Every college and university president I know has a Furious Eight on their faculty. Or the Furious Five. Sometimes just annoyed individuals. One president told me about an initiative that was resisted but ultimately passed with all but one vote in favor. The only objection is victory: if the person votes in favor, it signals a compromise in values.
When I asked the Furious Eight if they were still offering scholarships or excelling in the classroom, you can guess the answer. I read many pages of material against a president of a fancy institution after he received a vote of no confidence. I then Googled each faculty member’s name to examine their research activities. It seems these people do have a lot of free time.
Most troubling for the president, they say, is that when the Angry Eight takes the stage and roars, everyone else in the room starts looking at their phones or their fingernails. No one can stand up to bullies. It is difficult for teachers to argue for decisions that they know their colleagues will not like. Most of us remember not being picked for the middle school team. Additionally, we know that our colleagues will evaluate us for tenure and promotions. Even when they’re not angry, it still seems like the same person is talking. This is not a good example of classroom management or collaborative decision-making.
To be clear, the presidents and prime ministers I know respect and admire their teachers. They say the vast majority of people take their jobs seriously. They are enthusiastic teachers, they publish books, and they bear the enormous workload of helping to run a university. This is also my experience. I am pleased to have colleagues willing to staff all necessary committees. I’ve done enough service to know that I’m generally more useful in the classroom, smarter, kinder, and gentler on the page than when I served on the Faculty Senate.
As an assistant professor, I kept my big mouth shut in the Senate. Before getting tenure, I knew I needed to learn the culture of professorship. But a few years later, as I sat silently in meetings wondering why so much time was spent on revising policies and procedures, and listened to my colleagues complain about how the government was doing wrong and terrible things, I thought, oh! This is how we should behave. Don’t trust, don’t bother to verify! Accusations and rants! So I learned to speak out. And never shut up.
I wish I could blame my previous bad behavior on youthful arrogance, or on a life spent in school without exposure to professional work where you have supervisors and are expected to deliver. But no. I held a teaching position in my early 40s and had extensive “real world” experience. When I worked as an editor at a university press and on staff in an admissions office, I knew that if I didn’t do my job, I could and should be fired. After term? Party time!
Over time, I developed an attitude: you are not my boss. When administrators asked for reports, colleagues shrugged: We won’t do that. reasoning? They always ask; nothing happens; it’s a waste of energy. forget it.
I’ve seen faculty members, once promoted, stop even pretending to do the academic work that earned them promotion and instead spend their time on committees doing the “whatever it is, I’m against it” dance.
This brings me back to shared governance, which is what makes academia both fascinating and confusing to outsiders. The curriculum must be controlled by subject matter experts, otherwise you end up with, say, a health official who believes that long-acting vaccines are harmful. Expertise is important. Physicists should not decide which books writers read, nor should writers teach organic chemistry.
But I also shouldn’t be telling a basketball coach who needs more playing time (even though I think I know) or a chief financial officer which budget model to use. Sure, I worked in admissions a long time ago, but the VP of Admissions knows more than I do.
However, we faculty often think we know more about everything than we actually do and feel we can express this on the faculty senate.
It would be an interesting experiment to ask everyone on campus for a definition of “shared governance.” Like “Foucauldian,” it’s thrown around with more bravado than clarity. One former principal told her faculty, “Co-governance does not equate to co-management.” The Furious Eight would often lash out at matters that were clearly beyond their scope.
Free speech and academic freedom are often conflated (although, as we have seen in recent weeks, both may be a thing of the past). Teachers must control what happens in the classroom. We need leaders who can fight legislators who want us to include things like phrenology and celestialism in our syllabuses.
What scares me is this: This threat might not be as crazy as it seems. While most presidents are busy following the deluge of beeps coming out of Washington (and the states), faculty and staff are often not keeping up with general higher education news or realizing just how dire things are going on beyond their campuses.
Why? Because teachers are focused on doing their jobs well (and doing them well, even though we are all being asked to do more with less). Most people don’t have the time, bandwidth, or interest to track shifts in higher education policy, public distrust, or the admissions crisis. Most people are unaware of the Great Beauty Act and the creation of its evil policies. Many don’t even know how their own budgets work, naively believing that cutting football will result in millions of dollars going to academic matters. Every campus has its magic cash cow myth.
Those who have been around a few blocks will feel like they have heard this song before. Administrators come and go, but we are always here and we will outlast you. The last person who came in said we were broke. The same goes for the person in front of me. What.
Um. No, the situation now is very dire.
Presidents’ toughest task may be educating their campuses about these realities without freaking everyone out. How do you convince people who have never really worried about job security that the sky is falling? The world has changed and we are no longer respected? Doesn’t everyone think college is worth it and they show it by being absent? Has artificial intelligence changed everything?
Our role as teachers and scholars is more important than ever, and we need to protect and defend higher education to continue doing what we do best. Now is not the time to argue at Faculty Senate meetings about where recycling bins should be placed on campus, whether there is dust in the office, or which departments (with four tenured faculty and three students) need to be kept.
Shared governance is an important means of holding each other accountable. Yes, some presidents do some wacky things. There are careerists and cowardly provosts. Some deans act out of self-interest or favoritism. Many managers never learn how to be good managers. system of checks and balances once incorporated into our country’s government is essential.
The average presidential term has shrunk from six years to about 60 days. When a principal “resigns out of the blue,” it’s usually not because they were corrupt or sleeping with students, but because they were caught between a board that wanted change and a faculty that didn’t. They face many seemingly insurmountable challenges from the outside world. Before we take a vote of no confidence or get into a fight over dust, it might be helpful to remember that if we want our institutions to survive, we can’t keep using leaders like Kleenex during flu season.
Considering how many institutions are closing, merging, or laying off faculty, I’m grateful that there are still some out there willing to pursue higher education so I can focus on my students and feel lucky to still have a job.
But to be honest, I still think this little point guard deserves more playing time.
