Wow, "vocational awe" is such a good term. It well describes the attitudes most of my local colleagues have about educational institutions.
Likewise the concept of "love maps" is amazing, and ... wow I wish we had it around here.
I'd like to discuss application of these ideas to my own institution ... but it would be needlessly negative and unproductive. As a four-term president and two-term vice president of the faculy union, it was my job to deal with these issues, and I just wish I or any of us could have been more successful. It wasn't any better before or after my tenure as leader. But part of the problem locally is something this article doesn't handle, which is the fact that it's not actually a two-party arrangement. Around here, the administrators cultivate toady and stooge relationships with select faculty who then become appointed as faculty representatives. So ...
Ah, well, that's one of the limits of the metaphor. Polygamy carries it too far. But perhaps it illustrates the point that cultivating a sense of belonging within a workplace and affection for an employer is even more complicated than doing that work in a marriage. I suppose the thought experiment relies on abstracting some of Gottman's principles to work partnerships more broadly.
One thing that is true of work environments that is not true of marriages is that power inequity is built into organizational structure. Marriages might not achieve perfect equality, but there is at least a working assumption that both partners are on equal footing. I made this point in a faculty meeting once -- that when I knew something was off with one of my students, the power dynamics of the classroom put the onus on me to reach out and try to bridge that gap. Similarly, it is up to a president or a dean to reach out to faculty when they are suffering.
I was not a perfect faculty leader. But I had some success with "sayback" in large forums -- repeating back what I thought I heard people saying. It's a useful interviewing technique, too. Repeat back an incomplete version of what you heard, to invite the other party to keep talking. This is straying a bit from the central premise, but I think some college leaders think it's up to them to come up with a plan -- to have the charismatic and redemptive vision -- and then to persuade others of it. Allowing other institutional partners to influence your thinking can really change the tenor of leadership.
Naw, let's go there. As I was writing my comment, I was thinking of Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, where he explores alternative marriages as he often does, in in that case it was "line marriages." I thought the concept ridiculous, but interesting.
I've never heard it called "sayback," but I do that practice constantly in class, in leadership positions, and in committee work. It a major constituent of Davidson's hermeneutic charity, which is a key professional practice in professional philosophy. In fact, you can often judge what crowd you're with fairly quickly by how much or little they practice hermeneutic charity.
Line marriage would be an entirely different metaphor. But I suppose you could argue that people who are setting boundaries, either pragmatically or defensively, are perhaps applying an alternative model for relationships to their work. Everyone brings different levels of expectations to marriage, too.
And I suppose what you're pointing out, which I had not considered, is that Gottman's principles really only apply to monogamous couples. I suppose love maps and such could still work in open relationships, but it's possible that I am presuming a traditional view of marriage as a monogamous lifelong partnership between two people that many readers no longer endorse.
So while line marriages don't seem o be a good metaphor, I was pointing out that marriage works only in a different model. It's more like many people marrying one person. And Heinlein's depiction of a new wife in a line marriage was a lot like that; the wife is marrying all the men in the family even though only one man was he reason for he induction.
Yes, the second point is good, though I wasn't making it exactly like that. I wasn't thinking about traditional marriage, but rather than your model of what a relationship to academia should be is something that was dead on arrival before I even entered graduate school 20 years ago. Rather, colleges were promiscuous partners that kept leaving us. Kept making promises hey had no intention of keeping. Sometimes lies, but mostly just lacking in any discipline to recognize and follow through on commitments.
Hey, I think this metaphor can work, though I haven't the skill to run far with it.
Hmmm. Provocative. In my Rolodex of memories, when the powerful at my school use the technique, it’s in manipulative wolf in sheep’s clothing contexts. “I hear you saying ___”...and the next step is either gaslighting or negging. “I hear you saying__ and I’m going to disagree with you.” Or “and I’ll tell you why you’ve got it wrong.”
Here, in Iowa, being negative or confrontational in public (with few exceptions) is taboo. So, I rarely hear someone say that they "disagree." Instead, it's almost pure gaslighting.
