Making Committee Service Count

If you’re an administrator, it’s easy to make faculty members distrust you. Appoint them to committees whose protracted deliberations go nowhere. Exercise favoritism in assigning plum appointments. Give mere lip service to shared governance.

But work well with the varied committees that typically share in running a campus, and faculty colleagues will salute you.

Listening to faculty advice, and using it, is “so rare as to be incredibly appreciated,” says Abigail J. Stewart, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and an authority on faculty life. Her observation, from almost 40 years of seeing administrators come and go, is that morale-building collaboration is “the low-hanging fruit of administrative success.”

“It’s really important to have a way for the faculty and staff perspective and ideas to be expressed,” agrees James M. Glaser, dean of arts and sciences at Tufts University and a political scientist. “We don’t own all the good ideas.”

For decades, American higher education, with its long tradition of shared governance, has fretted over the burdens of faculty service and workloads more generally. Of late, demands for service, along with demands on administrators, have swelled because of such forces as increased oversight by accrediting and government agencies: of campus safety, teaching effectiveness, sex and race discrimination, and much else.

Making Committee Service Count

Serving on faculty panels is often seen as a thankless task, but colleges can make it more rewarding by agreeing on goals and spreading the work fairly.

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That has happened even while academic institutions have, unwittingly perhaps, heaped faculty-service work onto fewer and fewer faculty members. A large majority of the nation’s professoriate is now made up of adjunct instructors or other faculty members who aren’t eligible for tenure, and whose heavy teaching loads allow for few, if any, service duties. The ranks of full-time professors are thinning, even as the burden of committee work mounts.

Large institutions typically have numerous committees at the department, college, and campus levels. Among those at the University of Southern California, for example, are the University Committee on Curriculum, the University Convocations Committee, and the Conflict of Interest Review Committee — panels you might expect to find on many campuses. But the university also has a Radiation Safety Committee, a Joint Academic Senate/Provost Committee on Deadlines and Leaves, and an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, among many others.

So, how do administrators get the most from all these committees? How can they best consult with faculty members who want a say in who teaches, gets tenure, or wins research funding, but probably aren’t eager to pore over troubling budget sheets or gloomy enrollment forecasts? How can they work constructively with committee members who might like to decide which departments grow or shrink, or oversee how retirement funds get invested, or determine whether a student has been capriciously graded but would rather not spend time deliberating over landscaping and parking facilities?

A key question for administrators, say veterans of shared governance, is how much they really want faculty involvement. It can be frustrating to work with sharply analytical professors who may be far more knowledgeable about the college than is the dean who oversees them, but it can become impossible if they suspect that administrators want committees merely to rubber-stamp a decision. Faculty members know to be skeptical of such statements as: “This is going to be a completely faculty-driven process.”

At research universities, promotion-and-tenure policies commonly mention research, teaching, and faculty service as the three core criteria for faculty evaluation, with a 40-40-20 split. But for years, participants in tenure deliberations have reported that faculty service rates barely a mention — nor, in fact, does teaching. Committee membership, student mentoring, community outreach, and work with national groups tied to academic fields may all have a bearing on merit pay, but publishing and obtaining grant money are widely seen to count most.

At two- and four-year teaching colleges, service matters more: “Collegiality” is valued, and gauged, because it often determines whether colleges can run smoothly. But beware of expecting too much of team players, say seasoned observers, who know that outstanding service on one committee can get somebody hauled onto several more.

In particular, it is widely documented that women and members of underrepresented minority groups perform more service, both formally and informally, both by request and voluntarily. They frequently serve as role models, mentors, and even surrogate parents. Researchers speak of a “cultural taxation” that administrators levy on such professors to meet goals of racial, ethnic, and gender representation.

In contrast, plenty of faculty members shirk service or discourage future requests by serving poorly. But in the absence of a sort of intellectual idealism, it’s difficult for administrators and faculty members to advance a shared vision, says Mark William Roche, author of the new book Realizing the Distinctive University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture (University of Notre Dame Press). He says that while he served for 11 years as dean of arts and sciences at Notre Dame before returning to faculty ranks, he always took service into account in tenure-and-promotion hearings — and even voted down professors who neglected it — “for the simple reason that the flourishing of a university depends on people who, after having done good service at their departmental level, are the kind of people you can count on to contribute at higher levels.”

But idealism is not enough, he adds, because some faculty members will never volunteer for the heavy lifting that some committees require. In those cases, enticements might help. For example, members of hiring committees often find the work more engaging if a dean has offered an extra faculty position for hires that enhance specific institutional goals.

Campuses’ rosters of committees sometimes require pruning. Check that duties and membership numbers are warranted; perhaps delegate deliberations on specific areas, such as international education or academic preparedness, to fixed-term working groups. Be aware that labeling groups “special,” “ad hoc,” or “blue ribbon” may set off alarms that such an assignment could be a wild-goose chase.

Other common advice: Rotate service on duty-heavy committees such as those that hear disciplinary cases, hire new faculty members, or revise curricula. Ask new faculty members how they’d like to serve, based on their expertise and interests. Compensate extensive service with course reductions and other awards. Protect junior faculty members from excessive service duties so they can improve their chances of earning tenure.

Also pay heed, recommends Michigan’s Ms. Stewart, to an often-overlooked issue in faculty service: the tendency of newly tenured associate professors to commit to too much service. They still have to publish if they are to attain full professorships. “White men are not exempt from this,” she says. “They may be asked to be the chair of their department.”

Faculty members are often not as resistant to service as is widely supposed. Research shows that constructive service increases faculty retention, a sense of community, and positive attitudes toward administrators. Many professors also realize that if they do not involve themselves in often-tedious department and campus business (which may entail learning terms like “programmatic needs” and “contraction”), they cede power to administrators.

In any case, service introduces faculty members to nooks and crannies of campus operations — financial-aid, facilities, and information-technology offices, for example — that they otherwise might not encounter. (And it certainly provides them with a more informed variety of campus gossip — crucial for those who aspire to administrative ranks.) Of course, not only colleges are vying for professors’ service. Many faculty members do community outreach or aspire to committee appointments within the learned societies of their academic fields. Those appointments can bring prestige “not just for yourself, but also for your department, if you’re from a smaller department or institution,” says Julie Cidell, an associate professor of geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She’s a member of the American Association of Geographers’ Committee on Committees, which wrangles spots on the organization’s many other committees.

Additions to committee workloads seem to come from everywhere. Those national organizations, for example, increasingly are granting national and regional awards for research, teaching, and service, which have become a sort of currency for academic standing. Whom to nominate? Whom to select?

The answer seems to be to appoint more committees.

Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle. Email him at pmonaghan3@mac.com.