Although the higher education landscape offers an endless stream of issues to worry about — budgets, enrollments, degree completion, adjunctification — nothing in the current climate worries me more than the seemingly unbreachable chasm between many faculty and administrators.
That breach is so well known that it seems to require no explication or explanation, and can just be referred to in quick throwaway stereotypes: Administrators are soulless robots, faculty are entitled divas. Each side blames the other for being too pushy, too obstructionist, and too damned expensive.
There’s plenty to be said about the 40-year history of how we got to this place, and the news does not lack for examples of (yes) bad administrators and (yes) problem professors. But the fact is, we are now a house divided. What many campuses could use, it seems to me, immediately and practically, is a program that introduces faculty members to the real work of administration (which is significantly less soulless than some faculty envision) and the individual humans that conduct that work (read about one such program here). Similarly, we need a program that puts administrators, at least occasionally, in the role of faculty — not just observing and evaluating teaching (which is comparatively easy), but themselves engaging in the labor that they’d purport to manage and judge.
When you don’t know what to do, I believe you should do the next small right thing. And to me, the next small right thing — a low-cost, relatively easy to implement, drop-in-the-bucket-but-better-than-nothing solution — might be a two-part program I am calling “administration vacation.”
The first part of the program would reward faculty members who spend two to four weeks shadowing an administrator on the job. The second part of the program would reward administrators who teach a course in their discipline every three years. The comparatively slower pace of summer session could probably be used as the ideal time frame for both halves of this program — hence the “vacation” part of the deal.
While I don’t claim “administration vacation” as a cure-all, I can testify to the positive changes that such a program could produce. Like many faculty members, I hadn’t given much thought to administration beyond a vague, culturally embedded suspicion of it. Then my department’s associate dean unexpectedly retired and an interim was needed. I applied for the job on a whim, joking that administration would make a good sabbatical. I had no idea how right I would be: A year in an administrative role was an excellent sabbatical, offering me many insights on the dynamic between the faculty and administrative camps.
Here are just a few of the things I learned by teaching, administrating, and then returning to teaching. Many of these lessons apply equally to administrators and faculty members, like a double-page translation, demonstrating that the two sides are not always as separate as each of us think:
- Students, particularly en masse, can be aggravating. Administrators most often interact with students one-on-one, when they come in with a complaint. In those situations, they are on their best behavior, and in single units, their requests (for extra time on a paper, for the right to enter class late, for the exception to some rule) seem reasonable to accommodate. But administrators need to remember: Professors see such requests by the dozens, and what could be accommodated for the “one” can set an unreasonable precedent for the “all.” Be sensitive to that, and support faculty in the not-too-restrictive restrictions they put in place to manage a large group of students.
- Faculty, particularly en masse, can be aggravating. Faculty members each see themselves as a singleton, and in that context, our requests (for a different schedule, a different room, an exception to some rule) seem reasonable to accommodate. But — you can see where I’m going with this — administrators have the same large population challenges with faculty as faculty have with students. Sometimes the requests of the individual need to be subsumed to the needs of the group.
- Treat faculty as indispensable. There’s no greater disconnect, sometimes, between the extreme efforts the administration will take to make just the right new hire (poring over hundreds of CVs, all day wining and dining, hours of impassioned committee discussion) and the blasé attitude taken toward retaining (or even, if necessary, retraining) a faculty member. Your faculty is your talent base: They are all you’ve got. If you treat them like a logistical burden rather than a resource to be nurtured, your relationship will suffer.
- Faculty: For God’s sake, be indispensable. If you duck out of every service obligation, if you walk down a different hallway every time you see your dean coming, administrators are going to see you as replaceable, interchangeable, because they will have had to replace you with other, more reciprocal, participants.
- Sorry, but neither party — faculty or administrator — have the lock on “works the most hours.” My experience as an interim associate dean allows me to confirm that. In both camps, people work in different styles and in a different mix of hours. As an administrator, I would rue my life on Fridays; as a professor — facing a mountain of student emails and grading — I rue my life on Sunday afternoons. Both both jobs can be all-consuming and exhausting. There might be lazy faculty or lazy administrators out there somewhere, but they are more likely to be the exception than the rule.
In short, we as faculty members and administrators have to stop viewing one another as monolithic and antagonistic entities, and instead begin seeing ourselves as dedicated individuals and shared stakeholders working toward a common good.
We need more commitment from both camps toward solving the relational problems that bedevil our working relationships. My modest little proposal here is just one fumbling attempt at being part of the solution. If not an “administration vacation,” then we could all at least do with a vacation from objectifying and vilifying one another.
