Should Faculty Be "Managed" ?

The administrative urge to "manage" and the faculty desire for freedom can often conflict. But professional autonomy and corporate obligation can be balanced.

By Joseph A. Raelin

In recent years, business-management solutions have been hailed as a way to prepare the academy for the vicissitudes of academic markets in the twenty-first century. Underlying calls for such solutions is the presumption that the faculty must be "managed." Recommendations have been proffered for more "quality" in education, more effective supervision, more top-down control over faculty, and more standardization of matters such as faculty salaries and benefits, student evaluations, and admissions.

One of these recommendations, the quality approach, is often referred to as total quality management (TQM). Quality experts see consumer satisfaction as a critical goal of organizations, and argue that organizations must adhere to the needs and desires of their customers to achieve this goal. Consumer satisfaction, in turn, relies on continuous improvement of all organizational processes. In the university, the student is a key customer, according to the TQM model. Going along with this customer analogy, how does one seek the student's satisfaction? One way might be to ensure that students get the professors they want or to simply install evaluations that rate faculty and reward (or terminate) them accordingly.

TQM's proponents also argue that we can continually improve university cost structures by providing the same level of service with fewer resources. Some schools are attempting to control costs by gradually increasing class size without hiring more faculty. Another TQM proposal eliminates variations in order to increase uniformity of the product or service. Insisting on common syllabi, especially in multisection courses, might help to accomplish this goal. Although some TQM exponents might object that these recommendations are insufficient because they leave out quality components like employee involvement and collaboration, quality improvements might well be interpreted or implemented this way.

Management strategies like these have been proffered amid an atmosphere of growing alienation between professors and administrators. In a survey by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, slightly more than half of the academic respondents reported that their relationships with administrators were either fair or poor; a similar proportion agreed that their administrator was often autocratic. The popular press has picked up on the widening gulf between faculty members, whose influence is under siege, and administrators, who are being pressured by different constituencies to raise money, improve academic quality, control costs, restrict or encourage corporate ventures, and maintain enrollments. Clashes over governance, finances, and academic freedom have erupted all across the country, from San Diego State to Yale, culminating in faculty firings and executive departures.

Many of these clashes have resulted from college administrators assuming the powers of corporate executives, emulating the authority that corporate CEOs presumably would deploy. The AAUP censured Bennington College's administration in 1995 following the firing of twenty-seven faculty members as part of a sweeping reorganization by the college's board of trustees and president. After secretly determining that a state of financial exigency existed, the board and the president adopted a plan that, in addition to permitting the dismissals, effectively ended "presumptive tenure" at Bennington, an arrangement roughly equivalent to tenure.

One of those dismissed, the late Neil Rappaport, was an instructor of photography and an active opponent of the college's administration. He was given a "post-presumptive tenure" review after twenty years on the faculty and was subsequently dismissed partly for an alleged want of collegiality. In December 2000, Bennington agreed to a monetary settlement to end a lawsuit filed by some of the aggrieved professors and apologized to them. Nevertheless, Bennington's administration retains the plan it adopted in the mid-1990s and remains on the AAUP's censured list.

At another institution, a president overruled an all-college committee's promotion of three candidates, submitting three names of his own. Defending his action, the president explained that he substituted criteria for promotion that he and his staff deemed more suitable for the university. Although the president and the academic vice president subsequently survived a vote of no confidence, bitterness and mistrust pervaded the campus. Important service functions deteriorated, and other senior administrators lost credibility with many faculty members upon whom they could previously rely.

Recently, a professor at California University of Pennsylvania was fired for refusing to change a grade from failure to incomplete on instructions from his president, and for subsequently writing a critical review of the same president for the university's board of trustees. Although the professor eventually regained his job through arbitration, a lawsuit he filed is still in contention and may make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

University of East Anglia professor Adam Fairclough, writing in the July-August 1999 issue of Academe, describes what has been accomplished in British higher education in the name of managerial efficiency. He reports that government-imposed reforms of the late 1980s—including the abolition of tenure—have led to a decay in internal democracy, not to mention increased workloads, job insecurity, and mounting pressures on teaching, research, and administration. Fairclough further notes that owing to a "research assessment exercise," faculty are being advised about what and where they should publish. Student loads have tripled, and, although grade inflation is rampant, few faculty are inclined to question the decline in standards.

