Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education - Softcover

Esterberg, Kristin G.; Wooding, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826518990 ISBN 13: 9780826518996

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Through their interviews with faculty and administrators (from department chairs and deans to provosts and presidents) from a sample of eight public universities in the Northeast and their own experiences in both worlds, the authors provide a unique window into the life experiences and identities of those who struggle to make universities work. The book examines the culture of academic institutions and attempts to understand why change in public higher education is so difficult to accomplish.

Many faculty believe that one of their own who becomes an administrator has gone over to "the dark side." One provost recalled going for a beer with a faculty colleague and hearing the colleague complain about the latest memo "from the administration." He had to remind his friend of many years that he was the author of the offending document. Now he was "the administration." He realized that former colleagues now appeared in his office wearing suits and ties and referring to him by his title rather than his first name.

The disciplines serve as the tribes into which individual scholars are organized; the discipline is where a faculty member finds his community and identity. Administrators, on the other hand, identify with each other in trying to get the tribes to work together. Though most administrators came from the faculty ranks, their career paths take a different shape, especially in terms of mobility to another institution. It's not surprising that the two groups talk past each other.

A chapter is devoted to chairs of departments, who occupy an interesting middle ground. To their faculty, they can come across as a nurturing parent or a petty bureaucrat. The authors recommend training for chairs and administrative internships offered by the American Council on Education and other organizations.

The men and women on the campuses of the public universities described in the book make clear the challenges that universities face in terms of budgets, legislative politics, collective bargaining, rankings, and control of academic programs. If public institutions are truly to serve a public purpose, faculty and administrators must find ways to engage each other in shared conversation and management and find ways of engaging the university with the community.

About this title

About the Author

Kristin G. Esterberg is Provost and Academic Vice President at Salem State University, USA. She is a former chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she also served as Deputy Provost. She is the author of a book on gender and sexuality and a book on qualitative research methods.

John Wooding served as Provost at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA for four years, before returning to the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development, where he was a founding faculty member and chair. He is the coauthor of two books on the work environment.

From the Inside Flap

Faculty and administrators, often speaking at cross-purposes

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Divided Conversations

Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education

By Kristin G. Esterberg, John Wooding

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2012 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8265-1899-6

Contents

Preface: A Public Higher Education, vii, 
Acknowledgments, xxiii, 
1 Divided Conversations and Pathways of Connection, 1, 
2 Learning the Language: Faculty Beliefs, Values, and Identities, 31, 
3 On Becoming an Administrator, 59, 
4 Disciplines, Departments, and Chairs, 81, 
5 Cultivating the Communal and Administering the Campus, 105, 
6 Purpose, Power, and Innovation: Some Pathways to Change, 135, 
References, 165, 
Index, 173, 

CHAPTER 1

Divided Conversations and Pathways of Connection

As any number of analysts of higher education have noted, American academic communities are notably fractured places with "tribes" and "territories" (Adams 1988; Becher 1989) and unruly forms of governance (Eckel and Kezar 2006). Some characterize academe as a culture of complaint, one in which we can't "just get along" (Frazee 2008). The cultures on our campuses too often frustrate change and innovation, deny access to talented potential students (and faculty), and fail miserably to keep struggling students in college when financial, emotional, academic, or family pressures make it difficult for them to continue. Centrifugal forces, including reward structures that essentially shift faculty and administrators' attention outside their institutions, ultimately reduce the focus on students and stymie attempts to create a more cohesive campus community. These cultures stifle both the intellectual work and the institutional commitments of both junior and midcareer faculty, cutting off a much-needed critical perspective for change.

By focusing on academic administrators' and faculty life stories as they play out on campus, this work provides a different perspective from recent scholarship on higher education. Much has been written about the crisis in higher education, but this crisis literature has rarely touched on the lives of faculty themselves, their training, and their relationships with university administration (Bok 2003; Boyer 1990; Calhoun 2006; Ehrenberg 2006a; Hersh and Merrow 2005; Kirp 2003; Schuster and Finkelstein 2006). Nor has it delved deeply into the lives and career aspirations of senior administrators. By examining their experiences, and by analyzing the relationships between and among faculty and administrators, we provide insights into the divided conversations taking place on our campuses.

During the course of our research, we interviewed thirty faculty, chairs, deans, provosts and associate provosts, and presidents/chancellors on eight campuses in the Northeast over a six-month period in 2008. The interviews were semi-structured and conducted in person, each lasting one to two hours. The campuses ranged in size from around nine thousand students to well over twenty-five thousand students, and they varied in terms of prestige from less to more selective. The sample included both rural and urban campuses. Like most public campuses in the Northeast, all were unionized.

We interviewed on several types of campuses: four flagships (which we call Large Rural Flagship, Small Rural Flagship, Big State University, and Rural Midsize U), three regional campuses (Suburban Branch, Urban Branch, and City Campus), and one master's level comprehensive (Comprehensive U). One of the campuses was the result of several mergers. Another had been established to accommodate the surge of enrollments in the 1960s, and two others had grown up around former state teachers colleges. In several cases (Urban Branch, Large Rural Flagship, Big State U), the campuses had explicitly set the aim of moving up in the prestige rankings.

