Improve

For those who are green to the skill of administration, you may find my argument yesterday unbelievable. It is easy to tell if someone is trying only to appear to be doing something, rather than actually doing anything.

On that, you are wrong. It is always possible to prove that what you are (appearing to be) doing has a material benefit. Even for a naive thick-head academic, I know of two strategies:

1. See the short term effect. (When everyone is paying attention to a particular problem, there would be some transient improvement.)
2. Juggle with the statistics. (As Mark Twain said: There are three kinds of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics.)
   

That's why we saw an improvement in language capability of our secondary students with the Media of Instruction (母語教學) scheme, more competent graduates after some new curriculum, or a shorter hospital stay after changing the position of some beds. (For the last scenario, any benefit could also be attributed to the effect of a better Feng Shui [風水].)

PS. Well, you can fool a small group of people forever, and you can fool everyone for a short while, but you cannot fool everyone forever. Fortunately, no one is going to audit your performance forever !