A couple of articles came across my feeds in the last day or two that highlight the truly important cultural divide in academia. Not the gap between sciences and "humanities," but the much greater divide between faculty and administration. This morning, we have an Inside Higher Ed essay from Kellie Bean on the experience of moving into administration:
When I moved into administration after being a professor, a colleague who had made the same move years before told me to brace for the loss of my faculty friends.
Impossible, I argued -- we attended regular Friday cocktail hours, had fought and won battles across campus, supported each other across the thorny paths leading to tenure and promotion. We’d been through it all, and those are precisely the kinds of experiences that make for lasting relationships.
I was wrong. My colleague was right.
About this time in my career, I began noticing for the first time the term “incivility” in higher ed news. Perhaps I noticed it because for the first time, it rang true. Where once I had been respected as a caring teacher and a hardworking colleague, I was now viewed with suspicion.
Now perceived as someone out for personal glory and set on bungling things for everyone else, I began finding it difficult to interact with my department (where I still taught one course a semester). After my move to the administration building, returning to my home department was like returning to the house of ex-in-laws after a bad divorce -- everyone froze, smiled stiffly and waited for me to leave. This office had been my home for over 15 years.
This collided with a much-rehared piece on the evils of "flipped classrooms" from Jonathan Rees, which compares faculty adopting "flipped" methods to the self-slaughtering cartoon pigs of old meat ads. "Flipping" is "professional suicide," playing into the hands of rapacious administrators looking to cut costs by cutting corners.
As you can probably guess, I'm way more sympathetic to Bean than Rees. There are reasons to be skeptical about the merits of "flipped" classes, but Rees's article doesn't indicate much knowledge of the strength and weaknesses of the method beyond what you might get from a couple of Chronicle of Higher Ed op-eds on the subject. None of the pedagogical issues he raises are new, nor is the claim that flipping is just "outsourcing your class to the Internet." All of this has been raised and addressed by the community of faculty who actually work on this stuff, as opposed to writing hyperbolic op-eds about it.
Instead, Rees goes for the fall-back position that it's just another way for evil administrators to screw faculty. Which is pretty much the go-to argument against any change suggested in academia-- if we do anything other than exactly what we're doing right now, it will enable administrators to screw the faculty over.
But the number of administrators who are actively trying to screw people is very small. Most of them, like Bean, are former faculty who are still trying to do what they think is best for their institutions, just on a bigger scale. They're working at the level where they have to wrestle with the constraints affecting the entire institution, not just a single class or department, and that frequently means they have to be the Mean Person who makes tough decisions that some faculty don't like. But they're doing the best they can for the institution, in the same way that individual faculty do the best they can for their classes, even when that means handing out grades that some students won't like.
Academia would be a lot healthier if faculty could, as Bean says, try to "remember that many of us in administration are just as competent as we were as faculty, and no matter where we are seated on a plane, still as human."
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On the other hand, the instinctive faculty revulsion to administraiton does come from somewhere. Many of us have been burned. Many of us have watched nonsensical policies. Many of us have been subject to measure-nothing "metrics" and "assessments" that are used as building cases and ammunition should we ever need to be brought down a peg. Many of us have sat in meetings where lines of inexcusable bullshit are fed to us as if we were supposed to think it actually means something. Many of us have seen administrators talk about running a college like a business. Many of us have listened to administrators talk about supporting faculty and reducing paperwork while increasing the number of random forms and paperwork and approvals that have to be filled out for every little thing.
Is everybody in administration incompetent and out to get the faculty? No. But there's a lot of dysfunctionality in administraiton, and there are a lot of things that come from administrations that are the exact opposite of what they'd be doing if they were actually trying to support faculty the way the say they are.
Sure, I've seen most of that, too. But I've seen just as much inexcusable meaningless self-important bullshit peddled by faculty as by administrators. Often by the very same people who are quickest to spot diabolical conspiracies in proposals originating in the administration.
Does that mean that everyone is evil? No, it means that everyone is working with slightly different information, and slightly different priorities when deciding what they think is in the best interest of the institution, and slightly different constraints on their possible actions. But they're all trying to do what they think is best, based on the information they have and the constraints they're bound by.
