This article first appeared in a new Chronicle special report, “Reopening Campus: How to Do It Safely and Successfully,” which looks at how colleges are planning for a fall semester unlike any other.
At a town-hall meeting earlier this year, as I previewed my university’s developing plans for the fall of 2021, I included what I thought was an appropriately nuanced statement. Since we don’t know yet what a fall reopening of campus will look like, I told the faculty members assembled on Zoom that we would “likely return to in-person learning while maintaining the contingency to revert back to this year’s HyFlex instructional model if conditions warranted.”
At least one faculty member did not appreciate the nuance. Among other challenges, she encouraged me to “walk in her shoes” and experience the realities of HyFlex on our campus before continuing with fall planning.
That was not an invitation, but rather a rebuke — and not just of our institution’s fall planning but of my claim to be a faculty advocate. The irony of her lobbing this public and pointed critique during the same week that I was writing this essay on how to assist the faculty’s post-pandemic adjustment was unknown to her but not lost on me. Her confrontation prompted me to reconsider our approach to fall planning and, more important, my approach to supporting faculty.
I took a step back from the leadership frameworks — focused on crisis communication and organizational capacities — that I had been relying on to inform my thinking. Instead, I recalled the advice of a now-classic leadership book, Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and its adage “to seek first to understand.” That’s No. 5 on his list, and it requires compassionate listening, which in turn promotes reciprocity and leads to positive problem solving. Empathic listening means giving people your undivided attention, paraphrasing what you hear them saying, and making sure your response conveys that you understand their underlying emotions.
In addition to being a provost, I am also a psychologist. So naturally, I approach leadership challenges from that academic background and professional perspective. When I think about what I’ve learned in my four years as provost, and from the difficult months of the pandemic, I recognize that professors — like most people — simply want to be understood, acknowledged, and engaged. As senior academic leaders, if we claim to be faculty advocates, we have to attend to those three basic desires as we look for ways to support professors post-pandemic.
Understand. The skill of empathic listening is often described as a dynamic between two people. Campus leaders have occasional opportunities for one-on-one conversations with professors, but it’s not possible (especially now) to meet with every faculty member in order to understand their wants and needs for the fall semester. The question then becomes how to put empathic listening to use in meetings with large groups of faculty members.
First, we need to solicit more information from them. During the past year, colleges and universities have focused on improving how we communicate in order to disseminate vast amounts of rapidly evolving information to large numbers of constituents, with different interests, scattered across multiple locations. We’ve developed dashboards to share weekly — and in some cases daily — changes in virus spread on our campuses. We’ve altered websites to push out continually updated guidelines for remote instruction, diagnostic testing, quarantine protocol, and travel restrictions. We’ve issued statement after statement on how we are dealing with the past year’s multiple national crises.
Amidst all of those attempts to provide information, we’ve given less attention to collecting it on our own campuses. Senior academic leaders can gather information about faculty experiences in multiple ways. But in order to get the most useful information, those methods have to be authentic to both the institution and the leader.
For example, at small liberal-arts colleges and moderately sized universities, the town-hall meeting can work well, especially in regions like the Northeast with a long history of such public meetings. But for the town-hall tradition to be authentic, the leader has to be willing to answer any and all questions. Scripted town halls buck tradition and therefore lack credibility.
So gather information in ways the faculty will trust. Academic deans at my university have used variations of the town-hall format — weekly coffee hours and drop-in sessions — to hear from professors. Leaders at large institutions, or those uncomfortable with open forums, may choose to administer surveys or establish electronic suggestion boxes.
Regardless of how we collect the information, when it comes time to make sense of it, we should remove our administrative hats. Humans have a tendency to evaluate what we hear based on our own lived experience. Covey calls that “autobiographical” thinking, used by those who “do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” During this exceedingly difficult academic year, senior leaders must be willing to put aside our own experiences and curb our impulses to “evaluate, probe, advise or interpret.” Instead we need to listen to what faculty members are telling us.
Acknowledge. The next step is to confirm for faculty members that we’re hearing what they have to say. Senior leaders can use two classic empathic listening skills — paraphrasing and labeling — to acknowledge faculty voice and sentiment.
Frequently used by counselors and therapists, paraphrasing is a technique whereby a listener restates, in fewer words, the essential meaning of what was said back to a speaker. In counseling contexts, the expression “What I hear you saying …,” often introduces a paraphrase. Paraphrasing is most effective when also accompanied by the labeling of emotions — that is, recognizing the speaker’s feelings about what was said. In response, the speaker confirms the identified feeling and is encouraged to elaborate on either the experience or the emotion. Labeling emotions helps the speaker feel not only heard, but also valued.
How would those techniques work in an administrator’s weekly coffee hours, monthly town halls, or twice yearly surveys? Use expressions such as “I have heard…,” or more powerfully, “You have told me…,” to restate faculty experience. Make sure to name the emotions underlying what they have said to you.
As they adjust to a possible reopening of campus, accompanied by continued uncertainty, some faculty members on my campus have expressed feelings of exhaustion, frustration, and despair while others have shared feelings of gratitude, encouragement, and relief.
More broadly, professors are telling us that they are grieving, and asking for time and permission to recognize losses before moving forward. Josh Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, said in a Chronicle interview that it was important “for colleges to mourn, talk about what was learned, and map out a future that may be different, but still hopeful.” Several faculty members at my institution forwarded that interview to me. By doing so, they were sharing their feelings of loss and conveying that, once acknowledged, they can move past the loss with hope.
Engage. Forwarding that article was also a way for faculty members to tell me they want us to plan together for a return to campus this fall. On Covey’s famous list of seven habits, right after understanding, comes “synergy” — employing teamwork to solve complex problems that cannot be solved by any one person alone.
If ever a set of complex problems required teamwork in higher education, it’s been the ones we’ve faced lately: the transition to remote learning last spring, the move to HyFlex instruction last fall, and the readjustment to full reopening of campuses this fall. A third way to support faculty members’ readjustment to post-pandemic life is to engage them in the solution.
During the past year, the best solutions have emerged when I have leaned into faculty governance or called on faculty expertise to confront a challenge. Our faculty committees worked to deal with issues related to the academic calendar, pass/fail policies, and best practices for hybrid teaching. Math professors helped refine our dashboard metrics. Nursing and public-health professors participated in a newly formed public-health advisory team to make recommendations on issues such as diagnostic testing for all campus employees and behavioral protocols and mitigation strategies for students on the campus. Most recently, faculty members in psychology helped think through how to handle the growing mental-health concerns among students on our campus.
If we senior academic leaders seek first to understand, by soliciting information and responding with empathy, we will be met with the synergies of an engaged faculty who feel acknowledged and supported. From that place, together we can go forward. And I trust that should I forget, if I listen carefully, a faculty member at the next town hall will remind me.
