When ‘Collegiality’ and Evaluating Faculty Collide

Faculty members typically must meet standards related to their research, teaching, and service to earn tenure and keep their jobs. But sometimes, an additional criterion — collegiality — gets added to the mix, and it tends to raise professors’ hackles.

In fact, even the specter of collegiality is enough to cause alarm. Proposed changes to policies that govern tenure, promotion, and faculty dismissals within the University of Arkansas system included language that moved professors there to quickly mobilize in opposition last month. Among the concerns is what faculty see as a thinly veiled attempt by the Board of Trustees to use collegiality — or the lack thereof — as grounds for terminating a tenured professor.

The board met in early November but didn’t vote on the changes that are explained in detail in an FAQ posted on the system’s website. The system acknowledges that, until now, it has “never expressly included ‘collegiality’ among the factors that can constitute cause for dismissal,” but that it does consider “‘a pattern of disruptive conduct or unwillingness to work productively with colleagues’ as conduct that may give rise to the termination of a tenured faculty member.” Professors have been asked to submit feedback to the board by December 15, ahead of the board’s next meeting in late January.

Higher-education researchers have studied collegiality in the professoriate from various angles and have even suggested a way to measure it. At the same time, the American Association of University Professors has long opposed using collegiality as an explicit factor for evaluating faculty. But that doesn’t mean colleges don’t take it into consideration in some form.

“A lot of universities explicitly or implicity have collegiality somewhere in either their handbook or as part of their evaluation,” says Ann E. Blankenship Knox, an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of Redlands who studies collegiality in the professoriate. “Some places try to quantify it. But how do you write a policy or design a measurement to cover every scenario in which you think someone has been unprofessional to the detriment of the university or your students?”

It’s a task that faculty most often say comes with great risk. Here are three of the most common objections raised:

It’s a vague (and subjective) term.

Yes, collegiality has a dictionary definition. But what that means in practice, how it’s defined on campus, and how to equitably apply that standard is another story. The subjectiveness baked into assessing collegiality means that simply being outspoken or holding unpopular views could put a professor’s career trajectory in jeopardy, particularly if he or she is untenured.

“It’s hard to define. You can be dismissed for a lack of collegiality, but they can’t tell you exactly what that means,” Ms. Knox says. “Everyone assumes that everyone understands it in the same way, but there isn’t sufficient research on how people even understand it.”

A faculty member’s age, gender, place of origin, and field of study can color the lens through which collegiality is viewed.

That amorphousness is a key sticking point for faculty in the University of Arkansas system. Kevin D. Hall, chair of the Faculty Senate at the flagship campus in Fayetteville, wrote a letter to the university’s chancellor that said the language in the proposed changes that relates to collegiality as a cause for dismissal is “overly broad and highly subjective.” It could also be misinterpreted and misused by supervisors, Mr. Hall wrote, and phrases like “unwillingness to work productively with colleagues” would be “virtually impossible to apply in a consistent manner across units within the university.”

A better way to go, the AAUP says, is for collegiality to be considered as a common thread that runs through the three criteria faculty have long been judged by: teaching, research, and service.

Collegiality can be used as a tool to stifle dissent and academic freedom.

The AAUP, in a widely cited statement, makes the case that collegiality poses a threat to academic freedom. It could also be used as a tool to foster uniformity by shutting out individuals who don’t fit into a group — a move that goes against the diversity of thought and vigorous debate that are hallmarks of academic life. A growing number of institutions, the statement says, have added collegiality as a fourth criterion in faculty evaluation.

“We view this development as highly unfortunate, and we believe that it should be discouraged,” the association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure wrote.

Faculty members say they need to feel confident that they can express an opinion about an institution, an administrator, or a colleague without their collegiality being questioned. It’s easy for collegiality to be linked to expectations that faculty toe the line by showing “excessive deference to administrative or faculty decisions” that may actually call for thoughtful discussion, the committee wrote.

The Academic Senate Council at the University of Arkansas Medical School warned, in a letter to the system’s president and Board of Trustees, how policing collegiality could go awry. “Faculty must have protections for academic freedom to work,” said the letter, written on behalf of faculty and faculty clinicians. “Otherwise, a mere disagreement with a supervisor or a drop in grant funding could be misconstrued as ‘unwillingness to work productively, or disruptive conduct or unsatisfactory performance.’”

Some professors are more vulnerable than others to the abuses of collegiality.

Decisions about what constitutes collegiality and who’s exhibiting it (or not) are almost always made by administrators and faculty members with tenure. For pre-tenure faculty, when collegiality is part of the evaluation process, it further exacerbates the power dynamic between them and their senior colleagues. The stage is set for them to forgo speaking out on controversial issues out of fear that they won’t clear the collegiality hurdle, also known as “fit.”

Tenured faculty members aren’t usually “worried about their speech at an institution,” Ms. Knox says. “It’s the professors who don’t have the legal protections that go with tenure.”

A lack of collegiality is also often used as a pretext for discriminatory treatment against underrepresented minority faculty members and those who hold viewpoints not shared by the majority. In fact, that’s one of the arguments made by Joshua M. Silverstein and Robert E. Steinbuch, both professors of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. In an op-ed published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the two professors wrote that “when tenure protections are slashed, the impact is felt most keenly by minorities of all types — racial minorities, the religiously observant, and conservatives.”

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.