Academia: The Great Secret Dog War Vs. The Relationship Revision
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
I’m going to talk about two changes in policy that unfolded over a long interval at my institution. Not to relitigate either decision—I think we’ve ended up in basically the right place in both cases—but as examples of contrasting styles of decision-making within academic institutions that I think almost all faculty and staff will recognize in their own university or college. And I want to talk about why one style is far better—and what it means that this style is harder and harder to find across academia.
The Great Secret Dog War
When I first arrived at Swarthmore, there were a fair number of faculty and staff who brought their dogs to their offices or labs. Some of these were especially well-known: there were dogs who hung out in the bookstore, there was a chemistry professor who had a huge, beautiful Siberian husky named Chaos (who was quite sweet) that came to his lab and his office, and some others here and there.
I don’t recall hearing at that time (the late 1990s-early 2000s) that there were any concerns at all about these dogs. All the regular (and even the occasional) dogs to visit the workplace were well-behaved and well-trained. (There was a dog who sometimes hung out in an office in my building who would occasionally let out a loud bark I could hear through the walls, but it was rare.) There was a policy that any dog being walked on campus or in the Crum Woods behind the college had to be leashed while outside and that was generally obeyed. If I ever saw anyone disobeying the leash restriction, it wasn’t faculty or staff, it was people from the surrounding community.I didn’t have a dog in my own household until around 2005 or so and we generally didn’t bring either of our dogs to campus except on rare occasions when I might be walking one and decide to stop and work at my office for a while. I personally wouldn’t have been that distressed for my own sake to be told that I couldn’t do that ever. But perhaps because I was now in the camp of “has a dog”, but also because I’d become friends with our new president, I became aware around 2010 or so that there was a new tension around the presence of dogs. There were staff members who either were phobic about dogs, were allergic to dog hair, or were just tired of having to clean up dog hair in interior offices or spaces. There were also faculty members who didn’t like dogs and resented having them around. And there were concerns about dogs in spaces that students had to enter or use, because students also might be afraid of dogs or allergic to dogs.
Those are all legitimate concerns. This is a classic example of the lived dilemmas that any community that is trying to balance the needs and desires of its members has to face. On one hand, you’ve got people for whom the presence of dogs is a tremendous comfort, where dogs make them happy and make the campus feel like intimate and friendly—and you’ve got people where bringing the dog to campus is a vitally necessary part of their work-life balance that they’ve built their routines around. On the other hand, you’ve got people who have every right to feelings of anxiety or antipathy towards dogs and you’ve got people for whom the presence of dogs is actually a serious health issue or an unwanted additional work burden.
These are the kinds of issues that are a serious headache in civic life, no matter the setting or scale where they arise. City councils, town meetings, boards and commissions: if you’re serving on one of those bodies, these kinds of conflicts cause you to grip the armrests of your chair tightly and wish you were somewhere else. There’s no resolution that will make everyone happy, and all public debate of the issue is likely to make feelings run hot and create lifelong enmities between community members. All it takes to make this tip over into a profound breach is one especially aggrieved person on either side who brings a lawsuit or conducts a vendetta of some kind or who simply won’t accept anything but total and unconditional victory for their own preference.
Nevertheless, public conversation is always the right way to handle these conflicts. But in many universities and colleges—including my own—that is often not what we do. It isn’t what we did with dog policy. This is the rare case where I was sort of “in the room where it happens”, or at least was in one conversation where some of the details were revealed to me. One administrative leader who was strongly and personally aligned with the no-dog camp announced a stringent new no-dog policy that affected both faculty and staff. It wasn’t consultative or deliberative. The pro-dog faction launched aggrieved petitionary appeals at any administrative leader prepared to listen. Most of the campus community had no idea what was going on; a few dog-affectionate students and faculty wondered suddenly at the apparent absence of their favorites. A few dog-bringers committed civil disobedience, which was more dangerous for staff than tenured faculty. The president, it turned out, hadn’t really been informed about the policy change (or hadn’t really reckoned that there was much of an issue because the advocate of the change didn’t believe there should be an issue) and was a bit bewildered at the intensity of feeling that was suddenly visible.
