May-June 2001

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Conditions of Collaboration: A Dean’s List of Dos and Don’ts

By Philip A. Glotzbach

One of the principal characters in Voltaire’s Candide, Dr. Pangloss, continually advances the Liebnizian proposition that our actual world must be the best of all possible worlds since God created it and God is incapable of choosing the worse over the better. Unfortunately, the force of Pangloss’s observation is often lost on the novel’s other characters, whose lives are marked by a series of outrageous disasters. The underlying dialectic is well summarized in the epigram that defines an optimist as one who believes that ours is the best of all possible worlds and a pessimist as someone who agrees with the optimist.

An academic community is a peculiar kind of possible world that often embodies a similar contradiction: it is built upon the grandest of ideals that attract the very people who choose to work in it; yet the reality of life within the academy can fail to live up to its promise. Indeed, there is a whole literature on this subject going back to Aristophanes’ comedy, The Clouds—a genre that includes academic novels, the occasional essay, and, more recently, films (Animal House, for example). Think of the third book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or David Lodge’s Small World, Changing Places, or Nice Work. The general tenor of this literary portrait of the academy is captured in a passage from Richard Russo’s Straight Man. The novel’s protagonist, a professor and English department chair, encounters a campus colleague:

"How are things downstairs?" I ask him. French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Classics occupy the floor below ours.

"Silly, small, mean-spirited, lame," he explains. "Same as English."

These satires construct a distorted but recognizable image of a world that those of us who live in and love the academy know all too well. Indeed, it is fortuitous that we academics are proficient in laughing at our own foibles so other people don’t have to do that work. At the same time, in our better moments, we should remind ourselves of our higher aspirations and not accept the satiric vision as a literal or (even worse) necessary truth.

Theory and Practice

Last October, the AAUP and the American Conference of Academic Deans cosponsored a conference in Washington, D.C., titled "Collaboration Toward the Common Good: Faculty and Administrations Working Together." An underlying theme of that conference—and a fundamental commitment of the two organizations that cosponsored it—is that we academics should constantly reaffirm the ideals and values that shape our collective mission as a learned profession as well as our individual institutional missions. In doing so, we should take concrete steps to put those ideals into practice, not only in our teaching, research, or artistic endeavors but in our institutional governance as well.

I have in mind values such as the following: the primacy of free and unfettered inquiry in the search for truth; the practice of following a line of investigation wherever it might lead; the appeal to evidence and cogent argument to resolve disputes; the value of including a full range of voices in important decisions; the development and use of consistent intersubjective standards of judgment; and the capstone ideal that a college or university should function as a meritocracy of ideas in which a belief is valued by its ability to withstand analysis and critique, not because of whose belief it is.

However one would make one’s own list, it is fair to say that in the academic enterprise ideals of this kind should be, and I believe generally are, shared by faculties and administrations alike, at least in theory. If only we could live up to them in the practice of governance.

Well, why don’t we? Sometimes we fail simply because we are poor, dumb, fallible, feckless human beings whose best-laid schemes gang aft agley. Sometimes we just don’t do our work as well as we could if conditions were different or if we tried harder. In her address to the joint conference, AAUP general secretary Mary Burgan noted some of the problems with the faculty role in governance that have been articulated by the Association of Governing Boards. These "problems" constitute the standard brief against too much faculty participation: that it can, for example, stall important initiatives, make an institution inflexible and less responsive to changing external conditions than it needs to be, or embroil important institution-wide questions in issues of narrow departmental turf.

Let me return the compliment and present the standard brief against administrators from a faculty point of view. At our worst, we administrators can undercut collaboration by being high-handed or arbitrary or just too darn busy to consult faculty on important decisions; unresponsive (the infamous "black-hole phenomenon" in which faculty concerns or governance proposals disappear into an administrative office whose internal gravity is so intense that neither light nor wisdom ever seems to escape from it); impatient with and distrustful, or even disdainful, of the faculty; out of touch with the realities of today’s students and the day-to-day demands of faculty life; seduced by distorted or even anti- academic values (a search, for example, for increased revenue or fiscal efficiency that cuts corners to the point of undermining the faculty’s ability to do its primary job of teaching and learning); or simply inept: incompetent, lazy, unintelligent, or lacking in basic administrative skills.

