Can a written test determine whether a faculty member is a bully or a jerk or an all-around pain in the neck?
Two higher-education consultants believe they have an instrument that does just that. They call it the Collegiality Assessment Matrix, and they are promoting it to colleges as a tool for both professional development and faculty evaluations.
The two consultants, Jeffrey L. Buller, dean of the honors college at Florida Atlantic University, and Robert E. Cipriano, a professor emeritus of recreation and leisure studies at Southern Connecticut State University, say the test offers something colleges have long needed: a reliable means of identifying good and bad behavior in the academic workplace.
The instrument is objective enough, they say, to enable colleges to weigh collegiality as a distinct criterion in making decisions related to faculty members’ reappointment, promotion, or tenure. By using it, the consultants say, colleges can confront faculty members over actions that vex their colleagues and either coach them on how to behave better or, if necessary, show them the door.
A companion instrument, the Self-Assessment Matrix, lets faculty members examine their own behavior and see how well their self-perceptions match up with the impressions others have of them.
“Why do we in higher education accept noncollegial behavior?” asks Mr. Cipriano, who plans to discuss the consultants’ work this week at the American Association of University Professors’ annual conference, in Washington. While disagreements are inevitable in a workplace where ideas are freely exchanged, he says, “academic freedom does not give a person a right to be obnoxiously nasty and toxic to anyone.”
Several of the dozens of colleges that have purchased the tests have stopped short of using them for faculty evaluations, however, because of actual or feared resistance from faculty members or their unions.
Fayetteville State University, for example, ended up dropping any discussion of using the Collegiality Assessment Matrix in faculty evaluations because faculty members “did not like the idea” and feared that the evaluations would be too subjective, says Linda Wilson-Jones, a professor of educational leadership and chair of the Faculty Senate. Instead, the university just referred to the instrument for guidance in crafting a statement on collegiality for its faculty handbook.
Other colleges have ended up administering one or both of the tests solely for professional-development purposes or are still figuring out how they might use them.
Mr. Cipriano faces a potentially hostile crowd in presenting his ideas to AAUP members. The association has long taken the position that collegiality, in itself, should never serve as a criterion in faculty evaluations. Far too often, the group says, faculty members are accused of lacking it simply because they are outspoken or hold unpopular views. At most, it says, collegiality should be considered as an element of the three other criteria that faculty members are judged on: teaching, research, and service.
Gregory Scholtz, director of the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, says he remains skeptical that any instrument for assessing collegiality is so objective that it could not be misused to chill faculty speech.
“All too often,” he says, “we have seen faculty members get in trouble because of a lack of conformity, or a lack of harmony, with their department or with institutional goals.” Were he a junior faculty member facing evaluation on the “nebulous quality” of collegiality, he says, “I think I would be a little more hesitant to speak my mind on controversial issues.”
Facts or Feelings?
The Collegiality Assessment Matrix consists of 10 statements about the behavior of the faculty member being evaluated. Respondents rate how true each statement rings on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 for “strongly disagree” to 5 for “strongly agree.” If people lack enough familiarity with the person to provide a given response, they can say so; overall scores are based on the average scores only for the questions answered. Comments are solicited after each question and at the assessment’s end.
One of the statements inviting expressions of agreement or disagreement says: “The faculty member speaks in a professional manner to others in his or her unit. For example, he or she avoids making remarks that are caustic, disparaging, undermining, or embarrassing.” Another says: “The faculty member respects the decision-making processes of the unit, allowing issues to be resolved according to established procedures.”
The Self-Assessment Matrix presents similar statements but are phrased to be inward-looking. One says: “I behave in a professional manner toward others in my unit. For example, I avoid such behaviors as frequent displays of anger or irritability, contemptuous or dismissive conduct, or the refusal to grant others in the unit common courtesies.” Another says: “I follow through on professional tasks and deadlines so as not to inconvenience, delay, or burden others in the unit.”
Mr. Buller and Mr. Cipriano say the two tests protect faculty members from false accusations of noncollegiality by focusing on observable behaviors rather than on others’ perceptions of their personalities or attitudes.