So eventually the policy was modified: you could bring a dog to a private office but not to shared spaces (classrooms, labs, etc.) where getting the ok from everybody affected would either be difficult or would put people at risk because of workplace hierarchies. Some legal language in the final policy gave the college the right to revoke such permission if the specific dog was “unreasonably disruptive” or posed a health issue to someone else in the building.
All in all, a reasonable compromise, but the issue is how we got there.
The Relationship Revision
Let me contrast another history. When I first started teaching there almost thirty years ago, I think Swarthmore’s stated policy on relationships between faculty and students was that faculty were forbidden to have a romantic or sexual relationship with a student they were teaching or directly supervising. I don’t think it said anything else.
Not long after I arrived, a committee reported to the faculty that it recommended changing the policy to include a statement saying that all romantic or sexual relationships between faculty and students were strongly discouraged under all circumstances, while affirming the earlier policy as well. I remember finding that a weird halfway position: why not just say “never in all circumstances, period”? I think most of the faculty of my cohort felt similarly. But we discussed the recommendation in several faculty meetings and I was fascinated by the range of positions offered in favor of the policy as stated. Some faculty objected to the return of what they perceived as in loco parentis, believing that when we and most other U.S. colleges and universities had moved in the late 1970s and early 1980s towards imagining college students as fully functioning adults who could make their own decisions about everything we had done the right thing and that we shouldn’t give up that ground easily. Other faculty were reluctant to have a totalizing rule, and I realized after listening that what the older faculty were very carefully reckoning with the fact one senior faculty member (who has since retired) had in fact married an undergraduate (after she graduated) and was still happily married to her. Others were thinking of colleagues they knew elsewhere who had had the same experience, or of faculty who had married graduate students. Moreover, the oldest faculty were also thinking of a wider social world that they had grown up in where workplace relationships (some leading to marriages, some not) were common. Sure, yes, maybe there were also a few people trying to protect themselves from future charges of misconduct, but nobody of course took that position openly.
What you could sense in this discussion is that you were listening to a generational transition and that it wouldn’t be long before the policy was revised again. Which is exactly what happened, and once again it happened through a committee report and the faculty discussed the recommendation to forbid all relationships between faculty and students. This time nobody really objected to the change and I think the new policy passed nearly unanimously. The change in generational perspective was complete, but also even the oldest faculty members had rethought their concerns or objections. (Lest you think this was peculiar to Swarthmore, this was a pretty common policy transition at many colleges and universities around the same time, in the very early 2000s.)
If you wanted to review that moment of historical transition, you could if you were allowed access to the faculty minutes at Swarthmore along with the two relevant committee or task force reports. Some historian someday is going to be able to put that shift into context. More importantly, they were decisions that people could say we made. You understood what the thinking had been and you understood how and why it had changed.
The Upshot
If you wanted to know about the history of the dog policy, on the other hand, you’d be out of luck unless you managed to conduct oral history with some of the key participants, and it’s likely that many of them either don’t think of it as mattering much or would prefer not to recall the back-and-forth involved in the initial policy shift. The problem here is the process and the way that legalistic framings relevant to workplace regulations were ultimately used in the finalizing of a new statement of policy. That’s the way decision-making goes across American higher education at this point: things get changed in a way that isn’t up for discussion and without reference to any sense of underlying values, norms, or feelings. What is the relative worth of the comfort some take in dogs versus the capacity of dogs to unsettle, annoy or frighten others? Who knows, because the institution never had to say anything on that score, and no one who had feelings one way or the other had to be in conversation about it with anyone else.
Maybe in this case that’s no big deal. It spared managers and leaders the headache of having to mediate between people with strong feelings, and it was likely a more efficient way to arrive at the same compromise that some bigger community we would have come to anyway. But the problem is that the ease and efficiency of those kinds of decisions have convinced leaders across higher education that most or all decisions could be made that way, that shared governance is for chumps. The decisions that have to go through the difficult bumps of putting people with opposing views in conversation with one another create the foundation for trust in the institution: everything is decided in plain sight. They also are part of really believing what higher education preaches about civic life and training for democracy: we can hardly blame our students for having little faith in a vision of democracy that forces people with opposing views to work out compromises if what they see us doing is largely favoring hierarchical, managerial and non-transparent structures for decision-making.
Image credit: Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash
So insightful. You’ve got the framework on a book here. Might find it’s location among books on hegemony.
I really appreciate these thoughts on how the institution works at this everyday level. Thank you.