We used chain referral sampling techniques, beginning with our personal contacts and moving outward from there. We do not pretend to have drawn a representative sample; nonetheless, we actively sought out respondents from a variety of disciplines and with a variety of experiences. We aimed to include both those who had relatively traditional degrees (political science, literature) and those who had experience in professional education (business), as well as those who had been in their positions a long time and those who were relatively new to their positions. We also aimed to include as many campuses in the Northeast as we could gain access to in the time allowed. Our sample included eleven women and nineteen men. Three of our administrators were African American; the rest, white.

Ultimately, our sample included four who had served as presidents or chancellors. Three of these had served on regional campuses (and one had served on two such campuses). The other had served on a flagship campus. Only one of these had not gone through the faculty ranks (and did not hold a doctorate). Strikingly, three of our four presidents/chancellors were women.

Of the eight provosts and two associate provosts (both of whom went on to assume a provost position), one served on a state comprehensive college campus, seven served on regional campuses, and two were from flagship campuses. All the provosts had served in a number of administrative roles, including stints as dean, graduate dean, vice provost for research, and department chair. Two had served as provosts on more than one campus. All who served as provosts or associate provosts had held tenured faculty positions. Two of the provosts interviewed ultimately moved on to a president/chancellor role. In this group, three were female and seven male.

The deans included one honors dean and seven academic deans, six from flagship campuses and two from regional campuses. The deans represented a variety of fields, including arts and sciences, business, and engineering. Two of the deans were women. Each of the deans except one had served as a department chair. All held tenured faculty positions.

For five of our interviewees (four males, one female), the role of chair was the highest administrative position held. Each of these was from a regional campus. We also interviewed three faculty members who had never served as department chair or in any other administrative position; these represented two flagship and one regional campus. Two were female and the other male.

In selecting interviewees, we sought to include multiple perspectives from the same campus. On two campuses (Urban Branch and City Campus), we were able to interview respondents at all levels, from rank-and-file faculty to president or chancellor, along with a representative from the system's office. This vertical sample enabled us to understand the campuses and the unique challenges they faced from multiple perspectives. At another (Rural Midsize U), we were able to interview at all levels from faculty to provost. At others, we were able to interview only a few respondents (Big State U, Large Rural Flagship) or a number of respondents from a more restricted range (Small Rural Flagship). We supplemented our interviews, where possible, with direct observations of the campus over time.

Our interviews and observations document that our campuses resemble a conglomeration of tribal communities organized into the villages and hamlets of departments and disciplines. The sense of identity glorified at college football games and alumni reunions rarely spills over into the day-to-day lives of students, faculty, and administrators. For senior administrators and campus leaders this poses a unique challenge: how to represent and lead an institution that is deeply disaggregated. With this loose village structure, faculty primarily identify with and work within their department or discipline. This loyalty arises from faculty training and the imperatives of disciplinary acceptance, and is reinforced consistently by institutions and the reward structures of the campus (Becher 1989; Stein 2004).

One of our central suppositions is that, for faculty, the forces that shape their careers and through which they gain recognition, legitimacy, and rewards are primarily outside the campus. In most cases, the campus serves as a vehicle for faculty to engage in their work—and this is especially true for faculty who are oriented toward research or on campuses seeking to move up in the prestige hierarchy. Ultimately, at these institutions, the campus provides faculty a space and place for professional enhancement and achievement. It does not necessarily serve as the focus of their professional lives—indeed it may be perceived as an obstacle. The demands of heavy teaching loads or onerous service requirements detract from the assumed purpose of a faculty career: publication, grants, and national and international recognition.

Senior university administrators, however, work on a larger canvas: mission, budgets, change, and day-to-day management are the essence of administrative life. Administrators' tasks are multifold: to manage, in the most basic sense of the word, in a context of declining resources, and to lead. Yet administrators are beholden to other constituencies—alumni, legislatures, and the broader public—and they work within a hierarchy. Deans report to provosts, provosts to presidents, and presidents to boards of trustees. These hierarchies are at odds with the culture of faculty, who see themselves more as individual contractors than as employees. Administrators' efforts to speak for and respond to the demands of the whole campus, to react to demands from external constituencies, and to promote innovative change often contradict and threaten the values and goals of faculty.

Administrators, particularly presidents and provosts but to some extent deans also, are focused on the totality of the campus: the campus is their work. Their career success depends directly on what they achieve for their campus, not—as for faculty—what they achieve as individuals (Di Leo 2003). The campus is the place where they take action and where their reputations are enhanced by their legacy, especially if they move on to a higher administrative post. For administrators, too, leading the campus is a managerial challenge: How well do they make decisions? Can they operate under budgetary constraints? How successful are they at mobilizing support? In what ways have they enhanced the reputation of the school? In short, can they manage the campus?

