Can a relationship expert help higher ed?

Principles for happier work partnerships

Mar 28, 2023

How much can we expect institutions to care about us as individuals? The Supreme Court may view corporations as enjoying some of the same rights to freedom of speech as “persons,” but psychologists often describe the behavior of corporations as psychotic or psychopathic because they can’t feel guilt or empathy. Maybe it is unreasonable to expect colleges or universities to care about the people they employ, especially as higher education grows increasingly corporatized.

Yet family metaphors abound both in corporate environments and in academic settings. A few generations ago it was more common for people to find a work home for life and to feel that the institution they served over decades shaped a core aspect of their identity. But many industry workers now protect themselves by maintaining emotional distance from their employers. We tend to be suspicious these days of “work saints” and “work martyrs.” Fobazi Ettarh coined the term vocational awe to describe the set of beliefs about a particular job that make it seem so sacred that it is “beyond critique.” Accordingly, we are skeptical of “total institutions” that demand great sacrifices while isolating us from the world beyond their walls.

This climate of distrust has been jangling around in my thoughts alongside an abiding sense that universities ought to be different from corporations, that the lifelong tenure contract that has been the bedrock of academic freedom and financial security for generations of scholars ought to be more like a marriage than a business arrangement. Unhealthy marriages can be totalizing and isolating in many of the ways that unhealthy work environments are. But I still believe that lifelong partnership with an institution could be a beautiful thing under the right conditions, and that it might be possible, in that context, to lay out some principles by which colleges and universities could apply the wisdom of relationship experts to their own inner workings.

My text is John M. Gottman’s The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Before your eyes roll so far back into your head that they get lodged there, let me say that this book was recommended to me by an excellent therapist and that it is based on Gottman’s empirical research into thousands of married couples since 1986. Gottman is famous for his 91% accuracy rate in predicting the success or failure of a marriage after listening to a couple for just fifteen minutes. This is why Malcolm Gladwell devotes the opening chapter of Blink to Gottman’s lab.

I should also say that I am not a relationship expert. Much of what I have learned about marriage has been the result of my own failures, and so I claim no moral high ground. What I offer today is less an argument than a thought experiment based on Gottman’s text and its echoes in my experience as an academic. My hypothesis is this: Colleges and universities may be incapable of behaving as actual persons, but the leaders who define institutional culture would do well to consider Gottman’s principles for reviving troubled relationships.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Gottman’s language for doomed marriages is just as instructive as his principles for healthy partnerships. He identifies four forms of negative interaction as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because of their lethality. The Four Horsemen are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These terms are so self-evident in the exchanges between administrations, faculty, and staff at many institutions that I scarcely need to illustrate them. But consider, for instance, Gottman’s distinction between “complaint” and “criticism.” A complaint is isolated to a specific behavior or moment. But criticism paints with a broader brush: “you always” or “you never.” Criticism sees a pattern. It cuts to the core of who the target is. You faculty can never get your act together. It always takes you six months to vote on anything, and even then you just filibuster each other. You’re pathetic!

I have sometimes painted administrators with this critical brush, and I might be doing that now by identifying contempt as a common pattern among college leaders, who often seem to view themselves as superior to faculty. Contempt manifests in many ways: references to places where an administrator has previously served, which make faculty at their present institution seem provincial by comparison, gaslighting about resources or strategic planning, and many more. A college leader once told me in a private meeting, which I’d requested in my capacity as a faculty leader, “I could get another job tomorrow.” It was a stunning display of hubris. But faculty frequently return the favor by characterizing administrators as bean counters while elevating their calling as teachers to the Holy of Holies.

My own Achilles Heel as a spouse is defensiveness — a habit of turning a complaint or a call for help into a list of all the good things I’ve done, which I feel should be added to the score sheet. Sometimes I even cite Gottman’s line that every negative exchange needs to be balanced by five positive interactions to avoid a “negativity override.” The 5:1 positivity ratio may be true, but it is never a good excuse for minimizing a present concern, and invoking it in response to a complaint is self-defeating. As Gottman says, defensiveness typically escalates an argument rather than winning the other party over. If administrators have bona fide concerns about a governance structure, they are not going to change their minds after hearing a litany of faculty’s other good deeds. And deans and provosts take note: faculty who come to you with grievances are not interested in hearing about all the other ways that you are awesome. Throwing those deflections back and forth is a distraction from the rift that must be healed.