Upon hearing some of the questions from the Collegiality Assessment Matrix, however, Mr. Scholtz, of the AAUP, argued that elements of them deal not with actions but with personality characteristics he regards as “dangerous to even pretend to objectively quantify.” Words like “caustic” or “disparaging,” he says, can mean different things to different people.
Cathy A. Trower, research director at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, based at Harvard University, says the tests are potentially useful in faculty development but sees the format as “assigning numbers to subjective feelings, essentially.”
David R. Evans, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Buena Vista University, says he worries that the instruments fail to account for important context in examining faculty interactions. On his campus, for example, in Iowa, faculty members from the Midwest can be thrown off by the communication styles of people from California or New York.
“You have to be very, very careful to sort out things that are cultural differences,” he says. “It is well known that people are most comfortable around people like themselves, and the natural response to difference is to frame it as negative.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Evans adds, he sees some consideration of faculty members’ collegiality as valid in making personnel decisions. “You don’t want to tenure somebody who is just going to wreck your community.”
Toes in the Water
Mr. Cipriano says his interest in collegial relations in the academic workplace stems from a bitter experience early in his academic career, when he became chairman of a department that was being ripped asunder by an abusive faculty member. In recent national surveys of academic-department heads that he has conducted with Richard L. Riccardi, director of Southern Connecticut State’s Office of Management Information and Research, respondents have consistently ranked dealing with noncollegial faculty members as their biggest challenge. Solid majorities of survey respondents expressed support for considering collegiality as a separate criterion in tenure decisions.
Two years ago, Mr. Cipriano wrote the book Facilitating a Collegial Department in Higher Education: Strategies for Success, which provides practical advice for maintaining harmony within academic departments. At about that time, he and Mr. Buller, who operate Academic Training Leadership & Assessment Services, a consulting firm, found themselves in demand among colleges struggling with bad faculty behavior: bullying, personal sniping in large meetings, passive-aggressive work-shirking. They began developing their assessment matrices, with Mr. Cipriano taking the lead role, partly to develop a clear definition of what good behavior looks like.
The two sought the advice of experts on academic freedom and workplace relations and had the matrices tested by faculty members and department chairs. “We got consensus on a number of behaviors that really were at the heart of collegiality,” says Mr. Buller, who, to avoid any conflict of interest, does not use the instruments at his own university, Florida Atlantic.
The consulting firm has sold about 500 copies of the assessments to colleges around the nation, pricing them at $20 each, less when purchased in volume. The price they settled on is intended mainly to send a message that they hold the rights to the instruments, to discourage their being photocopied. Their consulting firm continues to earn most of its revenue from providing hands-on training and workshops at colleges in the United States and abroad.
Both of the assessments can be taken online, for a fee, and Mr. Buller says he is hopeful that they will be used widely enough to eventually generate national data that colleges can use to compare their workplace environments with those of similar institutions.
The consultants could not, however, name any college that is using their collegiality assessments in faculty evaluations.
Among those that have purchased the assessments, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte plans to have its freshman engineering program try them out without actually using them as a basis for any personnel decisions, says Ronald E. Smelser, senior associate dean for academic affairs. The goal of the test run, he says, is “to see if it makes any sense to do this on a broader basis as part of our tenure-and-promotion process.”
Western Kentucky University’s School of Nursing came up with the idea of using the Self-Assessment Matrix to screen applicants for faculty and staff positions as it expands. But it found the test of little use, because few of those seeking jobs appeared willing to admit to being tough to be around. “Everybody says they are wonderful, everybody says they work well with others,” says Mary P. Bennett, the school’s director.
Miami Dade College asked academic-department heads to take the Self-Assessment Matrix about a month ago, as part of a two-day training workshop, and “people seemed to feel they got a lot out of exercise” in terms of self-awareness, says Greg W. Sharp, director of professional-development programs.
Mr. Sharp says Miami Dade is considering the Collegiality Assessment Matrix as well in such workshops but is a long way from using it to evaluate faculty members, in part because iadministrators and the faculty union would have to be on board.
If faculty members were ever denied tenure on the basis of how people answered the assessment, “there would be grievances and lawsuits,” he predicts, “because it is not part of the culture.”