In hermeneutic charity, the practice is supposed to facilitate communication because a person demonstrates their understanding per some criteria that allows the other party to correct that understanding rather than be the subject of the other's unguided supposition.
At my institution, their preferred technique is an endless horse and pony show, where all real decisions happen among a few cronies.
I have some friends who've been working with the Gottmans and here's a video your readers might like to see: super brief: "Avid Relationship Buyer's Remorse" made by the Gottmans and their producers: https://youtu.be/jZmf_VTZ73Y
Nice! I can say that Gottman's book has helped me think about my marriage differently than any other resource I've seen. Whether the analogy to work partnerships holds up is another question :)
As a clinical psychologist, I love this. :) I'm in the "let's make academia better" camp. During my program, the board of directors decided to fully fund incoming clinical students and partially fund early students. They were uninterested in funding mid-level and advanced students who felt angry and hurt by these decisions. At the same time, the board started a fully-funded developmental program that they have now decided to close about four years later. The faculty in the new developmental program who were going up for tenure are now losing their labs and their students will graduate from a program that only existed for a few years. Faculty and students have been denied access to even speak to the board members. Stone-walling is a brilliant way to describe this phenomenon!
Wow -- powerful example. I can understand why it might chafe presidents for faculty or students to do end-arounds to the Board rather than trying to speak to them directly. But nothing good comes of restricting speech. More information is better, and Board members typically want to have a more nuanced picture than the president is giving them.
Some years ago a renegade group of faculty, including myself, initiated a process that ended with a faculty resolution on morale and institutional culture. This was a good-faith effort at expressing concerns with how unsatisfying our institutional relationships felt, and we asked for some specific things: like regular evaluations of the Dean of Faculty and the President, transparency with those results, and other ways of feeling like we had more of a voice. This went to the Board, and they unfortunately chose to pick sides, issuing their own resolution that demanded changes to faculty governance. During this time it was verboten for faculty to speak directly to Board members, but I did that on one occasion, and the Trustee, whom I still consider a friend, said, "You know, this is just soft tissue stuff." He was right. So much of it was just wanting to feel more valued, to feel that if we had concerns there were ways to voice them that might be heard. Smackdowns might feel satisfying to those in power, but they really rankle when you consider yourself to be a high-performing expert, more or less the professional equal of a dean or president.
I'll make a cheesy shift here to the TV series New Amsterdam, which I'm watching with my wife. It has a great clinical psychologist character in it, but what I love most of all is the model it provides for leadership. The Dean in this case, Max Goodwin, places patients first and bends the rules to ensure that they are the priority. In one episode, he conducts a survey and meets with focus groups based on the results to listen to their concerns, admitting that he has no immediate solutions. But in one case a group of doctors and nurses says that they are routinely sleep-deprived because of their two-hour commutes and because train transfers prevent them from sleeping. So he reallocates some resources to fund some charter buses that cut their commute time in half and allow them to sleep on the bus. Too good to be true? Maybe -- most TV examples are. But Max's mantra -- How can I help? -- is much better than the more common leadership refrain of "Thou shalt not..."
Ahh that sounds wonderful. It makes you wonder what it will take to open those lines of communication and elicit a compassionate response in real life. Perhaps a mainstream T.V. show called Renegade Faculty!
I’m not completely sure what “soft tissue issue” means but it sounds dismissive. I think it’s naive of those in power to think that those beneath them will never eventually rise up over not being heard.
What I heard "soft tissue" to refer to were more abstract (but still vital) things, like feeling valued. My friend in this case gave examples of how no matter how many awards he's won, he still wants his boss to say, "Hey, good job on that project." It wasn't dismissive at all, but truly perceptive, that what we as a faculty were calling for was respect, not just policy changes. I thought he was spot on in diagnosing our problem as relational, not structural.
You know I’ve got a jillion thingks now. Obviously I like this thought experiment, as we riffed on it a couple weeks ago. The always pesky variable of the power imbalance is key, but of course, many 2-person marriages have those imbalances from the relationship’s start. (And for many, it’s precisely this imbalance that induces erotic frisson.) The triangulation of higher ed institutions -- admins, “good faculty,” “bad faculty” -- happens in families too, though maybe differently in marriages. So many many thingks to ponder.
