: territorial, image-protective, and hostile when an instructor tried to originate rather than follow. A department head wanted to claim a new popular culture course someone else had designed and developed, complete with an Ivy-League-adopted textbook and a fully structured syllabus, and used the bureaucratic review process to block it rather than negotiate transparently. An executive came to the meeting as an “attack dog,” was dismantled by factual counter-argument, declared herself “dysfunctional,” and resigned within a month. She was a classic paper-crown leader: confident in the performance until the props were removed.[^17][^18][^19]<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Mohawk<\/strong>, the paper crown expressed itself as nepotism and deficit thinking. Department heads openly overrode faculty academic standards to protect insiders, told instructors to “just give them movie reviews because they’re not going to get jobs anyway,” and ran a Language Studies division at forty percent capacity with no apparent diagnostic curiosity about why. An administrator who had absorbed the cultural script about “giving students a chance” translated it into “pass them regardless,” while being entirely incurious about whether the curriculum was any good in the first place.[^20][^21][^22]<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Niagara<\/strong>, the paper crown expressed itself more benignly but no less narrowly. Elaborate formal structures for feedback and program review exist on paper. In practice, the institution behaved like a cautious customer-service organisation: responsive when pressed, but fundamentally oriented toward satisfaction metrics rather than learning. Leaders used the language of student success while framing students primarily as customers whose retention mattered more than their development.[^23][^24][^25][^26][^27][^28]<\/p>\n\n\n\n At\u00a0Conestoga<\/strong>, the paper crown reached its full expression: standardization as control, metrics as a substitute for quality, and an executive suite that rewarded itself with a 55 percent salary increase and a trip to Italy while laying off nearly 400 staff. The leadership vocabulary was flawless, innovation, excellence, community contribution, applied research, and the governance was catastrophic. A full board dismissed, a provincial administrator installed, and a parliamentary case study named after the institution. The awards it gave itself in 2023 now read as a document of how badly the accolade ecosystem failed to ask the right questions.[^15][^16][^29][^30][^14]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Running through all four: administrators who enforced, postured, and performed, but almost never asked coherent structural questions about what their institutions were actually doing to the humans inside them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What makes modern public-sector leadership LARPing particularly difficult to see is that it has acquired a second layer of simulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Administrators no longer merely mimic the bosses they have observed. They now also quote the thought leaders who have theorised those bosses. The result is a LARP inside a LARP: performing leadership at one level, while performing intellectual engagement with leadership at another. Words like “resilience,” “disruption,” “trust,” “accountability,” “authentic leadership,” and “psychological safety” appear in emails, strategic plans, and staff meetings. They are almost never operationalised. They function as mood signals,\u00a0I am the kind of leader who knows this vocabulary<\/em>, rather than as commitments with measurable outcomes.[^11][^12]<\/p>\n\n\n\n When a mid-level college coordinator tells a Communications professor to “teach the script and nothing else” while also describing the college as a “community of learners,” both things are true in the same institution at the same time, because the language and the practice have been decoupled so thoroughly that no one in the org chart notices the contradiction. The LinkedIn post about empowering faculty and the explicit prohibition on deviating from the course outline coexist without irony because one is performance and the other is control, and the two have never been asked to meet.[^8][^10]<\/p>\n\n\n\n The argument here is not that every college administrator is cynical or malicious. Most are not. The argument is that the system selects for and rewards a specific kind of performance that has very little to do with the structural work that good leadership in complex institutions actually requires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That work includes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A college leader with these competencies, encountering a Communications professor who had just published four books in one year, won the Arch Award, written for Skeptic<\/em>, Maisonneuve<\/em>, Elle Canada<\/em>, and two major newspaper columns, and delivered the highest student ratings in her cohort, would ask: “What is this person actually capable of? Where in the institution can she build something?” They would not allocate her one CE course and file the CV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A college leader with these competencies, watching a BIPOC immigrant PSW cohort survive an impossible ten-day Communications delivery because one instructor held open Zoom office hours every night until every student had what they needed, would ask: “How do we make that the design, not the exception?” They would not adjust the format from ten days to three weeks and consider the problem solved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The failure was never the students. It was never the instructors. It was the paper crown, worn by people who learned what leadership looks like from television and LinkedIn, in an institution where the safety is on and the real costs are deferred until someone else is forced to clean up the mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LARP, Live Action Role-Play, is an activity in which participants enact scenarios in real environments, using costumes, scripts, and agreed-upon rules to simulate a world that does not quite exist. It is, in its recreational form, an entirely legitimate hobby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a description of how middle-class public-sector administrators approach institutional power, it is precise and not particularly generous, but it is accurate. The costumes are the job titles. The scripts are the LinkedIn posts and the TED talks. The agreed-upon rules are the performance metrics that confirm everyone is playing the game correctly. The world that does not quite exist is the one where these gestures constitute actual leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The students who sit in the classroom, the staff who absorb the extra loads, and the communities that bear the downstream costs of a decade of guessing are not playing a game. They are living the consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This column is part of a series on institutional culture, higher education, and the hidden dysfunction of public-sector administration.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Additional research by Perplexity<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a specific kind of institutional failure that does not arrive suddenly. It accumulates. It is staffed by people who mean reasonably well, who work reasonably hard, who attend the workshops and read the newsletters and quote the right language about “resilience” and “psychological safety” and “empowering their teams.” And yet the institution quietly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,460],"tags":[49,502,652,651,650,483,647],"class_list":["post-2774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexandra-kitty","category-the-damage-report","tag-canada","tag-conestoga-college","tag-laurence-peter","tag-mohawk-college","tag-niagara-college","tag-ontario","tag-sheridan-college"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2777,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2774\/revisions\/2777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\n\n\nPublic Sector as a Leadership Simulator with the Safety On<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nFour Colleges, One Pattern<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe Double LARP<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWhat Real Leadership Would Require<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nA Postscript on LARP<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nReferences<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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