Those who do are subject to palpable risks. In 1991 three philosophy lecturers at Swansea University criticized the academic standards of a new degree program, charging that some master's degree theses were not only substandard but contained plagiarized material. In exchange for their trouble, two of the complainants were suspended from teaching and one resigned. The vice chancellor of the university commented that in the business world "those people . . . would have been up the road the moment they kicked up the fuss."

It would seem that business-management solutions are not among the best ways to address problems of university governance, let alone those of industrial practice. The pressures and potential discord facing the university campus are nevertheless real and require managerial attention.

The Culture of Academia

Students are not consumers but neophyte members of a select intellectual community whose methods of inquiry on the great questions of humankind require constant sustenance. Faculty members believe they are the driving force behind the university's success and cannot tolerate direct orders from those outside the community. Change must come from the bottom up, in their view, and collegiality and persuasion must reign over bureaucratic control. Faculty tend to insist that issues that affect them be decided by critical debate and open examination. Any administrator who wishes to be an academic leader must recognize the legitimacy of faculty interests and be open to collegial governance.

Indeed, higher education scholar Robert Birnbaum, in his major study of college presidents, found that the presidents who enjoyed faculty support were selected by a process in which faculty had a significant role; such presidents were also perceived to have confidence in their faculty and to have listened to them, especially in regard to their expectations.

Of all the institutions characterizing the culture of academia, none reigns as supreme as that of academic freedom. It is typically viewed as the academic version of professional autonomy—that fundamental attribute of practice that accords the professional the right to determine the problems that he or she will examine as well as the means to be used in confronting these problems.

Academic freedom is occasionally viewed as exceeding the attribute of autonomy. For example, it has been construed as constituting the inherent right of freedom of thought, especially the right to question accepted ideas and beliefs. In other professions, the expression of unpopular opinions may jeopardize the professional's security. In academia, however, academic freedom protects the professor from loss of position, among other consequences. The expression of divergent views is encouraged and guarded from restrictions by religious, political, or economic interests. Such restrictions would not only violate the mission of the university but would also presumably threaten the stability and progress of society, which depends on the advancement of new knowledge and ideas.

The principle of academic freedom was institutionalized through the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, issued jointly by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. It has even received judicial standing, as was affirmed in 1985 by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing.

Recently, however, academic freedom has been diluted through developments such as "post-tenure reviews" and multi-year contracts, and it is also subject to pressure from diverse stakeholders. Career-conscious students and their parents, interested in a return on their considerable investment, are insisting on more hands-on teaching at the expense of nebulous research. Corporate sponsors of research sometimes demand the postponement, or even nondisclosure, of findings. Some junior scholars protest against the institution of tenure until they obtain it. Other faculty members are their own worst enemies when they consider social factors—such as connections and elitism—rather than merit as a basis for promotion and compensation decisions. And, occasionally, suppression of ideas occurs on religious and political grounds.

Yet, within universities as in most other bureaucracies, administrators believe it is their right to establish fair and rational rules and regulations and to expect employee conformance to these procedures, regardless of professional standing. There is even a growing movement to associate academic freedom with the institution rather than with the individual, in which case a university might rely on its institutional autonomy (akin to its right to control faculty) to limit potentially offensive classroom or artistic expression that a faculty member might defend on professional grounds.

Strategies for Resolving Conflict

An initial solution to the dilemma of control versus autonomy is to break down the problem of autonomy into three parts: strategic, administrative, and operational. Strategic autonomy entails the freedom to select the goals and the policies guiding the organization and is usually an executive function accorded the trustees and university administration. The executives are responsible for determining the mission of the university and mediating between their institution and the wider community of which it is a part.

Administrative autonomy constitutes the responsibility to manage the activities of a unit within the system and to coordinate the tasks of that unit with other units in the system. Besides this internal function, the agents responsible for administrative autonomy (for example, deans and department chairs) also have an external function, namely mediating between their unit and possible users (for example, the business community) of their services. They also contribute to university-wide policy by reacting to the direction of the system articulated at the strategic level.

Operational autonomy means having the freedom, once a goal or problem has been set, to attack it in a manner determined by oneself but within the constraints of organizational resources and strategies. The agents responsible for this level of autonomy (the faculty) carry out their professional duties but also relate to the other levels, although most directly with the administrative agents.

