Using Disciplines to Control Faculty

Written with Michael Brown.

Mary: Mike, when you ended  our last post with a “sense of a discipline,” you were referring to teaching. I also thought of the relationship between disciplines as knowledge domains and academic departments as profit centers. As an administrator,  when I think of a discipline, I think of the division and containment of knowledge, the departments that stem from disciplines, and the enrollments and budgets associated with departments.

It is interesting to consider that disciplines were constructed to bring order and control to knowledge construction and now they are often used to bring order and control to the laboring bodies of professors. As an academic administrator, I have witnessed senior leaders manipulate faculty members by using loyalty to their disciplines to divide and conquer. While professors argue over the details of their areas of study and debate the rank-order of disciplines, provosts and vice presidents rearrange the very playing field on which faculty members are allowed to have these debates.

Mike: Let’s table the issue of disciplinarity for a later post and say a bit about your last point. I often hear people joking about faculty making a lot over a little. My own feeling is that our meetings confront us with administrative imperatives that make room for only small details. For example, an obligation to rate people for promotion or to appoint someone according to the reputation of his or her publisher or to accept letters of reference only from top departments makes very little sense as a principle. As a result, discussion at meetings often alternates between one detail and another as if each is absolutely crucial, since it is all we are allowed to consider. And, because faculty members are less and less permitted even to have input on general educational policies, principles always come up as what we should be discussing, even though we are pretty sure that it is futile to do so. As a result, these principles are bound to be expressed abstractly, in a way that looks as if they are intended to obfuscate — reinforcing a stereotype that justifies the exclusion of the faculty perspective.

In other words, we faculty members meet to ratify what we cannot control but are only able to debate, and we end up looking as if we should not be allowed to control precisely what creative intellectual work requires us to control.

Mary: Mike, I absolutely agree! The most important resource an academic institution has is the brain power and intellectual capacity of its faculty members. As an administrator, I feel that my imperative is to find ways to channel that capacity and creativity to improve the institution. I would like to think that most administrators feel this way.

However, I have to admit that you are correct in saying that many administrators feel that faculty members are unable to manage the business of higher education and that professors actually get in the way of efficiently running the institution. There are often jokes that if only we could get rid of the faculty, we would have a top-performing institution. I am often in the minority with my belief that the strength of higher ed is in the tension between administration and faculty. From my point of view, administrators are charged with simultaneously facilitating and constraining the creativity of the faculty. I see this as the ultimate challenge of administration.

Mike: I wish I could see more of what you’re talking about. I would love to meet more administrators who actually try to do this. I think that you are rarer than you seem to think you are. The tension you refer to as a strength exists independently of the difference between administrators and faculty members. That is, it is generally good to be creative within limits, but it’s often important to challenge limits. Administrators often feel that their experience as faculty members is not compromised by their sense of the requirements of their administrative position, but it seems to me that very few can actually retain their respect for and willingness to give weight to faculty members in determining many aspects of educational policy, including deciding standards for evaluating the work of colleagues. Institutional forces that respond to markets and that rely on the model of a business firm are now a bit overwhelming from the point of view of most faculty members.

As I see it, the tension exists, and I agree that it should allow the balance you yourself have achieved as an administrator. Institutionally, it is a tension faculty members feel without relief, and administrations are escalating it.

Mary: I  think that escalation is often the result of the reality of constraints — most importantly, of time and money. Working with faculty members, working on creative endeavors, thinking differently — all of these require time. Most administrators I know are overworked, overbooked, and putting in more than 60-hour work weeks. They do not have the time to sit with professors to discuss their ideas, to facilitate creativity in their institution. I feel that this is unacceptable and it has to change. However, I think this change will be painful It will require greater commitment to collaboration, trust from both parties, and a higher tolerance for risk-taking from administrators.

Mike, you say that I am rare, but I think that the experiences of academics from my generation are different. Many of us place a strong value on personal time, work/life balance, and a meaningful work life. For me, meaningful administration means working with creative faculty members to bring about exciting new projects at my institution.

It would be nice to hear about the experiences of our readers. Although I am particularly interested in hearing about institutions where creative relationships between faculty and administration have flourished, I also want to hear about some of the worst-case scenarios.