Given the role of administrators in our institutions, they can do great harm as well as great good—by their action or inaction they can foster cooperation or undermine it most effectively. So when we select and review deans and provosts, we need to place the ability to foster collaboration between faculty and administration high on our list of criteria. That is, in hiring we need to insist that this ability be solidly reflected in a candidate’s track record, and in administrative evaluations we need to examine this aspect of performance closely. Similarly, when faculty members accept positions on governance committees or agree to chair departments, they, too, need to live up to these same expectations. In short, accountability should be seen as a normal expectation of everyone who is engaged in the shared work of an institution.

Let us assume for the remainder of this article that both faculty members and administrators fundamentally do want to collaborate in creating well-run colleges and universities that support the central work of teaching and learning. What must happen if they are to do so?

Relational Conditions of Collaboration

Doug Steeples, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Mercer University, once remarked that "teaching is a relationship, not a transaction." A similar claim applies to collaborative institutional leadership: it depends first of all upon relationships that enable the players to interact effectively with one another to bring their collective wisdom to bear on institutional problems. Good-faith actions tend to strengthen such relationships, just as bad-faith actions undermine them. In his essay Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill wrote, "There is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard whatever to work ill if we suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with it." Likewise, there is no difficulty in proving any system of shared governance to work ill if we suppose it conjoined with idiocy, malevolence, or other such vices. So it is well worth our while to reflect on the virtues and attitudes that must be cultivated by everyone involved to enable any system of shared governance to work.

Following, therefore, is a list of exhortations to specific forms of behavior that enhance the relational structure required for effective shared governance and, even more important, shared institutional leadership. These nine "Commandments of Shared Governance" represent only a partial list of "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots"; others certainly could be added. But they represent a starting point. Holding ourselves to them would take us a long way toward creating a context for effective institutional collaboration.

1. Honor thy institutional mission above all other considerations and place no false values before it.

A shared commitment to mission provides the essential background for effective collaborative governance. Of course, no one ever would (or should) assume that answers to vexing institutional questions can be deduced from a mission statement. However, a shared understanding of a college’s or a university’s fundamental values, aspirations, and operating assumptions establishes the context for fruitful deliberation on specific issues.

2. Place the real agenda before thee—focus on the real work.

We all know that the ostensible agenda of a meeting can be just a smokescreen hiding issues that people believe are too politically charged to be addressed directly. Alternatively, players can gain political advantage by keeping their real agenda submerged in a haze of politically or emotionally charged rhetoric that intimidates others into silence. Unfortunately, to solve a problem we usually have to talk about it. At best, refusing to deal directly with the real issues wastes an enormous amount of precious time; at worst, it is dishonest in ways that are unworthy of an academic institution. So do not allow hidden agendas to cloud governance discussions or shift the focus from the (real) work. Be courageous: name the real problems—including institutional politics and even personalities, where relevant—and deal with them head-on. Focus collective attention on the issues that must be resolved and then deliberate on the merits of proposed courses of action.

3. Do the work.

Institutional work is serious and demanding—no less so than teaching, research, or artistic creation. Those engaged in a governance project must agree on their tasks and execute them, whether it is homework to be done in preparation for meetings or a concerted effort around a table. We need to be intolerant of (faculty or administrative) participants who routinely fail to show up, come unprepared, distract others from the business at hand, or otherwise impede the collective work. Conversely, we need to commend and reward those participants who contribute most.

4. Refuse to play zero-sum games.

Effective governance requires a shared commitment to advancing the institution; it cannot be seen as an arena pitting different constituencies against one another. In times of limited resources (and when are we not in such a time?), it may not be possible for every unit to get everything it wants or even everything it needs. However, genuine collaborative leadership aims to maximize the collective good. When we make progress toward that shared goal, we all win—even if from a narrower point of view my own unit fails to achieve an individual objective. It is possible to accept such compromises if all parties share the overarching institutional values and can affirm that the process of decision making was participatory, fair, and driven not by the political status of the players but rather by the merits of the proposals that won out.

