Earlier this week I learned that college leaders decided, without consulting faculty or staff, to shutter The Gettysburg Review, a legendary journal that has shaped American letters for 35 years. This came close on the heels of an article in Forbes which refers to faculty as “the enemy within” colleges and universities. Around this time I also finished watching the film series
Josh, I like this weaving of different elements into a single theme. I’ve watched Band of Brothers, and a variety of related documentaries, multiple times. Contrary to what Richard Winters says, he was the epitome of a hero, including for going home, as he expresses in the series, just to lead a normal life. I highly recommend the follow up series, The Pacific, a more spiritually harrowing experience.
My entire tenured teaching career, with one exception, was shadowed and brought to a gradual close by such hostile and imperious college Presidents. In the end, another president on that five-year cycle arrived during my post-chair service, when I was senior member of the department. During his faux listening and into his tear-down phase, acting on advice from other administrators, he systematically excluded me from every consultation and planning meeting regarding the English program. The current chair and the rest of the department sought my leadership in fending off his effort to recreate the program on his terms. As part of that effort, I was already leading preparation of our own lengthy and detailed planning document for a reconfigured program. He used his powers to prevent its consideration before the academic senate. The department’s only success, in the only meeting with him I ever attended, was in stopping his de facto assumption of departmental rule, which included, by the way, our “voluntary” devotion of hours per week tutoring in the writing lab at no additional pay. So nothing was achieved by anyone. It was at that point that I concluded finally I had no happy future on the campus.
A too brief counter anecdote, from when I was department chair, of that exception. During service on opposing contract negotiating teams, I and the college’s future president, with a reputation as a hard ass, developed a joking but increasingly respectful relationship with each other. When she assumed the presidency, we trusted each other, had regard for each other’s vision, and worked well together. We accomplished a lot and it was the happiest time of my teaching career.
Thank you, Jay. It really is amazing how much of a difference respect makes in professional collaboration! I think the admins who get it wrong think that they are the stars of the show, or that the story ought to be about them. But military philosophy is exactly the reverse. As they say in the Navy: My ship, my crew, myself (in that order).
I spent nearly two decades in faculty leadership ending with multiple terms as faculty president. At all three institutions I worked at, it was the same: the administration didn't trust their faculty even in their own field of expertise. I think that it is telling that most of the upper administrators I encountered we never faculty, and had degrees in "educational leadership" that ensured a chasm those making decisions and those having to live with them. At my last institution, where I was for 10 years, I noted that the president only walked in the liberal arts building a handful of times, which makes it less surprising that it hadn't been remodeled in 60 years, while the buildings he loved and frequented were always up to date.
What I don't get ... even as I do ... is how oedipal academic leadership is. And even when not that, how brazenly opportunist.
As you noted, Josh, one thing they don't get is that cutting a faculty line almost certainly ends that person's career given that colleges fill their classes with part-timers in lieu of full-time positions in a naked, exploitative, cash grab. Of course faculty are going to be prickly--they've spent their whole professional lives being exploited!
Exactly -- the default for faculty, understandably, is distrust. So what do administrators do about it? I don't think anything can be done to reduce that conflict when the compensation gap is so great. Senior admins can afford to take 6-12 months between gigs; most faculty can't. Perhaps I'm cherry picking with the Rosowsky article, but it really is an unforced error to label faculty as enemies. Absolutely zero faculty will be persuaded by that approach.
There were times when I lost patience with my colleagues and began to drift toward Rosowsky's and Rosenberg's condescending view. But you gain nothing by despising people, and usually that attitude is a symptom of arrogance. The opportunism built into administrative advancement -- the necessity to burnish a personal brand -- works directly against the principles of leadership. The leader is never the star. A president who wants to come in and save the day and get adulation for it is going to face a rude awakening. Faculty might care that their leaders are competent to solve some of the institutional problems, but they also want to have a hand in solving those problems. There aren't any shortcuts to this, and leaders who chafe at the inefficiency of shared governance are forgetting that they aren't entitled to trust. It's got to be earned, nurtured, protected.
I, also, was exasperated by faculty, because--understandably--I lot of people don't handle this situation with grace. (And I'm only allowing myself to be a bit raw about it now because I'm out of academia.) So, as I told them, it only makes it worse when we live up to the prefabricated expectations they have of us as whiners. I'm willing to bet that administrators aren't born callous, and that much of it is a learned behavior ... and since we're educators.... That approach is part of what landed me in senior leadership, as it is obviously effective, but I was never adroit enough to steer the ship--and nobody actually wanted to solve the problems but just cover them up.
So, while faculty are trained to distrust, too often they let that make the situation worse!
You're not wrong, but I stand by my point that no one can be expected to trust or act out of good faith if their basic needs aren't being met. Faculty are overworked, underappreciated, and increasingly told that the expertise that they've invested a great deal of their identity in is not that important to their institutions. That has to change for the admin-faculty dynamic to change.