Interesting -- I can't say that power imbalance has ever spiced up my marriage, that I know of, but I know for a fact that it harmed my institutional relationships. In one absurd example, when I was directing our first-year seminar, there was a flap over how I issued a public announcement about the summer common read, which was required for all incoming students and used during Orientation Week to kick off the first-year seminar. It was a collaboration with Student Development, and so we had representatives from faculty and staff in the meetings where the book was chosen. But there was some word choice I got wrong in the announcement -- and I think there was some question about whether I as director was the right one to issue it. The dean's spouse was the VP for Student Development, so there was some backchanneling there, and then I got the smackdown from the dean for something so obviously petty that it could not possibly have been worth the joules or calories required to send those emails. What it effectively did was kill my interest in collaborating further with Student Development.
There is perhaps a separate conversation to be had on the conundrum that women in leadership face as they exercise power.
I'll be blunt: what the business world has done to colleges by applying their principles to something meant to enrich society is a crime against humanity. What you felt at the college is akin to misogyny.
It's certainly hurtful -- not sure I'd take it quite that far. Not sure I follow the misogyny analogy, either? Sidelining arts and humanities, or allowing them to wither on the vine, does reveal a kind of prejudice, I suppose. And at some point I did recognize that my values were incompatible with the institution's, at least so far as I could foresee the near future. But I don't feel like a victim or a target of hate. I think it was turning into an unhealthy partnership, and I've never doubted my decision to resign.
Misogyny in the "I know better than you do because of my position in society" (privilege) and "you have more experience in this area than I do but I am going to tell you all about it and how you should act" (mansplaining), & "faculty are difficult and like herding cats" (gaslighting).
Wow, "vocational awe" is such a good term. It well describes the attitudes most of my local colleagues have about educational institutions.
Likewise the concept of "love maps" is amazing, and ... wow I wish we had it around here.
I'd like to discuss application of these ideas to my own institution ... but it would be needlessly negative and unproductive. As a four-term president and two-term vice president of the faculy union, it was my job to deal with these issues, and I just wish I or any of us could have been more successful. It wasn't any better before or after my tenure as leader. But part of the problem locally is something this article doesn't handle, which is the fact that it's not actually a two-party arrangement. Around here, the administrators cultivate toady and stooge relationships with select faculty who then become appointed as faculty representatives. So ...
Got any advice for plural marriages?
Ah, well, that's one of the limits of the metaphor. Polygamy carries it too far. But perhaps it illustrates the point that cultivating a sense of belonging within a workplace and affection for an employer is even more complicated than doing that work in a marriage. I suppose the thought experiment relies on abstracting some of Gottman's principles to work partnerships more broadly.
One thing that is true of work environments that is not true of marriages is that power inequity is built into organizational structure. Marriages might not achieve perfect equality, but there is at least a working assumption that both partners are on equal footing. I made this point in a faculty meeting once -- that when I knew something was off with one of my students, the power dynamics of the classroom put the onus on me to reach out and try to bridge that gap. Similarly, it is up to a president or a dean to reach out to faculty when they are suffering.
I was not a perfect faculty leader. But I had some success with "sayback" in large forums -- repeating back what I thought I heard people saying. It's a useful interviewing technique, too. Repeat back an incomplete version of what you heard, to invite the other party to keep talking. This is straying a bit from the central premise, but I think some college leaders think it's up to them to come up with a plan -- to have the charismatic and redemptive vision -- and then to persuade others of it. Allowing other institutional partners to influence your thinking can really change the tenor of leadership.
Josh,
Naw, let's go there. As I was writing my comment, I was thinking of Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, where he explores alternative marriages as he often does, in in that case it was "line marriages." I thought the concept ridiculous, but interesting.