5. Cultivate a flexible, Socratic spirit.

We all try to help our students understand Socrates’ principle that if you help me replace a worse idea (that is, an idea neither grounded in evidence nor based on cogent argument) with a better one, we both benefit. What if we were to live up to that ideal in governance? We would have to begin by checking our egos at the door. Seeking the best available solutions to institutional problems is incompatible with seeking to validate one’s initial position or enhancing one’s sense of intellectual self-worth. In short, we must avoid playing intellectual zero-sum games too.

6. Trust but verify.

Educational research has demonstrated the extent to which students live up to their teachers’ expectations, and accordingly the best teachers set high expectations for all of their students. Let us apply this principle to institutional governance as well. We all know that some players are relentless in projecting a lack of trust to the "other side." Genuine leaders, whether in the faculty or administration, must be equally relentless in expecting the best from their colleagues.

This is not a Pollyannaesque strategy. Effective teachers do more than expect the best of their students; they consistently hold them to the highest standards of performance and help them meet those standards. We must do the same in governance: we must join the expectation of trust with mutual demands to behave in ways that justify and reinforce that trust. Furthermore, we should look at governance as itself an arena for teaching—rather like a graduate pro-seminar in which participants who already have a good deal of knowledge can learn from one another.

If someone fails to meet our high expectations, then we must honestly name the problem and direct criticism where it is due. The next step is to reaffirm the need for trust, rebuild the relationship, and return to collaboration. If problems recur, then we may have to fix them in other ways—ultimately, if necessary, by removing someone from the table, but always with the expectation that all players should be worthy of trust and that trust ultimately will be rewarded.

7. Learn how to fight well—that is, learn how to disagree vigorously while preserving a working relationship.

Institutions can face difficult and even intractable problems; reasonable people can and sometimes should disagree passionately about how to resolve them. But those of us entrusted with the task of teaching and learning at the highest levels in our society should be able to fight our institutional battles like adults—disputing vigorously yet with respect, not picking up our marbles and going home if we lose. This is certainly another lesson we try to teach our students, and we know that such lessons can be learned.

So we should pick our battles carefully, fight fairly with the intention of arriving at the best solution (not winning debating points at all costs), and make sure that each side understands what the other is saying, especially where there is disagreement. Don’t confuse disagreement with misunderstanding ("The fact that you disagree with me means that you don’t understand my position"), and don’t explain disagreements by attributing evil motives to the other side. Cultivating such skills is essential to maintaining trust. It also helps to pause occasionally to discuss process, get everyone’s sense of how things are going, and explicitly reaffirm the importance of maintaining good working relationships.

8. Thou shalt not bash.

Be intentional in avoiding behavior that can undermine goodwill. Today, most of us have become sensitized to the real harm that can be done—both to targeted individuals and to intergroup relationships—when members of one group mindlessly describe members of another group in negative stereotypical terms. It is no longer generally acceptable (in or outside the academy) for men to talk that way about women, for whites to talk that way about blacks, or for straights to talk that way about gays. We know that stereotyping is an instrument of social repression and undercuts human relationships. For these reasons, we try to help our students understand the pejorative implications of such stereotypical locutions and believe that what they say matters.

Unfortunately, we administrators and faculty members do not always apply these same lessons to ourselves. In recent years, it has become less politically correct for administrators to use stereotypes in talking about faculty (though it still occurs too frequently); unfortunately, it is still accepted (and, indeed, often expected) in many quarters for faculty to bash administrators as a group. What if all of us were to live up to our highest ideals in this area of our collective discourse? How much better could we make our working relationships if we were to be intentional in avoiding the prejudicial attribution of universal malevolence, malfeasance, or idiocy to members of the other group? Let’s be less tolerant of those on either side of the table who try to score these cheap rhetorical points.

9. Understand that power takes various forms and that the most important power in a college or university should be—and usually is—the power to persuade.

The collective good is badly served by a one-dimensional analysis of faculty-administrative relationships that sees only a power differential. After all, if power is all that matters and if administrators hold most of the power because of their positions, then what is their incentive to collaborate? In fact, the ability to make a decision independently or to overturn someone else’s recommendation is usually not the most important form of power within a college or university. In an academic community—a community of discourse—the power to persuade (rationality!) should take the place of honor. By working to foster a culture of evidence and sound argument, administrators and faculty members together can create a context for genuine collaboration.

