I toyed with the idea of redirecting my career towards some sort of leadership position a while back. Never say never, but I don’t think it’s where I’m going as I head into my last decade-and-change of faculty work. If so, it likely wouldn’t be up the usual ladder.
I do keep thinking about what flips that switch for faculty I’ve known at various institutions. I’ve had good friends decide to make the move and I’ve had good friends hover over the switch and decide like me not to do it. I’ve known people who threw their name into the hat for one specific opportunity but for that opportunity only and no other, and give up when they didn’t get that gig (which was my own experience). I’ve known folks who’ve felt compelled to step into a leadership role in a moment of crisis or to defend an important accomplishment or goal who’ve stepped out as soon as the job was done, and people who’ve sort of drifted unintentionally into leadership and then decided to their surprise that they really liked it.
It’s important to think about this because serving faculty are so deeply accustomed to think that the relationship between institutional leadership and faculty is going to be antagonistic in any event and therefore that when a colleague gets onto the administrative path, they’re joining an enemy faction. Some of that antagonistic assumption is fair enough both in the sense of where overall management culture in every workplace and organization has drifted in the last thirty years and in the sense that leaders are employers and faculty are employed, which makes them have somewhat opposite interests.
Still, it seems to me that there should be a big advantage to having leaders who come from your own ranks, who know what it is like to do faculty work, who have shared the ethos and values of faculty. If leadership sometimes becomes strikingly distant from faculty, I’d like for that not to be the result of unreflective or unforced hostility on the part of the faculty themselves.
More importantly, I’d really love to think that when people flip that switch and decide to move into an administrative track, they do it out of a sense of responsible and in some fashion humble stewardship, that they’re the people who want to protect and nurture the professional practices and values most of us try to live within. We do all know and respect people like that in our professional networks, I think—experienced faculty who have developed deep convictions about how to protect and preserve the best features of faculty life not because they’re trying to get ahead or climb to the top of the heap, but on behalf of colleagues and the institutions and cultures they work within. They’re the people we ask to represent us, they’re the people we ask for advice from, they’re the people we listen to.
This is the problem, I think: those are often not the people who flip the switch and go into formal leadership. I’d like to think about why that is. Some of it is that they’re experienced enough to know that leadership roles tend to push people away from being in community with faculty, so if being in community is what they value, they know they will lose that. Moreover, the one thing that people who haven’t been in administrative leadership yet don’t know is what really goes on in the “room where it happens”, e.g., who really makes the decisions, or what constraints there might be on leaders that are not visible from where faculty sit. So there’s an anxiety for people inclined to stewardship: will I still be able to pursue that objective in the way I do right now? And they can see too that some of the defining features of a scholarly life of necessity have to drop away: being an active researcher or teacher becomes vastly harder at a minimum.
So the thing is that some of the people I have known flipped the switch because they weren’t all that happy with the conventional work processes that characterize faculty life. And maybe, though not always, because increasingly they didn’t really like other faculty all that much.
I get that feeling, I really do. When I was thinking about flipping the switch, one of the emotions driving me to that thought was frustration with some of the circular-firing-squad feeling of some faculty life, the lack of mutual support or care between faculty, the every-person-for-themselves sensibility that sometimes rises to the fore. And also the feeling that sometimes faculty were too distracted, quarrelsome or insecure to pay attention to the Big Picture and the dangers visible within it. I guess that’s a kind of stewardship: the hubris of an “I-alone-can-fix-it” vision, but maybe also simply the despair that Cassandra felt on knowing what was coming and not being heard. Those are feelings that both drive you towards care for the whole and a sense of distance from the whole, of wanting to save people from themselves—a feeling which always encodes an annoyance or disgust with the people who need saving.
But looking at a few folks I know in leadership now (far away from my own institution), I can’t help but think that flipping the switch for them was about shutting off the lights in the rooms they once inhabited. And I can’t help but wonder whether the current shift in much of the leadership culture in higher education against faculty governance is in that sense more pervasively an emotional shift against faculty themselves, a feeling embedded in the attitudinal orientation of the leaders involved from the moment they decided to move in that direction.
Image credit: Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
Academia: What Flips the Switch?
Hum. I had your experience, I think, Tim. I really wanted to work exclusively on general education, but I was "too divisive a figure" to be given that task. By which the Provost meant, I suspect, that I had strong opinions and everybody knew about them. Oh, and it didn't help that I was a woman with the reputation of arguing for what I thought was right. They brought in one of my genial male colleagues, who promptly accomplished nothing, but did it to grand acclaim. Good times in academia. Then people kept wondering why I didn't stand for all the most onerous elected committees, where I could do tons of administrative work and not be paid for it. And some still wonder why I retired this year. I guess they weren't paying any attention.
Very thoughtful. I flipped switch but never gave up priority of teaching and developing seminars where I worked alongside faculty. I would hope this would still be possible. One instance I learned about seemed awful, however. A Dean invited to teach, agreeing readily, and then given the course that other faculty in the discipline didn’t want to teach. The challenge is to create spaces of active intellectual work that bridge the divide.