Academia: Culture Change Is Hard Work

Thursday's Child Is Back On the Schedule

There is part of me that thinks that what higher education in the United States is about to face is such an all-hands-on-deck emergency that there’s no time for elaborate exercises in rebuilding trust, reknitting connections, reworking the culture of faculty life or of relations between faculty and administration.

That’s the wrong way to think about the challenges of the moment. In an emergency, you especially need everybody to pull the oars in the same direction, you especially need respect and trust, you especially need to know what you’re fighting for. If you go into a foxhole with people you don’t trust, you’re either going to get each other killed through a lack of coordination or you’re going to end up hoarding food, shirking guard duty and eventually shooting each other after the bombardment starts.

So if there’s an urgency to reknitting connections, restoring trust, airing out festering differences, what’s the hold-up at any institution where there’s at least some measure of faculty governance surviving, where a heathy faculty culture is necessary for strong participation in governance and where a healthy relationship between administrative leaders and faculty is necessary for the institution to live up to its values? I am pretty certain that at most colleges and universities where governance still exists, the faculty feel internally divided as well as alienated from their present administrations.

I’ll take a note here from John Ganz’s essay “Civic Life Kinda Sucks” that he published today. A lot of the people who are most ardently in favor of reconnecting everybody to the shared civic life of any community, including an academic institution, tend to underestimate how hard that work will be and tend to assume that they themselves already represent the reasonable, sensible consensus norm that a reconnected community will cohere around. They are unprepared for the humility and self-examination that intentional culture change will require of everyone, unready to put all their cards on the table, and often incurious about the actually-existing variety of working dispositions that they will be sharing a foxhole with.

Under less intense conditions, that’s why faculty at many institutions have tended to give each other a lot of space to do their own thing, why we create elaborate detours and diverging pathways through institutional life. The cost of maintaining a culture that aligns people or creates persistent solidarity on key points is very high. The maintenance of the covenants that sustain trust and toleration between leadership and faculty or within faculty takes constant mindfulness, it takes forgiving many trespasses (often of people who never offer such forgiveness in turn), it takes being explicit about values (and being prepared for the discovery that there are multiple and rivalrous value systems present within the culture).

All of that means time, and not just the suspended, set-aside time of formal meetings or structured workshops. It means regarding everyday sociality as a kind of expected labor that doesn’t just get off-loaded onto people who are “good at that”, a judgment that is often not based at all on some assessment of individual talents but instead defaults to women as a whole on the expectation that keeping people connected is just their lot in life.

It also means pain on some level, because there’s no way to intentionally remake cultural norms with a pre-defined outcome of greater civility and connection in mind without being willing to surrender some of your own preferences and without some kind of honest audit of the ways in which you yourself might be part of the problem. Or on the flip side of things, if you think that disagreement and difference are a positive and welcome part of the academic culture you want to preserve, then an audit of your own practice of those views might reveal that you’re just as prone to call for solidarity and civility when those cut in favor of your preferences or just as unappreciative of dissent if it’s aimed in your direction.

It also means research in the best traditions of the academy. It means you have to read the documents and the reports, but it also means acquainting yourself with a substantial literature specific to academic institutions about the shortcomings and affordances of freedom of expression, of academic freedom, of civility, of the role of dissent and disagreement in knowledge production, of the necessary divergences between disciplines, of the bounded sociologies that make up the academy. Whatever you think the culture ought to be, you have to responsibly acquaint yourself with the follies and strengths of your ancestral colleagues who have walked the path of that advocacy. There are positions today about how things ought to be in academic life that I hear people taking as if they are novel products of this time and place which nevertheless have an embarrassing kinship to positions which are not only old but troubled once you see them in their full historical context. Having that awareness doesn’t mean that you have to back off entirely, but it might modify or redirect some of your thinking.

I’m all for this kind of work. I have been in one form or another a public advocate of these difficult conversations for my entire working life as an academic. I am also a switch-hitter in the sense that I can see the virtues of multiple positions, multiple preferences about habitus, multiple temperamental orientations towards being a professor and working with administrators. I’m deeply bothered by nationwide trends in administrative practices but also persistent limitations haunting the working cultures of faculty at many institutions. I’ve done enough external reviews over the years to see both the recurrent patterns and the idiosyncratic ways that faculty can undercut themselves and the solidarities they yearn to have.

In better times, we could afford to fall short. I think we are about to face times that make this work newly urgent. Even so, it’s not worth starting it unless everybody calling for it understands just how hard it is to do what they profess to want.