These rules highlight familiar values and habits we routinely attempt to express in our teaching and disciplinary lives and to cultivate in our students. We need to foster these same values in ourselves when we do the shared work of governing an academic institution. To do so, we must first abandon the ideology that postulates the interest of the faculty, which is necessarily and inexorably opposed to the interest of the administration (faculties and administrations being no more homogeneous than, say, ethnic groups or genders). We also must abandon the old industrial-relations paradigm that regards any genuine faculty-administrative cooperation as an indication of weakness or selling out—by either side. Even though such beliefs can be deeply ingrained, they do not stand up well under scrutiny, and they impede efforts to work together effectively for the collective good. Fortunately, such beliefs also seem to be less in evidence today than in the past. There is reason for hope.

Structural Conditions of Collaboration

It is idealistic (if not Panglossian) to believe that effective faculty-administrative collaboration can be achieved merely through exhortations to grow up, play fair, and live up to our ideals. No rational governance system can rest upon the assumption that people will always deal in good faith. This point received its classic American expression by James Madison in Federalist 51: "[W]hat is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

Since we are no more likely to encounter celestial beings on campus than in Washington, it is appropriate to talk not only about virtues and relationships but also about ways of structuring the business of shared governance that encourage us to express our higher natures. Let me suggest five such organizational principles that systematically encourage collaboration.

1. Clarify the roles of the players.

As a starting point, it is important for everyone involved in the governance of a college or university to know who is responsible for what—to understand precisely what authority resides at each level in the system. The AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities makes this point clearly:

Joint effort in an academic institution will take a variety of forms appropriate to the kinds of situations encountered. . . . Although the variety of such approaches may be wide, at least two general conclusions regarding joint effort seem clearly warranted: (1) important areas of action involve at one time or another the initiating capacity and decision-making_participation of all the institutional components, and (2) differences in the weight of each voice, from one point to the next, should be determined by reference to the responsibility of each component for the particular matter at hand. [Emphasis added.]

It should be possible for anyone reading a college’s governance document or faculty constitution to determine the differing roles of faculty and administration in various decisions. It should be evident, for example, when the action of a body will constitute a recommendation and when, and the extent to which, its decisions will be binding.

At the same time, even though our understanding of governance appropriately begins with such questions, it should not end there. As I have urged above, persuasion ultimately should be more important than statutory power, and that principle should be embodied in the ways we do business with one another. The highest bid is to achieve consensus (or a reasonable approximation of consensus) on all important institutional decisions. To the extent that we achieve that goal, the question of who holds ultimate decision-making power becomes less relevant.

2. Keep the process as simple and straightforward as possible (but not simpler).

Convoluted governance pathways create opportunities for small groups or individuals to block good ideas, thereby reducing everyone’s incentive to invest time and effort in trying to make a difference. In their little book, The Elements of Style, Strunk and White advise us to "omit needless words" from our writing. We are equally well advised to omit needless committees, positions, and steps from college or university governance. Although neither piece of advice tells us just how to do what it says, each represents an important reminder—a good heuristic—to employ in taking a critical look at one’s prose or one’s governance system.

3. Assign (elect or appoint) people to participate in the work based on what they can contribute, not on who they are or which groups they "represent."

People should be given positions of responsibility in governance because of what they bring to the work, not because of their political status in the institution. When considering how to place individuals on governance committees, we often think immediately of representation by group (whether defined by employment category, academic discipline, area within an institution, or group features such as gender or ethnicity). This impulse can be based on a laudable commitment to principles of democracy, fairness, and inclusiveness. Certainly, people in particular divisions or groups can bring important kinds of awareness that others may not share. But the representational impulse can also involve the defensive idea that only someone from "my" group can adequately look out for "my" interests.

The latter belief, of course, embodies multiple confusions. Someone from one’s own group, however defined, may actually be ill equipped or ill disposed to protect one’s interests. Moreover, the values of participation and legitimacy can be realized in many ways, only one of which is election based on group membership. Above all, the interests we should be most concerned to protect are broader institutional ones, not our own advantages narrowly conceived.

