FEDERALIST STANDOFFS: PAINFULLY REDISCOVERING PLURALISM

Our administrative work has reminded us that that because of differences in values and economic conditions, individuals define their interests differently, often leading to clashes in aims and priorities. Research universities are not classical democracies writ small in which citizens meet in large assemblies and make policy after public debate and discussion. Universities resemble small federal polities with numerous subunits, each seeking to further its interests. Leaders of established disciplines, interdisciplinary programs, research centers, colleges, teaching and learning institutes, residence-hall bureaus, museums, libraries, and outreach programs compete daily for scarce resources, including additional professional staff, new work space, and expansion of discretionary funds for visiting scholars, conference travel, telecommunications equipment, etc. A few professional administrators decide how to distribute resources, but only after considerable discussions, disputes, and debates with groups and individuals with heterogeneous priorities and motivations.

In these pre-decision conversations, “the rule of localism” usually triumphs. Department chairs, program directors, and other local leaders ardently seek resources for their groups' needs regardless of the impact on other units of the university. This practice is not surprising. As Hamilton put it in Federalist 17, “It is a known fact in human nature, that its affections are commonly weak in proportion to the distance or diffusiveness of the object” (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay Reference Hamilton, Madison and Jay1961, 119). True, local leaders usually frame their requests in terms of the common good. They might claim that a new professorship in their discipline—say, biochemistry or early American studies—is necessary to cement the university's national standing or to win grants that, through indirect cost sharing, will benefit all campus units. Conversely, they often minimize the risks of their ideas and play down opportunity costs. After all, every dollar spent on one initiative (say, the establishment of a biomedical research center) is a dollar less available for another initiative (say graduate-student recruitment and training in the humanities). And why mention that the hire of an expensive “rising star” may not necessarily lead to national luster for a department because of endless shifts in intellectual fashions or because of potential envy and bad chemistry among colleagues? To win resources, exaggerations of benefits and elision of costs seem wise tactics to any local campus leader competing against other departments and centers.

We readily concede that sometimes members make arguments about general benefits in good faith. Deans and provosts nonetheless often suspect the worst. They therefore conduct their own analyses of local leaders' arguments and supportive data, which, on closer examination, can appear suspiciously one-sided, if not cooked. Thus cautious deans and provosts usually meet petitioners only part way.

Faculty leaders should therefore always anticipate reluctance, regardless of the apparent merits of the argument, and prepare fallback positions. Stated differently, use big dreams to convey excitement and potential benefits, but be ready to build upon modest foundations. For example, at one of our universities, an interdisciplinary committee of social scientists desired a costly social science research center that would support interdisciplinary research teams, host visiting scholars, and fund course release for faculty members preparing grant applications. Full realization of the plan would require considerable office space, an expensive professional staff, and an enormous operating budget. To get a foot in the door, the committee smartly included in their proposal a series of five more modest two-year projects that the dean and provost could review biennially and, if disappointed with the institute's progress, use as grounds to terminate the initiative. The sequence of incremental proposals proved acceptable to the relevant dean and provost, who opposed the more ambitious and long-term project that could tie up valuable resources for many years. If the social scientists would have insisted on all or nothing, they would have ended up with nothing. Additionally, achieving this sort of success showed faculty that involvement can be productive, thus helping to overcome the tendency to eschew involvement in campus policy matters.

THE CAMPUS AND THE MARKETPLACE

Every week, we receive large and small requests for money from departments, interdisciplinary programs, and research centers. In prioritizing the requests before approaching the provost, president, and board of trustees for supplementary funds, we have rediscovered the obvious: under-funded public research universities resemble struggling firms in capitalist economies. Universities badly need the dollars that legislators, parents, alumni, and philanthropies can choose to spend on other worthy purposes and causes. Provosts and deans therefore will channel initiatives toward potential donors' stated interests. Campus leaders know that universities, like private businesses, need a constant influx of capital or they will die.

The materialist base of educational institutions sometimes annoys those faculty members who want scholarship and teaching to be viewed as the university's raison d'etre. They recall public statements by university executives about the intrinsic delights of a liberal arts education, the unsurpassed nobility of the life of the mind, and the need for citizens to acquire both capacities for critical thinking and persuasive skills in communication. Consequently, they are disillusioned by administrators' decisions to constantly expand enrollments, contain spiraling upwards library expenditures, and hire low-paid graduate student employees and adjunct faculty to cover courses.

