Moving Up

The Divide

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By Ben Tryon

I spent nearly 25 years in higher education, first as a faculty member and then, for 17 years, as an academic administrator. During the last three years of my academic career, I was vice president for academic affairs at Upstart College, a small college in a rural area of the Northeast.

At Upstart College, I was finally making good money (the kind that junior executives in the Real World make before they turn 30). I also enjoyed the modest perks and social cachet associated with a vice-presidential title. As a member of the president's senior staff, I was positioned to influence the direction of the college in significant ways. And as the president who had hired me often told me, with another year or two of senior-level experience, I'd be a shoo-in for a college presidency.

Instead, I decided to resign my position, knowing full well that I was, in all likelihood, ending my academic career.

I had spent eight penurious years in graduate school preparing for a career in higher education. Why would I risk throwing that effort away when the payoff was just around the corner? No decision that momentous is made for a single reason. Looking back, however, I realize that a major reason was that I had simply grown tired of The Divide.

The Divide is that almost unbridgeable, us-versus-them gulf between faculty members and those who would lead them. I discovered it on the day my first administrative appointment was announced. I stopped in the hallway to say hello to a faculty colleague with whom I'd been on friendly terms for seven years. He responded with a suggestion that I attempt an anatomical impossibility.

As a faculty member, I had earned a reputation as a hard-working idealist and a person of intelligence and integrity. As soon as I assumed an administrative position, however, my reputation crumbled. I was simply one of Them.

The Divide became more pronounced as I accepted higher-level administrative appointments and moved from one institution to another. Because I had given up my role as a faculty member to become an administrator, many of my faculty colleagues automatically distrusted my motives. From their point of view, I could not possibly propose an initiative because I believed it would be good for our students. I had to be doing it either because someone higher up had told me to, or because I was a careerist fattening my résumé for my next move up the ladder. If I made an unpopular decision -- and every decision is unpopular with someone -- I was on a power trip.

My attempts to bridge The Divide were at best half-successes. For years, my wife and I held an annual party in our home, providing food and drink for 60 or 70 faculty members and their spouses. (No expense account paid for that party, mind you; the money came out of our pockets.)

Some of my faculty colleagues genuinely appreciated our hospitality and enjoyed the opportunity to mingle with their colleagues. Others couldn't shake their preconceptions. At a meeting with department heads a few weeks after one such party, the discussion turned to the (always fresh) topic of declining faculty morale. One chairman opined that I didn't do enough to bring faculty members together. In my mind's eye, I saw him standing in my living room a few short weeks before, a plate full of food in one hand, a microbrew in the other.

(It goes without saying that I had never been invited to his home. Morale-building is an administrative responsibility.)

Over time, I thought I'd adjusted to the reality of The Divide. I tried to accept it as a regrettable but unavoidable fact of administrative life. At Upstart College, though, I found an institution where The Divide had reached its apotheosis, codified in a 300-page collective-bargaining agreement.

Communication across The Divide was by grievance. Faculty members with a complaint -- or even just a concern or question -- didn't e-mail, call, or stop by my office. Instead, they filed a grievance alleging a violation of the collective-bargaining agreement.

As the designated step-one hearing officer, I reviewed two dozen grievances in my first year alone. With one or two exceptions, those grievances were trivial or frivolous. Nevertheless, I devoted hundreds of hours to conducting hearings, reviewing evidence, and writing opinions -- followed almost inevitably by step-two appeals, more hearings, threats of arbitration, conferences with the college lawyer, mediation meetings, and all the attendant paraphernalia of a quasilegal process run amuck.

If the only harm done to Upstart College by the collective-bargaining version of The Divide was the diversion of attention and energy from the real work of improving the quality of teaching and learning, it would have been bad enough. But the effect on the culture of the campus was far more insidious.

To be sure, some true believers were convinced that codifying The Divide leveled the playing field for faculty members who would otherwise be powerless before an indifferent or downright evil administration. More often, though, the faculty union served not the collective interests of the faculty -- still less the interests of the college -- but the selfish interests of disaffected, lazy, and incompetent faculty members.

Lest anyone think I'm exaggerating, consider this: In the decade before I joined Upstart College, and in the three years of my tenure as academic vice president, only one faculty member had been denied reappointment or tenure. And he, a junior faculty member universally regarded by his peers as a terrible teacher and a worse colleague, walked away from the college with a six-figure settlement and the full support of the faculty union.

Under the distorting pressure of The Divide, voting against a colleague's application for retention, tenure, or promotion was viewed not as an act of independent academic judgment in the best interest of the institution, but as anti-union and pro-administration.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that of all the faculty members who served on committees constituted to review candidates for reappointment, tenure, and promotion during my years at Upstart College, only one had the temerity to vote against a candidate. Others who had doubts about a candidate but didn't want to endure the abuse that would inevitably follow a no vote simply declined to serve on personnel committees.

As the chief academic officer, I submitted personnel recommendations that, on occasion, were at odds with favorable recommendations from the personnel committees. Invariably, the union responded with grievances.

For all the Sturm und Drang that followed, my efforts were quixotic at best. At Upstart College, The Divide had fatally undermined the very foundation of academic quality: faculty self-governance.

In the end, I came to realize that when good faculty members aren't allowed to live up to their professional responsibilities, it matters little who holds the nominal leadership position. No matter how fancy the title or how good the compensation, I didn't sign on to warm a chair or tilt at windmills. The Divide had won. I resigned.