I've never heard it called "sayback," but I do that practice constantly in class, in leadership positions, and in committee work. It a major constituent of Davidson's hermeneutic charity, which is a key professional practice in professional philosophy. In fact, you can often judge what crowd you're with fairly quickly by how much or little they practice hermeneutic charity.
Line marriage would be an entirely different metaphor. But I suppose you could argue that people who are setting boundaries, either pragmatically or defensively, are perhaps applying an alternative model for relationships to their work. Everyone brings different levels of expectations to marriage, too.
And I suppose what you're pointing out, which I had not considered, is that Gottman's principles really only apply to monogamous couples. I suppose love maps and such could still work in open relationships, but it's possible that I am presuming a traditional view of marriage as a monogamous lifelong partnership between two people that many readers no longer endorse.
Yes, it only works on monogamous pairs.
So while line marriages don't seem o be a good metaphor, I was pointing out that marriage works only in a different model. It's more like many people marrying one person. And Heinlein's depiction of a new wife in a line marriage was a lot like that; the wife is marrying all the men in the family even though only one man was he reason for he induction.
Yes, the second point is good, though I wasn't making it exactly like that. I wasn't thinking about traditional marriage, but rather than your model of what a relationship to academia should be is something that was dead on arrival before I even entered graduate school 20 years ago. Rather, colleges were promiscuous partners that kept leaving us. Kept making promises hey had no intention of keeping. Sometimes lies, but mostly just lacking in any discipline to recognize and follow through on commitments.
Hey, I think this metaphor can work, though I haven't the skill to run far with it.
Hmmm. Provocative. In my Rolodex of memories, when the powerful at my school use the technique, it’s in manipulative wolf in sheep’s clothing contexts. “I hear you saying ___”...and the next step is either gaslighting or negging. “I hear you saying__ and I’m going to disagree with you.” Or “and I’ll tell you why you’ve got it wrong.”
I think it depends on the institutional culture.
Here, in Iowa, being negative or confrontational in public (with few exceptions) is taboo. So, I rarely hear someone say that they "disagree." Instead, it's almost pure gaslighting.
In hermeneutic charity, the practice is supposed to facilitate communication because a person demonstrates their understanding per some criteria that allows the other party to correct that understanding rather than be the subject of the other's unguided supposition.
At my institution, their preferred technique is an endless horse and pony show, where all real decisions happen among a few cronies.
I have some friends who've been working with the Gottmans and here's a video your readers might like to see: super brief: "Avid Relationship Buyer's Remorse" made by the Gottmans and their producers: https://youtu.be/jZmf_VTZ73Y
Nice! I can say that Gottman's book has helped me think about my marriage differently than any other resource I've seen. Whether the analogy to work partnerships holds up is another question :)
As a clinical psychologist, I love this. :) I'm in the "let's make academia better" camp. During my program, the board of directors decided to fully fund incoming clinical students and partially fund early students. They were uninterested in funding mid-level and advanced students who felt angry and hurt by these decisions. At the same time, the board started a fully-funded developmental program that they have now decided to close about four years later. The faculty in the new developmental program who were going up for tenure are now losing their labs and their students will graduate from a program that only existed for a few years. Faculty and students have been denied access to even speak to the board members. Stone-walling is a brilliant way to describe this phenomenon!
Wow -- powerful example. I can understand why it might chafe presidents for faculty or students to do end-arounds to the Board rather than trying to speak to them directly. But nothing good comes of restricting speech. More information is better, and Board members typically want to have a more nuanced picture than the president is giving them.
Some years ago a renegade group of faculty, including myself, initiated a process that ended with a faculty resolution on morale and institutional culture. This was a good-faith effort at expressing concerns with how unsatisfying our institutional relationships felt, and we asked for some specific things: like regular evaluations of the Dean of Faculty and the President, transparency with those results, and other ways of feeling like we had more of a voice. This went to the Board, and they unfortunately chose to pick sides, issuing their own resolution that demanded changes to faculty governance. During this time it was verboten for faculty to speak directly to Board members, but I did that on one occasion, and the Trustee, whom I still consider a friend, said, "You know, this is just soft tissue stuff." He was right. So much of it was just wanting to feel more valued, to feel that if we had concerns there were ways to voice them that might be heard. Smackdowns might feel satisfying to those in power, but they really rankle when you consider yourself to be a high-performing expert, more or less the professional equal of a dean or president.