There are even more significant challenges. Some administrators (and, indeed, some faculty) seek to radically alter their campuses, setting out to challenge dominant cultural norms by creating counterhegemonic social spaces. While not common, efforts to address the perceived crisis of the university have prompted some leaders to revolutionize how we think about the goals and mission of our universities. At campuses like Arizona State University, Berea College, and Evergreen College, campus leaders have challenged the traditional view of higher education, revising and reenvisioning curriculum and mission to serve students more effectively. The American Association of State Colleges and University's Red Balloon Project, an attempt to harness the intellectual power of many individuals and campuses in networks across the country, seeks to reenvision undergraduate education (Mehaffy 2010). The problem is, as George Mehaffy describes, that higher education was designed in the eleventh century and operates on a nineteenth-century agrarian calendar, while trying to prepare students for life and work in the twenty-first century (ibid., 4). While Mehaffy is correct about the enduring legacy of old ways of doing things, many campuses are transcending traditional structures with innovative curricula and extensive use of online and distance education. They may not have entirely freed themselves of the agrarian calendar, but change is occurring.

In a recent article, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus ask hard questions about the value students and the public get from higher education. They argue that "colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them very well. They are staffed by a cast of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training—and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people. Higher education has become a colossus—a $420-billion industry—immune from scrutiny and in need of reform" (Hacker and Dreifus 2010, 25). While Hacker and Dreifus's argument may be overstated, the central concerns plague too many universities—the high and constantly increasing costs of tuition, the tendency to expand programs and courses, the proliferation of research and publications of questionable value, the increasing use of adjunct faculty throughout higher education. Although there was criticism of this article from both the right and the left, the authors' central concerns—increasing costs and reduced funding for the public sector—remain core challenges. In the face of critics such as these, academic institutions are under enormous pressures to demonstrate their accountability and to become better at what they do. Yet if campuses are to respond to the challenges facing us, real leadership is needed. And this leadership must come from faculty and administrators alike.

As reward structures for faculty and administrators lead us in opposing directions, the environment in which we operate has simultaneously become ever more complex. We face the challenge of shrinking state resources and an increasingly competitive environment. To compete, campuses face increased pressure to commercialize and to implement the latest (and most expensive) technology. In the context of a more competitive labor market and expanded access to higher education, faculty face increasing pressures to perform. We all face ever-greater pressures for accountability. If we are to meet these challenges, all of us engaged in public higher education must begin to talk with each other, not past each other.

The University in the Marketplace

There has clearly been massive growth in higher education worldwide. Higher education is an industry, and the university increasingly acts and functions as a business (Balch 2006; Bok 2003; Buchmann and DiPrete 2006; Jacobs 2004; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Tierney and Bensimon 1996). Indeed, the commodification of knowledge and changes in classroom technologies are perhaps the overriding characteristics of higher education in the last fifty years. The penetration of research and teaching by the market has proceeded apace. Industry funding of labs and research; funding of faculty chairs by conglomerates; outsourcing of everything from building construction to food services, from janitors and maintenance to technical support services—all have become common on our campuses.

In addition, the growth of online and distance education and the push for new technologies in the classroom and in administrative systems have contributed to greater and greater expenses as systems are built and replaced. This trend has created an educational-industrial complex, a multibillion-dollar industry selling services to universities everywhere. Staff, students, and faculty expect to have the most up-to-date computer technologies and to compete in the global marketplace. We have witnessed firsthand the pressures for universities to adapt the many new toys we are told are necessary to be a successful cutting-edge university or to attract faculty and students. The costs of creating an interactive, fully digital, and highly mobile university experience are staggering.

Yet the influence of the market goes beyond the wired classroom or the industry funding of faculty research, reaching into the very fabric of education. It has increasingly pushed universities (especially the publics) to seek resources from the private sector; it has pushed faculty and administrators to adopt the narratives and language of the marketplace; and it has encouraged parents and students to think of a university education primarily in terms of its financial payoff or an individual's marketability. The growing number of students signing up for professional degrees or business majors is testament to a view that holds (not irrationally) that education is an expensive investment that should have a payoff. With this kind of investment come louder calls for accountability, playing out in demands for efficiency and for a measurable product (Bousquet 2008).

The labor market for faculty and administrators is also critical to our discussion. The postwar boom in higher education lasted through the early to mid-1970s. During this period, universities and colleges expanded dramatically as a result of the GI Bill and the growth of the cold war military-industrial complex. Myriad forces led to the relative decline of American economic and military power during the 1970s and 1980s. The rise of neoliberalism and an accompanying decline of the public sector subsequently led to major reductions in funding and expansion of universities, both public and private.

The overall decline in faculty positions during the 1980s and 1990s and the aging of the faculty into the new century are key factors shaping the expectations of both faculty and administrators on twenty-first century campuses. Only in the last few years, as we have witnessed massive retirements throughout higher education, have we felt the full impact of this generational change. The absence of a strong cadre of middle-aged and middle-ranked faculty is notable, as few new positions were available or funded during these periods of decline. In addition, as public institutions struggle with declining state support, many have turned to part-time and adjunct faculty to fill the gaps. Today nearly 50 percent of all faculty are adjuncts. The decline in tenure-track positions has had a significant impact on the culture of campuses and the lives of faculty.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Divided Conversations by Kristin G. Esterberg, John Wooding. Copyright © 2012 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826518990
• ISBN 13: 9780826518996
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216