I'll be honest: I don't think the compensation that admins receive is attractive enough to accept the role (including the frequently uprootings that many admins go through). But there are at least some value propositions for admins that make sense. The only incentives admins seem to offer faculty are negative ones: change or die. But that's explicitly a fear-based tactic, which is once again why fear is a completely predictable response.
Maybe I wasn't being transparent enough. Wait, I think I just laughed at myself while writing that.
Too often, I find that faculty respond to the horrible situation by doing a bad job and not managing the trauma well. It's a catch-22 situation, sure, but I will also stand by my point that "admins aren't born bad."
All that said, the power is in the hands of admins and their overseers, so both the power and responsibility is extremely asymmetrical. My comment about botched faculty response is more about how this flows over onto the students and our peers, none of whom deserve this.
"The administration didn't trust their faculty even in their own field of expertise." One thing that always struck me as weird was when administrators made decisions about things related to the visual arts such as statues on campus or logos and they didn't consult the art department. I saw it happen several times and as a faculty member in the sciences, the results didn't impress me much.
"Of course faculty are going to be prickly--they've spent their whole professional lives being exploited!." Also, I'm not in academia now and still find that there is a certain expectation that my labor and expertise and me personally are here to be exploited since I once was an educator.
I always appreciated my conversations with my uncle who was on the Board of Trustees at Hope College. He would ask me questions about why faculty reacted a certain way--one which baffled him-- and even though it wasn't my college and I didn't know the faculty, I always understood where they were coming from. People in leadership positions should do more of this.
For instance, they kept hiring landscaping specialists for projects ... even though we have a whole horticultural and ag program. We should have offered special projects to a class of students to help them build portfolios. Give the top 3 a cash prize that was worth 1/1000th of what you'd pay a contractor, but they'd still be excited.
They paid $30k to a security specialist for some training that took him a week to make. But ignored our award-winning criminal justice / corrections / TSA department that trains all TSA agents in the country. Meanwhile, unfunded mandates keep coming.
I think specific examples are helpful to give non-academics an idea of what this looks like.
Yes. One example is a logo for the athletic department which ended up looking almost exactly like one I saw on some cheese at Costco. Another is using landscaping statues when one of the professors is a sculptor.
I suspect that "leadership" is now synonymous with changing something to make your mark and then move on to bigger things. Instead of looking at the intrinsic value of something set up before by someone else, the impulse is to cut it and then brag about the money that was saved.
Well said, Cathy. A leader who really puts others first doesn't get credit and so cannot profit from achievement in the same way. It's another reason why I see branding as so destructive.
Josh, I like this weaving of different elements into a single theme. I’ve watched Band of Brothers, and a variety of related documentaries, multiple times. Contrary to what Richard Winters says, he was the epitome of a hero, including for going home, as he expresses in the series, just to lead a normal life. I highly recommend the follow up series, The Pacific, a more spiritually harrowing experience.
My entire tenured teaching career, with one exception, was shadowed and brought to a gradual close by such hostile and imperious college Presidents. In the end, another president on that five-year cycle arrived during my post-chair service, when I was senior member of the department. During his faux listening and into his tear-down phase, acting on advice from other administrators, he systematically excluded me from every consultation and planning meeting regarding the English program. The current chair and the rest of the department sought my leadership in fending off his effort to recreate the program on his terms. As part of that effort, I was already leading preparation of our own lengthy and detailed planning document for a reconfigured program. He used his powers to prevent its consideration before the academic senate. The department’s only success, in the only meeting with him I ever attended, was in stopping his de facto assumption of departmental rule, which included, by the way, our “voluntary” devotion of hours per week tutoring in the writing lab at no additional pay. So nothing was achieved by anyone. It was at that point that I concluded finally I had no happy future on the campus.
A too brief counter anecdote, from when I was department chair, of that exception. During service on opposing contract negotiating teams, I and the college’s future president, with a reputation as a hard ass, developed a joking but increasingly respectful relationship with each other. When she assumed the presidency, we trusted each other, had regard for each other’s vision, and worked well together. We accomplished a lot and it was the happiest time of my teaching career.
Thank you, Jay. It really is amazing how much of a difference respect makes in professional collaboration! I think the admins who get it wrong think that they are the stars of the show, or that the story ought to be about them. But military philosophy is exactly the reverse. As they say in the Navy: My ship, my crew, myself (in that order).
I spent nearly two decades in faculty leadership ending with multiple terms as faculty president. At all three institutions I worked at, it was the same: the administration didn't trust their faculty even in their own field of expertise. I think that it is telling that most of the upper administrators I encountered we never faculty, and had degrees in "educational leadership" that ensured a chasm those making decisions and those having to live with them. At my last institution, where I was for 10 years, I noted that the president only walked in the liberal arts building a handful of times, which makes it less surprising that it hadn't been remodeled in 60 years, while the buildings he loved and frequented were always up to date.
What I don't get ... even as I do ... is how oedipal academic leadership is. And even when not that, how brazenly opportunist.
