Reading my social media feeds and talking to some friends, I can see that faculty and staff on almost every campus are reeling in disorientation as policies for covid-19 management change almost by the minute.
In some cases, the dictates coming down from leadership are almost breathtakingly intrusive—at public universities in Republican-dominated states where the leadership has decided not to mandate vaccines or require masking while also requiring faculty to teach in person, faculty have been ordered not to discuss masking or vaccination policies with students on the grounds that because of power disparities between faculty and students might constitute a form of harassment or coercion. That’s even happening at private colleges like mine, in a milder dictate. If you ever wanted to see the danger of handing managerial authority too much open-ended authority in the name of accomplishing progressive goals, there’s Exhibit A for the prosecution right there. I’m fine with saying in an institution that has a vaccination mandate, “Look, let’s not freelance here on the communication—it’s not your job to hassle students, we have that covered.” But my skin crawls a bit when I see any administration saying as a dictate that you may not even talk about a particular issue or controversy with students in your own classroom.
In general, the policies keep shifting in their specificity and intensity of their restrictions and requirements. As I’ve noted here at 8 X 7 before, at least some of the time the myriad of covid-19 policies percolating through higher education don’t seem strongly guided by any particular evidence-based standard or recommendation but instead by the way that lawyerly perspectives imagine an institution has to act in order to reduce its exposure to liability and increase its compliance to governmental specifications. That structure of reasoning will dominate as long as a central unannounced mission of institutions is to transmit their assets as intact as possible from one year to the next.
Rather than tilt at that windmill again, let me make a slightly different plea for managerial consideration on behalf of my tens of thousands of colleagues nationwide who are parsing the latest emails with some degree of weariness and anxiety. Namely, making policies and procedures with some degree of parsimony both in the frequency with which they are updated and in the degree of detail that they specify.
Over the years at my own institution and many others, across a fairly wide spectrum of colleges and universities, I’ve felt increasing discomfort with the growing granularity of policy handbooks of all kinds. Rather than starting from some broad principles and expecting faculty, staff and students to demonstrate some degree of intelligent discretion in applying those principles to unexpected or undescribed circumstances, policies seem now to want to lay out all possible permutations, situations and events and the required or recommended procedures and actions associated with them.
Much as academic managers rarely if ever estimate or anticipate the amount of labor that new policies and procedures may entail, they also don’t seem to think about the cognitive and emotional fatigue that stems from excessive granularity, especially as it is multiplied with the frequency of change in procedures. Everybody seems to understand this point if they’ve just ordered a new machine or piece of furniture and it arrives with a six-page instruction manual for assembly that includes numerous warnings to follow procedure exactly or risk damaging the product. Somehow that point disappears when we’re writing procedures for a thousand or more employees to follow.
There’s a paradox here that’s a familiar one in modern bureaucratic regimes of all kinds. You’d think that as a body of policy increases in its length and detail that we’d all feel more relaxed, less cognitively burdened: there’s less to puzzle over, every circumstance is covered, every action is plotted out in advance. You don’t have to worry about what to do, because the policies tell you what to do in every permutation of every case.
As many people have discovered over the centuries, it’s often the opposite, because you are responsible for compliance to more and more requirements and specifications across more and more particular circumstances. A failure to follow procedure might lead to discipline or termination, it might mean that you are not entitled to a benefit or compensation that you formerly received, it might mean that someone with authority is free to ignore or dismiss your complaint or request.
Nor does circumstantial ambiguity disappear because there is always some new combination of events, locations, people and practices that is unanticipated by the procedures and policies. Which is especially fatiguing when you’re in the middle of a novel situation, because as the policy frameworks get more detailed and prescriptive, the capacity to make a wise or common sense discretionary decision that rises from a generalized principle degrades. Rather than asking, “What in general are we supposed to do here? What are the basic goals or values involved?”, everyone finds themselves worrying, “What if they decide retroactively that I violated a procedure?”. We move towards dependency, away from autonomy. “Just use your common sense” starts to feel like a graveyard for fools. “Trust me” starts to sound like a threat.
