There was a time not so long ago when I did my best to avoid being asked questions. I had forsaken administration to return to the faculty, and I didn’t want to be the person I had been—the tactician, the politician, the person charged with being an emissary from the world of the classroom to those office suites wherein I had once passed my time as others got on with the real work for which colleges and universities were created.
Nowadays no one asks me those insider questions. Because one thing has become abundantly clear in the 18 months since I closed the door of the dean’s office, handed in the keys, and went back to the classroom: I am growing increasingly ignorant about the inner workings of our institution.
But even as my ignorance grows, I am learning more and more about what matters: students, learning, and the connections between the two. Or, at least, it seems to me that those are what should matter at a university.
Being out of the loop, it turns out, does have certain advantages, and my steadily growing ignorance about internal affairs allows me to offer some advice to faculty colleagues looking to engage with their institution without losing themselves in it.
When I meet colleagues in the corridors now and ask them how things are going, I can be surprised to hear that they are no longer department chair, or, conversely, are now serving as a department chair, or that they have just returned from a sabbatical, or will soon start one. Such changes that once so concerned me now seem to happen mysteriously.
Surveys arrive in my e-mail from the administration and I wonder: Did we ask as many questions of faculty members when I was one of those doing the asking? We did. No doubt the talk among administrators about the low response rates hasn’t changed either. Soon my attention is captured by the next e-mail—from a student with a question or an internship supervisor with a request—and I never get back to the survey.
But the truth is, I never get back to it not because there isn’t time but because I just can’t see how it matters what I have to say. I’m not thrilled when ignorance rather than curiosity makes it into the classroom, and I find myself reluctant to disseminate my own ignorance, even when promised anonymity.
I am also unsure why I need to be asked. I have no idea, for example, if we have adequate parking on the campus. Certainly most people would say we don’t, but why that is the case I don’t know, and how to fix the problem is something about which I am equally uninformed. More important, I can’t see how it will help if I take the time to develop a working knowledge of transportation policy and traffic engineering. There are people who already have those skills. I’m not happy when people tell me how to teach. Why should I be in the business of advising our parking planners?
Nor do I have any idea if our food-services contract delivers nutritionally appropriate meals. And I certainly don’t know if the library or the campus fitness center is open for long-enough hours. Sometimes they seem very crowded when I visit, sometimes not. Some days my classes jell and everything is a model of what I am striving for; other days nothing seems to work. I wouldn’t appreciate suggestions from librarians or personal trainers based on a visit here and there about how I might better employ my time and resources. Why should I presume to tell them how to go about their business?
I have a hard enough time trying to understand the curriculum changes proposed in cognate departments, changes that might or might not make sense given trends in student demographics, institutional hiring plans, and resource allocations—things about which I am now, by and large, ignorant.
I teach communications. I can tell you about the strengths and weaknesses of crowd sourcing. I can tell you about social media, about connecting with your constituents and your stakeholders. I can help students distinguish grass-roots campaigns from Astroturf campaigns and reporting from commentary. But the most important piece of advice I offer students, time and time again, is that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” an aphorism that would seem to have been coined by Frank Kotsonis, Raymond Wolfinger, or Roger Brinner (a useful demonstration in itself of the problem of crowd sourcing).
Yet all I can offer my institution now, in its questions about administrative matters, is anecdote.
As I commit myself to teaching, to students, to departmental needs, to professional development, and to scholarship, something has to give—and it’s certain types of service work on which I can be of no help. So I would offer the following advice to faculty colleagues who are looking to be involved without that service work taking over their lives.
First, don’t worry about what you don’t know. Life isn’t a game of Humiliation as described by David Lodge—unless you want it to be.
Focus on what you do know. That seems obvious, but every day I hear my colleagues voice concerns about what they don’t know and how it may surprise them and undermine their prospects of reappointment or promotion. To prove that they are team players, and that the well-being of the institution matters greatly to them, they sign up for committees and throw themselves into work that someone else can do better. And then they find they are always playing catch-up, trying to learn budget processes, master the nuances of enrollment management, or understand the subtleties of strategic planning.
Those are important tasks, and we all suffer when they go wrong. It matters that the people responsible for those tasks get them right. And, yes, there are faculty members who can bring experience or insight to those undertakings.
But there are also those of us who can’t.
The real benefit of knowing our own ignorance is that we work in a profession in which we can avoid having that ignorance exposed so long as we don’t offer ourselves up. One does not need to serve in strategic planning to secure a tenured faculty position, and one does not need to serve in enrollment management to earn a promotion. Neither does one have to do either of those things to improve as a teacher and mentor.
Of course, should you wish one day to be a dean or provost or president, it is wise and professionally appropriate to undertake such service work. But don’t confuse that with your primary obligations. And don’t take your colleagues’ gratitude for your willingness to sit in on long and frequent planning meetings as anything other than relief that your presence in that room spares them the likelihood of having to be there.
Faculty service to the institution matters. The professionalization of academic administration has not been good for institutions in many ways. Too few administrators today have much sense of what it means to teach, and in an era in which many senior administrators change jobs every few years, too few of them understand the pedagogical opportunities and challenges of their institutions. Administrators need faculty members to speak up.
But we should speak up only when we have something to say. What should concern us as faculty members is outcomes. It doesn’t matter, for example, how, exactly, the enrollment-management staff creates an ideal freshman class. What matters is that the class represents both the institution’s ambitions and its faculty’s competencies. And it is to such outcomes that faculty members can speak.
What matters most to us as faculty members is work in which, while the outcomes count, the process also matters. We know something about developing valid assessments of student learning, about creating experiential and field-learning programs that are effective, and about defining our own departments’ abilities to contribute to knowledge in our fields. We can, and should, share what we know about those processes.
But we should respect the experiences of those who practice in areas of the university with which we are unfamiliar. Outcomes are the appropriate subject of collegewide discussions. Implementation processes are best left to those charged with implementation.
Finally, then, perhaps the best test of whether it makes sense to volunteer for committee or other administrative work is simply this: Will the service experience help you improve the classroom experience for yourself and your students? If you can answer yes, go for it. If not, don’t.
But don’t ever be shy about admitting ignorance about how your institution works. Ignorance is not bliss, but it sure can be a practical guide in your career.
