One of the complicated limitations on faculty political action stems from a two-part problem: it is hard to know what the faculty of a given institution think and it is hard to find a position from which faculty, whether elected, appointed or self-proclaimed, can speak with recognized authority about what faculty think about a given issue.
That leads to a familiar kind of slippage that happens in any system of political representation, in which people who have representational responsibilities or even people who claim the right of representing the interests of a group or faction have the discretion to sharpen or obscure in any given deliberation whether they are speaking purely as individuals, whether they are speaking on behalf of some highly specified group, or whether they are invoking their sense of the “will of the whole”. Like people who claim representative authority in other systems, faculty sometimes blur the basis for saying that a relevant group of colleagues have a particular preference for some action or hold to a particular point-of-view.
So it’s an ordinary kind of problem and it is hard to see what anybody might do to resolve it with changes to the structure of faculty committees, faculty procedures, and so on that are laid out in many university and college handbooks. Some kinds of faculty governance structures in some institutions are quite explicit about the representative character of a particular role. A chair represents their department to the administration, which generally obligates chairs to speak on behalf of the needs and views of colleagues where they might in other circumstances disagree with them. (Though chairs also often represent administrations to departments, and get pulled in two directions.) Faculty senates, where they exist, are usually sketched out as explicitly representative, though the constituency can vary from “all faculty” to “divisional faculty” to even more specific groups.
Elected committees of other kinds, often used for governance at smaller colleges, often do not have formal representational charges to their members. But speaking as a veteran of both such committees at my institution, it’s fairly common for faculty there to speak on behalf of methodological and transdisciplinary communities that they believe share interests or dispositions—all STEM faculty, all quantitative faculty, all humanists, all qualitative social scientists, etc., depending on the issue on the floor. Those same claims are sometimes made in larger faculty meetings, though in that case there is always the danger of being contradicted by someone else with equal claim to membership in the same group about what that group does or does not prefer about a particular issue.
How we come to know—or think we know—what other faculty want is a many-splendored thing. Sometimes there’s an actual vote in a faculty meeting on an actual resolution where the vote also serves as a kind of suggestive indicator of the size of two major factions that weigh on other considerations and decisions. And yet those factions can melt into smaller fragments or recombine into different coalitions instantly depending on the issue at hand and depending on the rhetorical moves made on the chessboard in a particular meeting or deliberative occasion.
Some sociologically-indexed factions often don’t get explicitly invoked but are visible in votes and other formal tests of preference—junior faculty and senior faculty, men and women, people with a lot of administrative service and people who are vested in the production of scholarship, faculty of color and white faculty.
Many faculties across the U.S. have no other formal mechanisms for determining where the balance of sentiment lies on any given issue. We don’t run polls, we don’t do surveys. (Or we do surveys, they’re anonymized and generally get held as proprietary research data by whomever is conducting them, and thus aren’t very good for informing situated claims in relationship to a deliberation or decision.) Sometimes there are consultants who say that the faculty think this or that, but the data behind those claims is frequently subjective or shaky.
I know many small colleges where a committee with a particular charge may either call people to a consultative meeting (or many such) or may ask faculty with concerns or views to email them or visit them during office hours, or where there is some form of a “listening tour” where the committee members go to departments to talk with them. The problem with those approaches usually is that they’re only marginally better than just being a person who attends many faculty social gatherings if the people on a listening tour don’t scrupulously represent what they hear from others—and even if they do, there are often large groups who don’t participate or speak where the best you can do is guess at what they think or want.
All of this said, I think there are many ways to be faithfully mindful of and accurately representative of what your colleagues think when you’re involved in governance.
The first is to be socially active and available, which is an important form of faculty labor in these roles. If you talk with a lot of people in a lot of contexts, you have redundant opportunities to hear what they think and listen for shifts in that thinking that are dependent on who they’re talking with and why they are talking. Though here of course the tricky part is to not let yourself think of the other people who are socially active and available as if they are the faculty as a whole. You need other kinds of para-social, network-making approaches to trace how people who you don’t run across are thinking about common issues and problems. And to some extent, you can read their non-presence in some venues as a meaningful statement about institutionality in its own right—that whatever they are invested in at the institution or beyond it in their view doesn’t require ongoing social investment as a precondition of its success, or that they simply don’t have the energy, time or desire to be engaged in that way. (Even that is a complicated sentiment to try and interpret: it can be “I really don’t like any of you” or it can be “I really trust the people who are invested to do the right thing, thank you very much.”)
The second is to be mindful of the importance of faithfully representing groups and individuals with whom you do not agree but you are aware are constitute a substantial faction or constituency within the faculty. That’s a skill as well as a responsibility. It can be learned and refined. Maybe it comes easier if you’re a social scientist, because there’s a familiar problem involved which is often methodologically as well as ethically challenging (how do you know what people think who are not articulating their own advocacy into a decision-making space, and how can you make their advocacy sympathetic and legible in its own terms without necessarily agreeing with it at all). I think this is vastly more important when the issues under discussion are not the kind of thing that you can resolve through some form of vote or plebiscite, where there will never be a real test of what is majoritarian sentiment and what isn’t. Maybe I’ve spent too much time in an institution influenced by ideas of Quaker consensus, but I even think that something that can be resolved by voting requires a person who identifies with the presumptive majority to care quite a bit about large minority factions—or even the passionate dissent of a handful of people. In any event, however, if you do become conversant with how colleagues think about a particular issue, especially when you’ve formally invited them to tell you, you’ve got to find a way to carry that into decision-making processes that you’re a part of. And if that feedback was asked for in preparation for reporting back to the community both with recommendations and some transcription of what everybody said, that’s work that has to be done with extraordinary care and attentiveness. There’s nothing that engenders mistrust more within faculty governance than for some people who have troubled to make themselves visible and available disappearing from any reporting back to the wider community.
Though that points to the third strategy, which is to be clear about the distinctions between your own advocacy, your mindfulness about groups and interests that aren’t in the room but need to be spoken for, and the need to push forward towards resolution of the issues at hand. I guess that’s where I accept that a representative approach is both necessary and good—the “committee of the whole” has upper limits on the numbers of discussions it can have, on the bandwidth of attention it can ask for, and on arriving at a decision through direct democratic decision making where everyone is at the table at all times. The common administrative caricature of faculty as hopelessly digressive, divisive and self-interested and therefore as enemies of prompt and efficient action in response to pressing needs is (mostly) unfair and inaccurate at many institutions, but there’s certainly some truth to it. Perhaps more importantly, whether we’re talking about hundreds of people trying to make a decision or ten people in a small room, moments where opposing principles and divergent principles cannot be reconciled are going to happen. I think it’s easier to navigate those moments in small groups, and easier to shoulder responsibility for the trade-offs involved as a well-meaning individual who is trying to do their best service to the underlying values and principles that apply to everyone. Sooner or later you have to stop speaking for others not in the room and start working with the actual group who are present right there in front of you in order to get anywhere.