I'll make a cheesy shift here to the TV series New Amsterdam, which I'm watching with my wife. It has a great clinical psychologist character in it, but what I love most of all is the model it provides for leadership. The Dean in this case, Max Goodwin, places patients first and bends the rules to ensure that they are the priority. In one episode, he conducts a survey and meets with focus groups based on the results to listen to their concerns, admitting that he has no immediate solutions. But in one case a group of doctors and nurses says that they are routinely sleep-deprived because of their two-hour commutes and because train transfers prevent them from sleeping. So he reallocates some resources to fund some charter buses that cut their commute time in half and allow them to sleep on the bus. Too good to be true? Maybe -- most TV examples are. But Max's mantra -- How can I help? -- is much better than the more common leadership refrain of "Thou shalt not..."
Ahh that sounds wonderful. It makes you wonder what it will take to open those lines of communication and elicit a compassionate response in real life. Perhaps a mainstream T.V. show called Renegade Faculty!
I’m not completely sure what “soft tissue issue” means but it sounds dismissive. I think it’s naive of those in power to think that those beneath them will never eventually rise up over not being heard.
What I heard "soft tissue" to refer to were more abstract (but still vital) things, like feeling valued. My friend in this case gave examples of how no matter how many awards he's won, he still wants his boss to say, "Hey, good job on that project." It wasn't dismissive at all, but truly perceptive, that what we as a faculty were calling for was respect, not just policy changes. I thought he was spot on in diagnosing our problem as relational, not structural.
Ahhh okay! I wasn’t sure if he meant the kind of tissue for tears. Yea, humans need that!
You know I’ve got a jillion thingks now. Obviously I like this thought experiment, as we riffed on it a couple weeks ago. The always pesky variable of the power imbalance is key, but of course, many 2-person marriages have those imbalances from the relationship’s start. (And for many, it’s precisely this imbalance that induces erotic frisson.) The triangulation of higher ed institutions -- admins, “good faculty,” “bad faculty” -- happens in families too, though maybe differently in marriages. So many many thingks to ponder.
Interesting -- I can't say that power imbalance has ever spiced up my marriage, that I know of, but I know for a fact that it harmed my institutional relationships. In one absurd example, when I was directing our first-year seminar, there was a flap over how I issued a public announcement about the summer common read, which was required for all incoming students and used during Orientation Week to kick off the first-year seminar. It was a collaboration with Student Development, and so we had representatives from faculty and staff in the meetings where the book was chosen. But there was some word choice I got wrong in the announcement -- and I think there was some question about whether I as director was the right one to issue it. The dean's spouse was the VP for Student Development, so there was some backchanneling there, and then I got the smackdown from the dean for something so obviously petty that it could not possibly have been worth the joules or calories required to send those emails. What it effectively did was kill my interest in collaborating further with Student Development.
There is perhaps a separate conversation to be had on the conundrum that women in leadership face as they exercise power.
I'll be blunt: what the business world has done to colleges by applying their principles to something meant to enrich society is a crime against humanity. What you felt at the college is akin to misogyny.
It's certainly hurtful -- not sure I'd take it quite that far. Not sure I follow the misogyny analogy, either? Sidelining arts and humanities, or allowing them to wither on the vine, does reveal a kind of prejudice, I suppose. And at some point I did recognize that my values were incompatible with the institution's, at least so far as I could foresee the near future. But I don't feel like a victim or a target of hate. I think it was turning into an unhealthy partnership, and I've never doubted my decision to resign.
Misogyny in the "I know better than you do because of my position in society" (privilege) and "you have more experience in this area than I do but I am going to tell you all about it and how you should act" (mansplaining), & "faculty are difficult and like herding cats" (gaslighting).
Ah -- makes more sense. Here's to recovery from all that!