Continuing in the vein of last week’s little-read, passive-aggressive, subtweetery-filled entry about the difficulties of representing faculty opinion on any given issue within an institution (or across institutions, in higher education as a whole), I honestly don’t know what to do when I come across a strongly-felt faculty opinion about institutional practice that is argued with intensity and passion that also makes the assumption that there is not and could not be an opposing view held within the faculty by any sizeable constituency of people—that the only opposition could come from “administration”, for malevolent or exploitative reasons.
“Faculty” functions in some kinds of arguments as a kind of universal laboring subjectivity. In that frame, to hold to a preference other than what the argument sets out is to instantly cancel the membership of the dissenting person within the faculty as a whole. The other position gets relabeled or resituated as managerial, externally-dictated, or based on materially and intellectually false premises that are so transparent to the speaker that they aren’t seen as worth challenging.
I fully grant that the opposite move is just as troubled, which is to gesture towards the presumed plurality of views and perspectives among the faculty as a reason not to do anything at all, or to accept the status quo as an expression of the “wisdom of [faculty] crowds”, set by the jostling of a hundred tacit preferences. (This is sort of the position that David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess takes on contemporary academia as a whole, that our current situation is a multiplicitious accident and it’s best to leave it that way.) At all levels of deliberative life, even in institutions where faculty governance has been mostly destroyed, the quickest way to stop a conversation about policy is to assert that there are many other points of view among faculty and that it will be impossible to design policy in a way that satisfies everyone.
In a way, the person who assumes that by speaking as faculty, they are speaking to a kind of universal subject whose self-interest as a laborer is reducible to some common denominators that relate to the basic conditions of labor, is making a sensible decision about how to seek commonality, because faculty are really not a natural “community” as such: we are not present in the entirety of our social being within institutional life. (Though perhaps there is no community to which we or anyone else belongs where that would be so.)
As a matter of practical workplace politics, the person who thinks there can really only be one understanding of how any group of workers should approach a policy about labor within an institution or company is going to be disappointed by a diverse reality. Any incipient politics that handles a major divergence in real on-the-ground perspectives by refusing to acknowledge their existence is heading for a bruising encounter with the reality. Or is perhaps just subcontracting that acknowledgement to other people who will have to work from the way things really are.
I think this style, righteously assuming that there is only one valid ‘faculty’ position, is certainly costly if it inflects into an actual faculty-wide discussion of an issue or problem, wherever that happens. Solidarity is only achievable and sustainable if it acknowledges difference within the ranks. But I also think it’s costly as a mindset for the individuals who hold to this way of thinking, because they never get around to understanding the weaknesses and strengths of their own advocacy and thus never really develop the most robust version of that advocacy.
Which in turn is a specific weakness for a faculty member because it’s yet another case where we don’t seem to be able to inhabit or practice what we loudly declaim as objectives for our students and as values for our institutions. If you’re not thinking about what you want with a full and frank awareness that some of your colleagues want something else, you’re not doing critical thinking.
I think there are plenty of times where one group of faculty are right to want a particular course of action and another group are wrong. I think there are also times where there’s a good case for two different approaches but that the worst thing to do is to try and split the difference and do both, where it’s best to go definitively one way or the other, even if your own preference ends up losing out. Any real hope of solidarity in fact resides on that kind of situational selflessness, and sometimes finding ways to simply live with an approach that others prefer. There are recurrent practical arguments that I’ve lost for my entire professional career, and I’m fine with that, even though their recurrence (not at my instigation) suggests to me that I have a valid point. That feels like something we all have to do in order to live up to Benjamin Franklin’s political observation that we have to hang together in order to avoid hanging separately.
This has me thinking about whether there is something like an unwritten "constitution" for faculty, principles on which we really do have, and need, near unanimous consent, that differs from policy issues on which there will be differences of opinion as to what to do, within that shared understanding of the constitution. And if so, what are the things that are in that constitution?
You have me thinking that there has been a drift away from meetings, organized spaces of actual conversation, where ideas and opinions are aired. All that complaining about more meetings and then you/we end up with more control from above and more representing of what others are “saying.” Here, I am also thinking about the model of the Polish Roundtable as an alternative way of solving problems. And this comment is also referring to your previous post about examples of finding alternative and better ways of governing. I am vexed, I admit, as I feel many university issues can be resolved with better leadership (and perhaps less deliberative consultation), yet I admire those rare opportunities where “all stakeholders” work together to achieve a next dispensation. The problem at this moment is that leadership pays consultants to produce some effect where there seems like consultation but it’s pretty much just direction. Potemkin Roundtables.