This a big battleground for modern politics, but on a simpler level, I’d just like to say that move in academic institutions is expensive. It’s expensive because it uses the finite cognitive budget of individuals and departments for low-value returns. That waste then multiplies dramatically across institutional networks, requiring everybody to be asking other faculty and staff about compliance all the time (hence an overall strategy of reducing risk and liability exposure inevitably infects network hub and every network connection within a university). You end up hiring people whose job consists almost entirely of answering questions about compliance and monitoring whether compliance has been achieved, who (surprise!) often drive the proliferation of further granularity in policies and procedures. A general fatigue sets in all around, and high-value, high-impact work gets less and less accomplished. The price for doing anything new or daring goes way up, and most people stop wanting to pay it.
I understand how we got to this point. It’s not just risk management. It’s also that calls to common sense and discretionary judgment on some vitally important matters like sexual harassment meant that staff and faculty made bad judgment calls based on flawed or antiquated ideas about gender, sex and power (or used the space of discretion to protect abuse). In some cases, we had to take the wide range of discretion away and create a more specific professionalized infrastructure. But even experienced Title IX officers at universities and colleges will tell you that they’ve still got to make judgment calls and deal with unanticipated complexities.
And we’ve gotten here because sometimes faculty, staff and students judge that whatever is not forbidden is permitted, that the lack of a specific policy doctrine grants them nearly infinite agency to do as they please. When you state a broad baseline principle or doctrine and ask everyone to act in accordance with that principle, you’re always going to get a few people who willfully contend that whatever they have done is somehow consistent with the principle in their view or interpretation of it. In response, policies and procedures often expand to try and expressly forbid an already-committed breach or repair an already-happened error.
There’s no catching up when you take that approach, though: every major transgression is the product of the peculiar carelessness or eccentric disregard of a single person. Every such motivated individual is able to find a new breach when they are denied the last one. That’s the thing: faculty, staff and students in academia are generally well-educated, intellectually capable and driven by a strong professional ethic or focused aspiration. That is why overly granular policies are usually a mistake in academia, because most people are smart in applying a general guideline to a specific case and will be reliable, creative stewards of the ideas behind a guideline. When individuals in higher education are strongly inclined to violate a general principle or baseline ethic, they’re usually capable of covering their tracks and creating plausible deniability of intent to break a rule or flout a policy, all the more so if they feel that the effort of disciplining them will pose political or professional risks for any who try. So we get more and more detailed rules intending to close the last loophole that was found by some imp of the perverse, rules that end up having to be read and applied by everyone in the name of consistency.
Which is how we end up with the groaning cognitive and emotional weight of more and more highly specific policies, revised more and more frequently. Covid-19 is a bad example of this, perhaps, given how mutable the underlying crisis itself has been—and how fundamentally difficult it is to manage the behavior of an entire community when there are large numbers of people who disagree with the general principles and large numbers of people who are demanding intensely granular rules that they would like to see punitively enforced on others. (I’m as guilty as anyone: I just got into a conversation with leadership about an intensely specific provision governing access to one campus space where I should have had the common sense to just let it sort itself out.) It’s been a terribly difficult time to manage the everyday business of a working community of independent thinkers, and all of us have probably added to the burden one way or the other. The general principle holds even here, though: the more specific and expansive the rules, the more that the work of compliance becomes the only work anyone has energy to fulfill.
Image credit: "Ordinance relating to regulation and collection of licenses, 1872 (laarc-10 37 58~14)" by Fæ is licensed under CC BY 2.0
I share all of your concerns about the costs of bureaucracy and rule-following in place of broadly accepted principles for guiding decisions making. What confuses me is when the demands for rules come from the bottom, upward through the administrative hierarchy. The discussion on my campus about mask mandates in the classroom has seen many faculty demanding that the administration scold the students into complying. Faculty are comfortable with exercising total authority over the content of their course, but become very reluctant to exercise any control over the behavior of their students. I'm not trying to be nostalgic for a time when teachers were unquestioned authorities, but it seems like the balance has been thrown off. The same thing happened among the staff who wanted rigid rules about returning to physical work around schedules, etc. I argued that middle managers, like myself, should be able to make that decision based on our judgment. In that case, the rules were avoided but there was still the oddity of people lower on the power hierarchy requesting more regulation of their own behaviors. Is this a matter of individual psychology and how people deal with ambiguity? Or is there a cultural trend at large that pushes us toward greater regulation? Your recent comments on decriminalization seem appropriate in some way.