University leaders who use lofty rhetoric about scholarship and teaching often mean what they say (partly because a goodly number were full-time faculty members). However, to meet the campus payroll and building needs (in part, so that faculty members can pursue their research and scholarship), top administrators keep in mind parents' ambitions for their progeny, legislators' desires for their constituencies, and donors' often non-academic agendas. Economically powerful off-campus constituencies expect a research university to do more than transmit knowledge and understanding and to nurture curiosity and wonderment. Business groups want the university to contribute to the local labor market by pursuing research that generates jobs and by preparing a new generation of workers with a modicum of technical skills. Parents also want students to grow in a comfortable physical and social environment. When decisions are made about new buildings, new faculty lines, and new research centers, the agendas of these outsiders compete with the scholarly ambitions of faculty.

To simultaneously please outsiders and insiders, academically committed deans, provosts, and presidents play a sort of shell game. They first try to secure and spend funds for the goals that legislators, trustees, parents, and alumni clamor for. They then use freed-up funds to aid scholars with arcane research and unpredictable intellectual journeys that have minimal money-generating potential and miniscule direct impact on economic development.

Over the long run, this arrangement does not favor most scholars in the social sciences and humanities. New campus investment usually goes first to disciplines and interdisciplinary fields with technological applications. Likewise, within social science and humanities departments, there is a bias in favor of more applied and topical subfields—say, terrorism research—than on contemplative and universal themes that create more questions than answers—say, the visions of a tormented soul in Augustine's City of God. The tendency over time is for more resources to be placed in the life and physical sciences, while relatively fewer resources (office space, professional staff, and teaching posts) are channeled toward scholars of society and humankind.

What is to be done? First (as most department heads know already), less privileged faculty should try to make clear and convincing arguments about the ways that their fields train people for the workforce. In a globalized world in which rapid change and multiple careers in a lifetime are the rule, an education grounded in the liberal arts and sciences arguably gives graduates the ability to pivot and to grasp new opportunities. As the Association of American Colleges and Universities (2007, 16) reports, “employers are urging more—and better—liberal education, not less. Because employers view innovation as their most important comparative advantage, they seek to hire graduates who can think beyond the routine, and who have the ability not just to adapt to change, but to help create it.”

But this line of argument, by itself, is not enough because some variant of it is used by almost every discipline in almost every school and college. Schools of business, engineering, and environmental sciences also know how to package the multiple benefits of their styles of reasoning.

Faculty must adopt a mode of persuasion that involves more particular and less abstract interests—say a legislator's family experiences with poverty, bigotry, inadequate health care, or war. This requires, among other things, meeting with donors, legislators, and guardians face to face. It also entails a set of activities—chatting with parents at open houses, speaking over the phone with publicists, and dining with donors—that often fall outside scholars' comfort zones and that can feel like distractions from scholars' vocations rather than necessary preconditions for scholarly security.

Instead of forging ties with the non-academic sides of the university and connecting with outsiders, talented faculty members often pooh-pooh the task of cultivating non-academic acquaintances and partnerships. This silence is counterproductive, in our opinions, because we cannot expect non-social scientists to spontaneously understand the relevance and value of our disciplines. Without our involvement in conversations, top administrators, fundraisers, and external constituencies will likely construct a rhetorical framework that does not benefit the humanities and social sciences. Conversely, we have observed at both of our universities that when social scientists and humanists meet with legislators and donors and discuss topics, such as human rights programs and internship possibilities, mutual interests are uncovered and productive partnerships are created. In one case, a benefactor's desire to highlight his legacy of public service led to new streams of support for scholars and students, and the realization of common projects and dreams.

HELPING FACULTY ESCAPE A CAVE OF IGNORANCE

To this point, we have argued that to increase their clout in the battle over scarce resources, faculty members in the humanities and social sciences must become more interested and fluent in the ways of non-academics both on campus and off. But this undertaking is not easy. We found that more than a few scholars believe that successful professional and business leaders cannot comprehend the benefits of social sciences and humanities. We also have found a goodly number of scholars who commit the opposite sin: they prematurely assume that the social benefits of their teaching and research are so obvious that patient communication and dialogue are not necessary. Parallels to Plato's allegory of the cave may clarify some aspects of this problem. Scholars, at least since graduate school, spend countless hours staring at books and computer terminals. They, arguably with good reason, see themselves as selfless thinkers who have sacrificed more lucrative careers in legal, business, and other professions for the life of the mind. Meanwhile, the workplace habits they have acquired over the decades (including fluency in their disciplines' technical vocabularies) have gradually separated them from others in society and inhibited them from seeing “sideways” and looking thoughtfully at their neighbors.