After the first three horsemen have galloped around for a while, the fourth — stonewalling — often follows. On the faculty/staff side this goes by the names quiet quitting and disengagement. On the admin side, it means tuning out, holding faculty hostage with long PowerPoints, controlling the flow of information in public meetings by allowing five minutes for Q&A just before lunch. I once heard a college president describe how, hypothetically, he could disarm an unruly faculty by deluging them with data. Try drinking from this firehose of transparency! A faculty colleague joked that you could also use the “mushroom diet” — keep them in the dark and feed them shit. But clearly anyone who is thinking in such cynical terms has built a tall and thick wall between themselves and their institutional partners.

Marriages that erode equality are moribund. And current trends in higher ed away from tenure and toward contingent employment, either by traumatic means such as those used by Texas A&M to strip librarians of faculty status or by quieter strategies, such as replacing tenure-line faculty with adjuncts or lecturers, only strengthen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The less power faculty and staff have, the greater the potential for contempt from college leaders. Job precarity directly enables disengagement and redirects loyalty and affection away from an employer. It’s this climate that has enabled an explosion of literature on burnout.

Principles for Making Institutional Marriages Work

I sometimes consoled myself after an awkward class discussion or a teaching experiment gone awry with the thought that my relationship with students could always be repaired. The next class could be better. We could get back on track. The same, I believe, is true of institutional relationships. No matter how dire things seem, the partnership between college leaders, faculty, and staff can be revived. And here is where Gottman’s principles for successful couples apply.

Gottman has 7 principles for sustaining marriage — too many to cover here. And I am under no illusions that they all apply equally to healthy institutional cultures. There are limits to every metaphor. However, each of the principles attempts to reverse the hostility and disrespect generated by the Four Horsemen. And I believe that the goals of marriage — a deep and abiding love, an enduring partnership — lie closer to the heart of a college or university than the corporate goals of brand influence or organizational efficiency. It is no accident that William Cronon ends his classic essay on the goals of a liberal education with the recognition that “[l]iberal education nurtures human freedom in the service of human community, which is to say that in the end it celebrates love.” Most of us who choose academic careers bring similar ideals into our commitment to the institutions we see as our partners.

Consequently, Gottman’s principle of enhancing “love maps” in a marriage resonates deeply with my sixteen years as a college professor. How much do university leaders know about why their faculty colleagues devoted their lives to their disciplines? When was the last time a dean or provost asked faculty what motivates their best teaching or what fears keep them up at night? A spouse with a deep love map is attuned not just to their partner’s personal history and long-term goals, but also to little things that make a difference in the day-to-day: a favorite salad dressing, the fortunes of their sports teams, a need for touch or an encouraging word, clearing the sink and the dish rack before dinner preparations begin.

A college leader who takes the time to listen to a colleague’s podcast episode, purchase their book, or read one of their recent journal articles will do more to make their institutional partners feel seen than they will by asking their secretary to order pastries for the next faculty workshop. We instinctively do this with our students. Even when I taught at a large university, I checked the scores for athletic teams because my students were the players. I knew it would make a difference to someone if I expressed compassion, before class started, for their nail-biter loss on the road the night before. I attended candlelight holiday concerts because my students were in the choir. I waved hello to them in the gym. The more I knew about their histories, their passions, and their fears, the more I could meet them at their points of need.

When I was teaching full-time, I woke up excited to introduce students to Willa Cather and Phillis Wheatley and the pleasure of answering burning questions with research. But when it seemed that my employer wanted me to help my American Literature students get jobs at Wells Fargo, the overlap between my affective map and my institution’s began to fade. Little wonder, then, that Gottman’s second principle — nurturing fondness and admiration — was so absent from the time I spent in faculty workshops on strategic planning, in meetings with consultants about academic assessment, or in student recruitment events on Saturday mornings.