I would happily get rid of the mental virus that is "academic institutions should run like businesses," but I suspect the same is true of most academic administrators. That's not an idea they came up with themselves, but an external constraint they're stuck with, and have to make the best of.
I'm with Rob Knopp. I get that they are working within certain constraints, but I would be more impressed if they leveled with us instead of trying to get us to drink the kool-aid and agree that this dumb assessment or whatever is in fact great.
Just say "Look, this was forced on us. We don't have a choice. So we need to figure out how to do this as painlessly as possible, and maybe even get something useful out of it in the process." Tell me that and I will respect you. Tell me that this shit doesn't stink and I will give you the bare minimum of compliance.
Keep in mind that, if you are a high-level university administrator, your boss is the Board or Trustees or equivalent body. For state universities, trustee positions are likely to be political appointments, and you get further direction from the legislature. Private institutions have a bit more leeway, but they tend to choose as trustees alumni (or occasionally, others) with a history of donating often and generously to their alma mater. Guess which alumni are likely to have such a history, as well as time to devote to the role. (Hint: It won't be professor types.) Even when the alumni supposedly have an active role to play in choosing the trustees (as is true of both my undergraduate and graduate institutions), somebody nominates candidates, resulting in a pool that is only slightly more diverse.
That's where bovine guano such as "academia should be run like a business" gets imposed on the administration. It's hard for them to push back against it if they want to remain administrators. Sure, they normally have some job protection for the duration of the contract (usually multiple years), as well as tenure-like job protections (administrators at the dean level and above will normally be offered a tenured position in the appropriate department if they don't already have one), but what happens if the administration contract is not renewed? Pride will make it difficult to stay where they are, and depending how public things get, they may not have the option of moving elsewhere.
That doesn't excuse outright dishonesty, but administration is severely constrained.
While many faculty enter administration with good intentions, they end up being seduced by the dark side where everything moves downward and nothing comes from the grass roots
seduced by the dark side
I have used that metaphor myself. Once you start down the path that leads to administration, forever will it dominate your destiny.
As always, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has a post worth reading.
I've had good and bad administrators, and while it's not a 100% determinate indicator, there is a very strong correlation between "good administrator" and "actual flow of accurate information". When information and context are just not available to the faculty, then nearly any decision by administrators can look arbitrary and capricious. It's much easier to have faith that your administration is competent and doing the right thing if you have seen actual examples of them making rational decisions given their context.
I think Alex @#3 hits the mark.
We used to have an administration that leveled with us on finances and explained all major decisions. We faced the crises of the Great Recession as a team. Now we get no info at all about why non-academic admin is growing. Even the Deans don't know anything beyond their own budgets.
On the plus side, we went into Outcomes Assessment with precisely the attitude from on hight that Alex praises, and our experience was comparatively painless. You can waste a lot of energy being angry.
I'll say this about the flipped classroom and whether it is a good or a bad thing: Who owns the course material when all is said and done. If the university insists that they own it or they you own it jointly, then just know that once you offer it once you'll be expected to offer it in that format whenever they want you to, and if you don't, odds are good that an adjunct or a lecturer will be teaching anything to which the institution/system ha staked a claim. That goes double for purely online courses.
Yes, a lot of us on the faculty can be intransigent and difficult. When I was faculty senate president that was even part of my conception of the job description. But let's be clear: if the admin or institution is trying to stake a claim to your work under some catchall "work product" nonsense, stay in the classroom, flip nothing, and don't look back. This is trebly so if you incorporate even a tiny bit of your scholarship in your classes. I've watched professors try an online class, hate it or think it didn't work, and then either be forced to teach it forevermore or else watch lecturer or adjunct, who of course have no leverage and do as they are asked, take the shell of that class and use it with their name in place of the course designer.
Rees may or may not have raised salient issues with regard to ownership and intellectual property. But know that they are very, very real. And when institutions incentivize (usually with a nice check) the development of online and flipped courses but not their face-to-face equivalent, just know that they are buying the class. They just haven't told you that.
dcat