In his recent book, The Synthetic University, James L. Shulman uses his experience building ArtStor, a digital-image library, to explore how partnerships can provide both efficiencies and better products for American higher education. The national context is important, given that our campuses tend to emphasize the local almost as a matter of faith. Shulman’s point is simple: Why should every college and university rely on local solutions rather than sharing ideas?
In my administrative roles, I have always been attracted to the best practices that emerge from shared solutions. For example, when I served as graduate dean at the University of Missouri, I worked with a dean at our longtime rival, the University of Kansas, to forge an agreement to recognize each other’s doctoral faculty members. That way the pool of mentors and committee members would double, and, in effect, we’d have the doctoral firepower, together, of a larger university like the University of Michigan. I still think it was a good idea. My chancellor favored it. Kansas’ chancellor, alas, rejected the proposal, which had been jointly submitted by the two institutions’ graduate deans. Pesky Jayhawks!
At the same time, I get that institutional differences create collective strengths. The range of American institutions of higher education — from community colleges to research universities — seems a great strength, serving students, towns, and local and regional economies alike.
I started this series, “The Provost Files,” in February 2022 when I wrote about why I was moving back into administration. In July of that year, I joined the University of Tulsa as provost. In those initial months, I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out the personnel, rules, history, and folkways of the institution. Any provost coming from the outside needs to do that, regardless of whether you have “a mandate for change.” It’s a responsibility borne out of respect for the faculty.
Now in my second year as provost, with knowledge and a bit of experience, I’m navigating between my growing understanding of the campus and my previous experience in higher education. I had been a faculty member at five R1 and R2 universities and an administrator at two, as well as serving on the national board of directors of the Council of Graduate Schools, through which I got to meet and learn from many institutional leaders. So I thought I understood accepted practices as well as most candidates for a senior leadership position might understand them.
I am sure I am not the first administrator-from-outside whose understanding has been challenged by local practices. I’m not a trained lawyer, but I’ve found myself reading our faculty handbook and needing to interpret it from several angles: the words as they are written, the practices as they have existed on the ground, and the best national practices as I understand them from previous work and study. Also, of course, I have my own ideas (we all do!) on how to make things better, regardless of campus rules or traditions.
Allow me to distill that mix of issues into a broad question about academic leadership: In dealing with issues under your purview as provost — faculty hiring, evaluation, tenure, promotion, curriculum — should you work to align your institution with its peers and with broad best practices, or should you preserve and encourage local practices?
That question is not so difficult to answer when the issue is basic, such as how many faculty members should serve on a department’s promotion-and-tenure committee. But what about when things get complicated?
My university offers a case in point. At Tulsa, it’s local tradition to require tenure-track assistant professors to participate in departmental votes on colleagues going up for promotion and tenure. That is: A first-year assistant professor is expected to vote on the tenure bid of fellow assistant professors, and is even supposed to understand whether a colleague should be promoted from associate to full professor.
I was a bit dumbfounded when I first learned of this practice, which is strongly defended by the faculty here, including the leader of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors. I asked a friend who heads up the AAUP chapter at a major public research university if he had (a) heard of this and (b) thought it a good practice. I got a resounding “no” on both questions.
This is typically thought to be bad practice for two main reasons:
- First, it creates a terrible (and obvious) conflict of interest for assistant professors. They could face “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” situations in which their own job security would be evaluated in a few years by people whom they voted to tenure. Or they could be lobbied to vote against candidates who are opposed by powerful tenured professors: “If you don’t vote ‘no’ today in the way I want, I’ll vote ‘no’ on your case in a few years.”
- Second, the presumption in academe is that only tenured academics — who have earned promotion thanks to their extensive research and teaching — have the requisite experience to make judgments about a faculty member’s work based on national and disciplinary norms.
When I pressed to change Tulsa’s custom, its defenders acknowledged that national practice might be against requiring assistant professors to vote on tenure-and-promotion cases, but they insisted that it worked at Tulsa. Because our university has such small departments, they argued, the practice is a necessity. (I wasn’t convinced.)
A few months ago, a department head asked how to set up a “review committee,” which prepares a report on the candidate up for tenure and promotion and makes a recommendation for the departmental vote. I dutifully went to our handbook, and saw that faculty members were not permitted to serve on committees judging “their own status.” I (with relief) told the department chair that he needed to keep assistant professors off such committees, as they would be reviewing faculty members of “their own status” — i.e., those also holding the rank of assistant professor.
A firestorm ensued! The “own status” phrasing, I was told, referred to a faculty member’s “own case” rather than their “same rank.” I responded with the two factors that had led to my interpretation: the dictionary definition of status and the national practice of keeping untenured assistant professors off committees judging other untenured assistant professors. I was told that I was citing the wrong definition and that, in any case, national practice was irrelevant. What was important was local past practice, which had allowed untenured assistant professors to serve on such committees.
My boss, the president, who has a law degree and, indeed, served as general counsel for the Army under President Barack Obama, supported my interpretation of the rule. And there it stands, although with plenty of continued grumbling from my faculty colleagues, who say they believe that any changes to their local practices represent an existential threat to their academic freedom, perhaps even to their employment at the university. I’ve challenged the faculty to find any other research university with the same practice. That challenge (so far) has gone unanswered.
As a leader, you will need to pick your battles and decide when it’s worth challenging your institution’s status quo. I was not trying to alienate faculty members by changing the local custom. I was aiming to help our university get better, and position us to attract great faculty members. We aspire to achieve status as an elite private research university. If they do it differently at Rice University or Washington University in St. Louis, we should learn from those outstanding institutions. Sometimes an outsider is better positioned to make such changes than a leader who moved up the ranks internally for years and who, used to local customs, can’t as easily recognize when processes require an upgrade.
One thing I did last year is start up an email discussion group — Provost-L — through which provosts can query one another nationally about best practices and, I hope, brainstorm about new policies and procedures that might improve our own institutions more broadly. (I tried to invite most provosts nationally, but I am sure I missed many. If any other provosts want to join, please send me an email message and I’ll add you.)
I want to be able to rely on the collective wisdom of peers — and perhaps the collective wisdom of their various faculty handbooks — to bring best practices to the University of Tulsa.
At the same time, I am trying to recruit people to Tulsa, from new faculty members to new deans, touting what might make this an especially good place to work. That is, I am seeking to differentiate us as a local institution from other colleges or universities where those candidates might find work.
In the provost’s office, you may well face the local-versus-national dilemma — when to be different and when to conform — on a weekly basis. It is a shared national best practice for provosts to emphasize local differentiation in ways that make our campuses better places for teaching and research in comparison with our peers. The diversity of our institutions allows students and faculty members to find the right homes (when the system works) in what turns out to be a competitive landscape.
So provosts need to try to improve their institution by importing best practices — or stealing good ideas — when they will create better conditions for teaching and research. And to make this all work in a system of shared governance, we need to include the faculty we lead to understand and accept change. It’s a complicated thing to lead faculty members to change, and I’ll explore that topic in my next column.