As you noted, Josh, one thing they don't get is that cutting a faculty line almost certainly ends that person's career given that colleges fill their classes with part-timers in lieu of full-time positions in a naked, exploitative, cash grab. Of course faculty are going to be prickly--they've spent their whole professional lives being exploited!
Exactly -- the default for faculty, understandably, is distrust. So what do administrators do about it? I don't think anything can be done to reduce that conflict when the compensation gap is so great. Senior admins can afford to take 6-12 months between gigs; most faculty can't. Perhaps I'm cherry picking with the Rosowsky article, but it really is an unforced error to label faculty as enemies. Absolutely zero faculty will be persuaded by that approach.
There were times when I lost patience with my colleagues and began to drift toward Rosowsky's and Rosenberg's condescending view. But you gain nothing by despising people, and usually that attitude is a symptom of arrogance. The opportunism built into administrative advancement -- the necessity to burnish a personal brand -- works directly against the principles of leadership. The leader is never the star. A president who wants to come in and save the day and get adulation for it is going to face a rude awakening. Faculty might care that their leaders are competent to solve some of the institutional problems, but they also want to have a hand in solving those problems. There aren't any shortcuts to this, and leaders who chafe at the inefficiency of shared governance are forgetting that they aren't entitled to trust. It's got to be earned, nurtured, protected.
Josh,
I, also, was exasperated by faculty, because--understandably--I lot of people don't handle this situation with grace. (And I'm only allowing myself to be a bit raw about it now because I'm out of academia.) So, as I told them, it only makes it worse when we live up to the prefabricated expectations they have of us as whiners. I'm willing to bet that administrators aren't born callous, and that much of it is a learned behavior ... and since we're educators.... That approach is part of what landed me in senior leadership, as it is obviously effective, but I was never adroit enough to steer the ship--and nobody actually wanted to solve the problems but just cover them up.
So, while faculty are trained to distrust, too often they let that make the situation worse!
You're not wrong, but I stand by my point that no one can be expected to trust or act out of good faith if their basic needs aren't being met. Faculty are overworked, underappreciated, and increasingly told that the expertise that they've invested a great deal of their identity in is not that important to their institutions. That has to change for the admin-faculty dynamic to change.
I'll be honest: I don't think the compensation that admins receive is attractive enough to accept the role (including the frequently uprootings that many admins go through). But there are at least some value propositions for admins that make sense. The only incentives admins seem to offer faculty are negative ones: change or die. But that's explicitly a fear-based tactic, which is once again why fear is a completely predictable response.
Josh,
Maybe I wasn't being transparent enough. Wait, I think I just laughed at myself while writing that.
Too often, I find that faculty respond to the horrible situation by doing a bad job and not managing the trauma well. It's a catch-22 situation, sure, but I will also stand by my point that "admins aren't born bad."
All that said, the power is in the hands of admins and their overseers, so both the power and responsibility is extremely asymmetrical. My comment about botched faculty response is more about how this flows over onto the students and our peers, none of whom deserve this.
"The administration didn't trust their faculty even in their own field of expertise." One thing that always struck me as weird was when administrators made decisions about things related to the visual arts such as statues on campus or logos and they didn't consult the art department. I saw it happen several times and as a faculty member in the sciences, the results didn't impress me much.
"Of course faculty are going to be prickly--they've spent their whole professional lives being exploited!." Also, I'm not in academia now and still find that there is a certain expectation that my labor and expertise and me personally are here to be exploited since I once was an educator.
I always appreciated my conversations with my uncle who was on the Board of Trustees at Hope College. He would ask me questions about why faculty reacted a certain way--one which baffled him-- and even though it wasn't my college and I didn't know the faculty, I always understood where they were coming from. People in leadership positions should do more of this.
To the first comment.
Yeah, I tried to address this many times.
For instance, they kept hiring landscaping specialists for projects ... even though we have a whole horticultural and ag program. We should have offered special projects to a class of students to help them build portfolios. Give the top 3 a cash prize that was worth 1/1000th of what you'd pay a contractor, but they'd still be excited.
They paid $30k to a security specialist for some training that took him a week to make. But ignored our award-winning criminal justice / corrections / TSA department that trains all TSA agents in the country. Meanwhile, unfunded mandates keep coming.
I think specific examples are helpful to give non-academics an idea of what this looks like.
Yes. One example is a logo for the athletic department which ended up looking almost exactly like one I saw on some cheese at Costco. Another is using landscaping statues when one of the professors is a sculptor.
Well researched Josh. Great writing. Impressive. Reminds me of Heather Cox Richardson. Keep going!
Thanks, Jann. You are a leadership guru, so your stamp of approval means a lot!
I suspect that "leadership" is now synonymous with changing something to make your mark and then move on to bigger things. Instead of looking at the intrinsic value of something set up before by someone else, the impulse is to cut it and then brag about the money that was saved.
Well said, Cathy. A leader who really puts others first doesn't get credit and so cannot profit from achievement in the same way. It's another reason why I see branding as so destructive.