None of Gottman’s principles resonates as deeply as the idea that mutually respectful partners remain open to each other’s influence. This applies not just to sharing power in decision making, it means allowing your partner’s tastes and worldview to change your own. Many colleges and universities claim to practice shared governance, by which they mean that powers granted exclusively to executives or to a Board of Trustees are entrusted, in part, to faculty. Recommendations for tenure and promotion are one example. Typically the heavy lifting for formal evaluation is done by a faculty committee, and these recommendations are then supported by the Dean of Faculty, the President, and the Board. Nothing roils shared governance like an executive overturning a faculty committee’s vote on granting or denying tenure. And administrators who remind faculty that they have no real power, that they are only making a recommendation and that the real decision is the Board’s, are not only nuking fondness and admiration, they are undermining the principle of mutual influence.

Shared power in decision making means having actual influence, even control, over how some resources are allocated. But our college budget was never available until January or February, which meant that expenses for half of the academic year were little more than guesses, all hedged with caution about overshooting the amounts that had been available the previous year. It reminded me of how my father kept the family finances secret from my mother. One summer I made a fuss over an Aerobie in a store window, and after my mother said I couldn’t have it, my father went in and bought it. That almost never happened, and I’m not sure why he was feeling flush that day, but I remember my mother’s embarrassment. “I never know how much we actually have,” she said. The power imbalance negated any generosity my father might have intended. And I wonder how many of my mother’s trips to the grocery store were leaps of blind faith, if she felt as powerless as I did while charging instructional expenses against an empty spreadsheet.

Most institutions face difficult decisions about how their limited resources might be spent. Transparency about those decisions is important for building trust, but actually sharing the decision-making power is most important of all. If every nickel and dime requires permission, the hoofbeats of the four horsemen are soon to follow.

Shared meaning is the lifeblood of belonging

Near the end of my tenure I became increasingly aware of the emotional bait and switch that takes place during hiring at many campuses. Candidates for faculty positions have spent six to eight years of their lives building deep love maps with their disciplines, mentors, and colleagues within that discipline. What a newly minted PhD really wants to bring to an institutional relationship is an extension of this love. But what an institution really wants from a candidate is often hidden in the job advertisement. That research area you spent four years or more becoming an expert on? Maybe it cycles through as a senior seminar every six years. Maybe what your institution really wants you to do is write handwritten cards to high school students, in hopes that you can charm them into enrolling, after which your job will be trying to keep them from transferring.

Gottman proposes that couples complete a test to determine how well they create shared meaning. Does each partner have similar values about being a parent? How much overlap is there in how each partner defines what it means to be a good friend? How compatible are their individual views on the role of work in their lives, or how to balance work life and family life? True or false: “My partner supports what I see as my basic mission in life.”

The unsavory truth about many faculty jobs is that they are grossly misaligned with the expectations and the actual training of graduate students. Mentors warn undergraduates against graduate school because of the slim likelihood of landing a tenure-track job. But those dwindling jobs are still held up as the Holy Grail: the chance to get paid to do what you love. As a mentor, myself, I found it hard to be honest about the real reasons I wanted to discourage young people from following in my footsteps. Perhaps it was a sense of professionalism, of not wanting to inflict my unhappiness on my students, that kept the real questions unspoken. What if the calling you thought you devoted your life to is not at all what your employer sees as its basic mission in life?

In that role I often felt like Jason Royce, in One of Ours, when the young Claude Wheeler asks for his blessing before proposing to Jason’s daughter, Enid. Mr. Royce knows it’s a bad match. His daughter wants nothing more than to be a missionary overseas. Enid’s desires are antithetical to the “something splendid” that Claude wants out of life. She admires preachers that Claude finds weak-minded and parasitic. Claude is as physically passionate as he is idealistic, but Enid finds a man’s embrace repulsive.

Mr. Royce struggles to express his reservations as the two men walk through an alfalfa field, stopping to rest against a cottonwood tree:

[Royce] sat with his hands clasped over his knees, his heels braced in the soft soil, and looked blankly off across the field. He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his secret, was to live.

It may be that younger faculty who protect themselves by reframing their calling as “just a job” have a more resilient view than those of us who embraced our work with the enthusiasm of a newlywed. But I suspect that none of us would ever say, even in the secret of our own hearts, “this is *just* a marriage,” unless we had given up hope. Why, if we devote one third of our lives to our jobs, would our standards be so much lower than they are for our other life partnerships?

The Recovering Academic

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