Note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department answers your questions about departmental leadership. Send your queries via Twitter, Facebook, or email. Read previous columns here.
Question: My department is characterized by what might be called a bimodal age distribution: One half is quite senior, the other half untenured assistant or recently tenured associate professors. The most senior professors in my department have been here for three decades longer than the most junior. They completed their graduate training in the last decade of the previous century, and some have been better at keeping up with developments in their fields than others.
As a result of this “generation gap,” I’m having a hard time moving an agenda forward for the department: The junior faculty members fear direct or indirect retribution from the senior contingent if they push for changes that the longest tenured don’t wish to see. (Full disclosure: I’m on the “senior” side of this great divide.)
I’m sure that, to paraphrase Tolstoy, each unhappy department is unhappy in its own way, and there are particulars and histories at play here that I won’t go into. But are there any general principles for dealing with this kind of generational stalemate?
Signed,
Stymied Chair
Dear Stymied,
It’s cold comfort, I’m sure, but the situation that you describe is hardly unique to your department: In my work with chairs across the country, this dynamic is one of the top sources of departmental strife. It’s rooted, at least in part, in a fundamental bit of human psychology — I’m not sure what to call it, but I can tell you I’m feeling it myself. As I begin my 34th year of full-time college teaching, my self-image is still that of my freshly credentialed visiting assistant professor self, newest kid on the block.
But in the wake of an unexpected summer retirement in my department, I suddenly find that I’m its oldest member. How did that happen? How could that have happened?
A year ago in July, I wrote for The Chronicle about academe’s difficulties in dealing with faculty retirement. In response, I received quite a few “amen” emails, which was gratifying. But I also got an alarming number of notes from professors insisting that after 30, 40, or more years in the saddle, they were proud that they “still had it.”
Now the issue here isn’t whether or not your senior colleagues are still fit for the work they do. Rather, it’s what they’re doing — or what the junior contingent fears they will do — with the institutional privilege they’ve amassed. The fact that one remains good at one’s work past the traditional age of retirement does not mean one has all the answers to the enrollment, financial, and curricular questions facing the department.
It seems to me there are two fundamental challenges in the situation you describe, though they bleed into one another:
- First, how can you as chair promote more productive cross-generational conversations among your colleagues?
- And second, how can you protect the academic freedom (and future careers) of the least powerful faculty members?
I can offer some tried-and-true strategies on both fronts, though of course no one of them offers a single solution to this complex problem. To promote open, equitable conversations:
Let everyone speak before anyone speaks twice. In a small department, that can take the form of going around the circle to make a space for everyone’s thoughts and contribution — just be careful that no one feels put on the spot. If, rather than working your way systematically around the room, you as chair are recognizing those who wish to speak, be alert to junior voices — and if possible, allow them to weigh in first. Sometimes what they wish to say is much easier if a dominant senior colleague hasn’t already framed the terms of the debate.
In a large department, the simpler way to proceed is to stop colleagues who are poised to make their second remarks and open the floor to any who have not yet spoken.
Ask for evidence in support of claims. Arguments based on “the way we’ve always done things” simply reinforce the status quo. Press instead for data, especially from external sources. That might be the structure of the major at peer departments; a survey of job advertisements in the field; or exit interviews with graduating seniors, alumni surveys, or programs reviews. If the field is changing (and whatever your field — it is!), fight the tendency to look inward by providing context from outside the department.
Make strategic use of secret ballots. This one is complicated for me: I’ve made the case before that tenure-and-promotion votes at the department level should not use a secret ballot (though of course the details of the vote should be kept from the candidate), because the stakes are too high for a faculty member to be allowed to hide personal animus behind “the secrecy of the ballot box.” At most institutions, faculty members must hold the rank and tenure of the candidate whom they’re voting on, so there’s no chance that their own tenure/promotion down the line will be jeopardized.
But there are plenty of other issues like curricula, hiring, student prizes, etc.— some of them important and/or controversial — on which untenured and junior faculty members do get to vote. Using a secret ballot on such votes makes it possible for early-career academics to vote their conscience without putting their future in the department at risk.
Throw your own gravitas behind those who need it. You have a unique opportunity, Stymied, since you enjoy the privileges of senior-professor status while recognizing its potential for abuse. Use your own position to call other senior scholars to account, since junior faculty members may not feel able to do so.
Those same strategies can help protect the academic freedom and professional future of junior scholars. But here are two others to consider:
Remember that your dean has tools at their disposal that you do not. You have been cultivating a healthy, mutually respectful relationship with your dean, right? A difficult intergenerational feud may be one of those occasions when it’s helpful to use the leverage of that relationship. Your dean has institutional power (and potential carrots and sticks) that you don’t have — and could bring it to bear in trying to resolve the conflict.
But you can only play that card so often without risking your relationship with your fellow professors. And there’s a risk, too, that the dean, once invited into the internal affairs of your department, may not leave when the “assignment” you gave is over.
Emphasize to junior colleagues that the tenure process includes important checks and balances. Ideally, you talk about the tenure process during your ongoing mentorship of junior faculty members. Precise procedures vary from campus to campus, but tenure and promotion always requires evidence — including course evaluations from students, peer teaching evaluations, peer-reviewed scholarship or creative work, and an assessment of that work from outside reviewers. Help your tenure candidates understand: One vitriolic student evaluation in an otherwise glowing set calls unwanted attention to itself (and the unfairness of its author); one prickly outside review is read in the context of, and suffers by comparison with, the five other measured assessments. So, too, the voice of one cranky colleague (even if it’s a loud one) will not derail an otherwise-sound tenure or promotion case.
It may be important to go ahead and say all of that out loud in your meetings with junior scholars. But don’t raise the specter of bad behavior if it hasn’t already reared its head. When it does, that is when to do some trouble-shooting. But there’s no point adding more anxiety to an already-anxious tenure process without good reason.
I suppose that the general principle here is something like “isolate and protect” — isolate the tenured instigators and protect the least powerful. I’m not crazy about either of those terms, as they seem too extreme. Isolate is too punitive (never mind impossible, in practice, to achieve), and protect is too paternalistic. What I mean is: Think about the barriers you might put between the most powerful (isolate them) and the most vulnerable (protect them).
Different chairs have different styles of doing the work — to be simplistic, some of us lead with our heads, some with our hearts. Depending on your personal style, this might be an opportunity for you, as a colleague with both seniority and a leadership role, to model the kind of openness to change, and civility amid difficult conversations, that you hope to see reign in your department.
