Faculty Work/Administrative Work

It’s no surprise to anyone in higher education that there are often considerable tensions between faculty members and “the administration,” an amorphous group of people who may or may not include chairs, deans, academic vice presidents, student-affairs people, and others whose duties are not primarily classroom instruction and research.

I think about these tensions a lot, and for all kinds of reasons including my intense desire to minimize them here when I can. An atmosphere of trust and collaboration is obviously much more likely to be productive than one in which the players don’t believe in each other’s good intentions and willingness to carry out agreements and plans.

I’ve recently had some correspondence with a professional friend about a provost who quietly overruled the actions of a series of faculty committees that developed plans to strengthen a particular program. I have very few specifics about this situation, but it strikes me that it represents a very serious failure to adhere to either the letter or the spirit of “shared governance.” It’s my philosophy that, in general, the faculty should determine the curriculum, and that the time to forestall a change I think would not be positive is long before it reaches my desk for final approval.

There are some challenges with shared governance, however, that need to be acknowledged. I’ve recently received my first administrative evaluation, which is a biennial evaluation conducted by the faculty senate. I’m quite happy with the responses I’ve received to my work—they reflect the goals I’ve tried to develop and meet over the past couple of years, and indicate basically that faculty members are satisfied with my work.

One concern that comes up in these evaluations, though, gives me some pause, and not least because I recognize it as completely true. This concern has to do with my timely completion of major projects and initiatives. In the time I’ve been here, we’ve gotten several very large things done, but there are a few things that are still hanging, which doesn’t make me happy. However, there are reasons for this that I can’t completely control.

Right before summer, for example, a group of colleagues decided that we should reorganize how we manage our small online graduate program in education. I agreed. This discussion occurred in May, though, and about a week later, faculty members left for the summer. I could certainly have reorganized the program over the summer, but doing so would have meant excluding most of the faculty members from the conversation, and presenting them with a fait accompli upon their return to campus this week. Such a course would have been efficient, but inadvisable. It would have placed a priority on efficiency, which is a secondary value, rather than collaboration and shared governance, which is a primary value. If you value collaboration, you need to work with the people who have the expertise to make smart decisions, and who will be affected by those decisions—there’s simply no other way to do it, and if they aren’t around, the task won’t get done.

The other thing that makes me fall behind is a consequence of my working style, which I developed as an English professor. I can complete large projects very quickly, but in order to do so, I need minimal or no interruptions—in other words, I need to have several hours specifically dedicated to the task. But it is virtually impossible for me to define such periods. There are phone calls to answer, crises to deal with, meetings to attend, and complaints to resolve literally every single day of every single week of my working year. I confess that I am still struggling with how best to handle the clash between my working style and the nature of my actual job duties.

Finally, people in my position don’t just work on one big project but on a multitude of them. I can rattle off at least five major projects that require many hours of my time that are sitting on my desk right now. When I was a faculty member without much administrative responsibility, I usually had one or two big projects (scholarship, teaching preps, maybe something for the college) on hand at any one time. Even though the quantity of work wasn’t all that much lower, the diversity and urgency of it were  radically different.

There’s no way to understand that difference until one has sat in both chairs. I have also never seen an institution where the pace of change or the rate at which problems are tackled is universally pleasing to faculty and staff members. But faculty work and administrative work are so different that, even with the best will in the world, there are surely going to be conflicts about how such work gets done.