To help colleagues see their professional lives as linked to the people outside their departments and professional associations, deans and associate deans persistently identify promising scholars for committees and task forces, cajole them to join (despite the opportunity costs for research and teaching), and patiently educate faculty members about different offices, bureaus, personalities, and jurisdictions within the university. Sometimes faculty volunteers discover that their participation at meetings with non-scholars makes a palpable difference (say, in the acquisition of office space for emeriti faculty or securing travel stipends for graduate students). Often, however, faculty volunteers will initially feel frustrated—for example, when after the first few meetings, non-academics either ignore recommendations from professors or, perhaps worse, selectively use unrepresentative parts of faculty reports to pursue non-faculty agendas. One of us recalls being baffled at a trustee dinner party when raising the topic of additional funding for a small, high-quality graduate program in the humanities and receiving silence. As associate deans, we try to reduce the sting of such disappointment by reminding colleagues that not every committee meeting will result in a successful conversion of others' thinking. Batting 0.300 is considered commendable in baseball. It is also a realistic and praiseworthy performance at meetings with non-academics in which the dispensation of resources is the subject of conversation.

Those scholars who persist in meeting people from other parts of one's institution, and outside campus, learn over time some elemental yet important facts about (1) who does what on campus, (2) the long train of formal and informal decision-making processes by which any policy is initiated on campus and implemented, and (3) the economic pressures behind policy development. Such learning never occurs quickly because it arises only from experience. But the lengthy and arduous education about life outside one's department is necessary if faculty members are to break from an isolated understanding of their situation and are to impart their unique values to people with different outlooks.

To be effective in making even incremental and partial gains, faculty members must put together internal and external coalitions and alliances. These depend both on having built relationships in other settings and in spreading clear, concise information to the various participants. One of our universities recently implemented new work-family policies that allow faculty who become parents to extend the tenure clock. Although earlier but still recent discussions of similar proposals had encountered resistance, this time those seeking change used a process that generated broad consensus for change. A small group of faculty gathered information about policies at other universities, then wrote a draft proposal, and then convinced a number of senior faculty and mid-level administrators to sign a letter of support. Changes that have improved the lives of faculty would not have been adopted without the patient cultivation of a coalition among individuals who do not normally communicate and work with each other. A similar coalition-building dynamic enhanced the lives of graduate students, including increasing graduate stipends.

BUREAUCRACY AS A SPECTER?

A skeptic might respond that the onerous process of learning the interests and priorities of groups on and off campus is unnecessary. It is easier to see administrators as unthinking paper pushers, who roughly resemble Weber's classic portrait of a bureaucrat—a follower of standard operating procedures who conscientiously and uncritically obeys fixed processes. This bureaucrat “cannot squirm out of the apparatus in which he is harnessed … he is only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march” (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946, 228).

This fatalistic view of university politics is partly true, of course. But it is also misleading. True, legal, and contractual protocols guide hiring and tenure processes and administrators sometimes inflexibly adhere to past procedures and precedents when allocating resources. Still, as we have stressed at the outset, the university also contains multiple groups and power centers, and therefore opportunities to create alliances and combine resources. Moreover, many initiatives, such as the establishment of a new interdisciplinary program, continue to be decided the old-fashioned way: through persuasion, promises, and favors. Bureaucratic predictability and conformity exist alongside (and in tension with) the dialogue and glad-handing.

At the same time, faculty members can take advantage of the bureaucratic aspects of academic life. As every political scientist knows, power is imbedded in the rules of the game. Preserving and changing procedures are ways of gaining influence or even control. For instance, at one of our institutions, the Faculty Senate created a new process and new committee to investigate and evaluate reorganization proposals. Although this assessment committee lacked formal authority to destroy, combine, and redefine departments, the number of reorganization proposals advanced by upper administration declined sharply after this new committee demonstrated the seriousness with which it took its task. In another case, department chairs in a college inserted themselves into the process of choosing an interim dean. Although they had been told that the provost alone would choose the interim dean after receiving nominations, the chairs requested and obtained the power to screen and limit the pool of candidates considered by the provost. The chairs thus were able to indirectly but effectively shape their fates.

Finally, faculty can also employ the politics of coercion and threat. It is worth recalling that medieval academics belonged to guilds that checked the exercise of authority based on tradition and charisma (Clark Reference Clark2006). Modern universities are obviously more bureaucratized than their progenitors (Kaplan Reference Kaplan and Smart2006, 220). Still, through collective bodies—such as unions and senates—faculty members continue to defend their time; and the standards of modern academic guilds (disciplines) remain central to teaching, hiring, and peer evaluation. The guild-based traditions of universities provide legitimate bases of collective action.

Administrators who refuse to take seriously faculty voices risk uprisings. They therefore tend to listen whenever a department head or center director has patiently gathered allies from across and outside the campus. At both of our universities, efforts by titular leaders to close an economically “weak” academic program were staved off by angry faculty who publicized their concerns at public forums on campus and who communicated with potential friends off campus.Footnote ³

In short, faculty members have more potential to shape their destinies than the bureaucratic nightmare of Weber suggests. Politics of argumentation, negotiation, favors, and tumult are all options if faculty members choose to become savvy practitioners of the political arts, both within and outside of their institutions.