So questions of expertise and thoughtfulness come again to the forefront, prompting us to ask: "What institutional goals are we trying to achieve?" "Who is best positioned to do the necessary work?" "And how do we (collectively) bring those people together to complete the task?" In many cases, an alternative to a representational model will offer the best prospects for success. For example, Santa Clara University, which received a governance award from the AAUP in 1999, has implemented such a system.

4. Prefer a "matrix management" model of decision making wherever possible.

Matrixed decision making involves bringing together those persons who are best equipped to address a complex institutional problem. It is antihierarchical in that it explicitly reaches across institutional dividing lines to constitute cross-functional teams. In a college or university, such teams usually should include both faculty members and administrators, and frequently staff, students, alumni, or trustees.

It is crucial to include the key administrator who ultimately will have to sign off on a decision (or his or her trusted designee). The role of this player is to ensure that everyone involved in the project understands the parameters within which they are operating so that the group will produce a proposal that can be implemented. It then becomes everyone’s responsibility to craft a result that will work—as opposed to creating a product whose primary virtue resides in representing a particular institutional perspective or "voice" but ignores other important voices or values. Like politics, institutional governance is above all the art of the possible.

Sometimes faculty members believe that they increase their autonomy and authority by excluding administrators from deliberations until they have arrived at a position or crafted a proposal that has been endorsed by a faculty group. This tactic is, however, misguided and, in fact, achieves just the opposite of its intended effect. The power of administrators to say no is far greater when they are presented with a proposal or a recommendation they have had no part in developing. By contrast, administrators share power when they participate actively in the work of committees and task forces. By getting into the room and becoming part of a working group, they place themselves in the position of having to persuade and be persuaded. Politically, they are much less able to reject a proposal that they helped to create, and so consensus trumps positional power.

5. Create systems and procedures (both formal and informal) that maximize consultation and minimize surprises.

All of us—faculty members and administrators alike—hate governance surprises. A faculty body (especially an assembly of the whole) is perfectly prepared to reject a proposal wholesale—no matter how much thought and effort has gone into it or how meritorious it might be—if it is forced to vote when seeing it for the first time. Conversely, a faculty assembly or senate is far more likely to approve a proposal that has been widely vetted and that incorporates the results of that prior consultation. The same holds true for administration. Accordingly, we need to build in both formal steps and informal procedures to guarantee broad consultation throughout the process. This can mean, for example, consultation between a governance committee and the faculty at large (by holding hearings and bringing proposals to an assembly or senate for discussion only, prior to voting at the next meeting), between faculty and administration, between administration and faculty, or with trustees or the legal staff. When in doubt, consult.

Of course, no set of abstract principles can guarantee success. But a governance system that incorporates even some of these ideas is more likely to achieve its goals than one that ignores them. Collaborative decision making can be difficult, and we need to give ourselves every possible advantage in trying to make it work well.

Unscientific Postscript

In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Søren Kierkegaard mounts an acerbic attack on Hegelian philosophy as a grand logical system that leaves no place for the human individual. Kierkegaard caricatures Hegel as a man who builds a large and elaborate mansion but chooses then to live in a hovel on the rear grounds of the estate. Let me suggest by way of comparison that the ideals of the academy invoked above themselves map out a grand and beautiful structure. But if we—and the we here must include both faculty and administration—cannot create governance systems that embody these ideals in practice, then we, too, are choosing to live in a hovel in the shadow of our own castle. Certainly no rational person would make such a choice, and of course we academics are nothing if not rational.

So our task is to construct simple but tastefully elegant governance systems that foster collaboration, and then actively cultivate the habits of heart, mind, and action that build community and enable us to work together effectively in the service of a shared mission. More simply, our challenge is to live up to our own academic ideals, not just in our pedagogical and disciplinary lives but in governance as well. To the extent that we do that, we will build colleges and universities in which we truly can dwell together—not in conflict but in a spirit of genuine collegiality that could, in fact, make an academic community the best of all possible worlds.