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Collegiality and Tenure
James L. Bess, Carra Leah Hood
To The Editor:In "Does Collegiality Count?" in the November–December issue, Mary Ann Connell and Frederick G. Savage lay out well the legal issues involved in using collegiality as a criterion in tenure decisions. However, the authors barely scratch the surface of the underlying question of the "meaning" of collegiality and the behaviors that are presumed to accompany it. Moreover, the even larger issues of comity in departmental employment relations are only hinted at.
Freedom of speech and action are especially, and perhaps uniquely, central to the effectiveness of academic organizations. In addition to the free expression of new ideas that will rightly challenge some extant ideas, they ensure the vitality of the enterprise by nipping at, if not penetrating, the intellectual security of faculty members, frequently forcing them into an uncomfortable confrontation with their own perceived individual integrity. Academic freedom thus supports and enhances the cognitive side of the enterprises of teaching and research.
On the other hand, as many organizational psychologists have been telling us for decades, for most people, there can be no unencumbered life of the mind in the presence of disconcerting organizational, social, and personal turmoil. That is to say, at least a modicum of comity is necessary in order for both rationality and creativity to emerge. Significant ideological differences usually cannot even be tolerated, let alone nourished, in an atmosphere of dislike, distrust, and enmity.
The question, then, is not whether tenure review committees should take idiosyncratic and apparently deviant or antisocial behavior into account. They already do, and they should. The issue is how to balance the need for comity and the need for academic freedom, and how to prevent collegiality from becoming the "mask" that authors Connell and Savage rightly claim obscures discrimination.
One answer lies in understanding academic freedom as rooted in the diversity of nearly 4,000 institutions of higher education. Too much local diversity provides too little nurturing; too much local homogeneity stultifies deviance and creativity. Fortunately, qualified but rejected candidates will usually be able to earn tenure somewhere in the system.
Needless to say, unethical, prejudicial discrimination is not acceptable, but enlightened matching of a candidate’s values and personality to departmental culture makes eminently good sense.
James L. Bess
Senior Partner
James L. Bess & Associates
To The Editor:Although an absence of collegiality within university departments can create an unpleasant environment, evaluating the collegiality of individual faculty members for tenure does not necessarily eliminate unpleasantness. It might change the context in which contests are articulated. As well, the pressure to be collegial might silence untenured faculty, unwilling to risk challenging the status quo within their departments. Faculty who receive tenure and promotion might not experience the pressure to be collegial as significantly as untenured faculty members do and, consequently, might act in remarkably noncollegial ways.
If collegiality is interpreted as "being nice to the chair," which it seems to be in some of the legal decisions that Connell and Savage discuss in their article in the November–December issue, then the indirect criterion for evaluation of "working well with others"—a reasonable criterion if all of the faculty member’s working contexts are considered—comes to mean "getting along with the chair." While nurturing a working relationship with the chair can be beneficial, this relationship is not the only demonstration of a faculty member’s collegiality. Pressure to work collegially—that is, not to create problems, not even to raise legitimate, if controversial, issues within the department, and, definitely, not to challenge the chair—without a doubt produces an environment that breaches academic freedom and creates the opportunity for all sorts of discrimination. However, and perhaps more important, an evaluation criterion that silences untenured faculty produces potential exacerbation of inequalities. In a troubled department, this effect can easily and most damagingly occur. Finally, the legal standard that equates universities with businesses outside the university misconstrues the nature of academic work and reflects the increasing bureaucratization of the profession.
Carra Leah Hood
(English)
Southern Connecticut State University
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