Who’s Got the Power?

Written with Michael Brown

Mike: Administration and faculty need to cooperate in order to bring together two of the main aims of the institution, credentialing and educating—without sacrificing the latter to what appears to be an emphasis on selling credentials. There are problems in going beyond this idea in principle to a practical solution. For example, you mention, Mary, that it is important for tenured faculty to participate more in the “marketing” of the institution and, perhaps you would add, to do so in a way that gives substance to the idea that credentialing without education is like a commodity with no use. We need to discuss how this might be done.

Mary: Although I think this type of conversation around marketing is important, I am not naive enough to think that this would be easy to do. I also won’t pretend that most professors are “camera ready” or even willing to talk about how to make teaching and learning sexy. How do you capture the excitement of learning in a classroom in ways that transfer to a Web site or a view book? How do you convince your more-corporate admissions and marketing teams that faculty needs to provide input into the selling of the institution?

A conversation about how to market an institution is just one small, but concrete, example of a situation where faculty and administration need to work together.

Mike: This is certainly one problem in professors joining in the task of selling education. Serious work is, of course, serious, and that seems to be an obstacle to certain forms of marketing. But there are is another obstacle that I want to mention that you alluded to.

It is difficult for faculty to penetrate what many believe is a kind of administrative-culture defensiveness about its role in higher education. If that belief is at least somewhat true, then it is also reasonable to expect administrators to denigrate faculty as part of their self-defense. This is done in subtle but decisive ways: Faculty members are portrayed as engaging in turf wars, being interested primarily in their careers and less so in educational values, and so forth. All of these implied accusations appear to be designed to release administrators from the first obligation of dialogue when the parties are not equal in power. Those with power, in this case administrators, need to be able to subject themselves to faculty before asking the same thing of faculty.

The power differential that now exists, and that is reinforced by a defensive culture that consistently imposes itself on educational practice, places an obligation on administration to make the first move and to lean over backwards to make that work. That, I believe, is the first condition of faculty being able to “trust” administration.

Mary: I disagree with your portrayal of administrators having all of the power in our institutions. As a group, tenured faculty members have more power than they are often willing to wield. I realize that this differs drastically from institution to institution. But, as I see it, the much bigger problem is that this power is rapidly diminishing as senior faculty members retire, as lines are eliminated, and as contingent faculty are hired to pick up the teaching load. On many campuses, real power is being replaced by symbolic power as your numbers diminish.

Mike, I don’t think our main goal should be weakening administration. Instead, I think we should focus on strengthening faculty. If we want to improve our institutions while focusing on teaching and learning, this has to be a dialogue of equals, which will require transparency, trust, respect, and the ability to have difficult conversations and to make tough decisions.

Too often, it seems like faculty either want to have the power or complain about their lack of power. Just as administrators need to listen to and respect faculty, faculty need to find a way to value and respect the work that administrators do.

Readers, what do you think? Who’s got the power?