When the distribution of autonomy, both by function and by role, is carried out as above, most governance conflicts can be reasonably managed, albeit in an organizational environment faced with increasing turbulence and fragmentation. Furthermore, the distribution is not so tightly sealed that roles from time to time might intermingle. In other words, professionals may occasionally gain strategic and administrative autonomy, and administrators may sometimes need to prevail over professional work processes. Opening up a dialogue regarding these exceptions may constitute a pivotal administrative function in its own right.

The role of the administrator is, however, one of clarifying task boundaries or providing support and resources to assist professional constituencies in conducting their own operations and interacting with one another. The eminent sociologist Thorstein Veblen forecast this role about eighty years ago when he called for administrators not to govern scholars, but to "stand in the relation of assistants serving the needs . . . of the body of scholars and scientists that make up the university." To do otherwise, Veblen continued, would thwart the role of the university in society because, as he put it in The Higher Learning in America, "a free hand is the first and abiding requisite of scholarly and scientific work."

Other Techniques

One method is to tailor professional and personal career activities according to needs arising during life-cycle academic stages. During an orientation stage, faculty members will be searching for or starting their first job. At this stage, they need to begin a program of scholarship while learning how to conduct themselves in the classroom.

Subsequently, during their early career, as they become more comfortable in their faculty role, they can offer more service to their institution while simultaneously augmenting their professional involvement outside their university. They may also be pressured to meet growing family and community responsibilities at this time.

At midcareer, they have surmounted the tenure hurdle and thus have achieved success in their teaching and research. They may be able to divert their energies to new agendas and settings while attempting to stay focused and not burn out after expending so much energy in prior years becoming established.

At the late career stage, faculty members begin putting to-gether their life's work, although some use this period to pursue entirely new agendas. It is a time to celebrate accomplishments and share personal experiences but also a time for reflection.

Professional productivity is not guaranteed among professionals without some incentive. They desire fair compensation and financial benefits as well as the perquisites of many managerial jobs, such as administrative assistance, photocopying, phones, and private office space. Yet the intrinsic benefits of the job—those things that bring out the individual's sense of achievement and contribution—explain much of what attracts faculty to the professoriate. They want to participate in the advancement of their own profession through professional development activities, whether they be in the form of attending cutting-edge conferences, presenting papers, taking leadership roles in professional associations, writing grants, or even merely having time to engage in ongoing, practice-oriented inquiry.

They appreciate career assessment and faculty development efforts that support their research and instructional roles, such as writing for publication or teaching improvement workshops.

Some also enjoy the opportunity to teach and conduct research outside their immediate discipline to combat the monotony resulting from having become overspecialized. These professional development activities acknowledge to the professional that his or her work is important, that the individual is contributing to something that is greater than mere self-gratification, and that one's peers recognize the effort. Further, although the university may derive only indirect benefit from these professional undertakings, it at least has the good fortune to sponsor an active and developing organizational member.

Researchers of the professional career development process have found mentorship to be a critical stage that comes as an outgrowth of one's success as a specialist. While performing the mentoring function, mature professionals not only tend to broaden their area of expertise but serve to inspire the research agendas of their junior colleagues. A protégé need not develop just one mentoring relationship; in fact, it may be advisable to have a research mentor separate from an instructional mentor. Academic administrators can assume a mentorship role but can be equally constructive in encouraging their senior colleagues to try out such a relationship. Mentors are also potentially helpful to management to the extent that in teaching their protégés the ropes, they can simultaneously guide them in making useful organizational contributions.

The "dual ladder," familiar in technology organizations but not formally acknowledged in the university, has great potential to serve the basic needs of professionals for autonomy and advancement without obliging them to assume nonprofessional, supervisory duties. Perhaps designed in conjunction with the mentorship strategy, the position of instructional or research fellow might reside at a rung on the professional track that has status, pay, and responsibility equivalent to that of the department chair, or even the associate dean, on the managerial track. Endowed chairs already command esteem comparable to that enjoyed by deans and executives in many universities. These roles earn the respect of faculty while sending a message throughout the community that a professorship is a valued craft requiring progressive development and commitment. Introducing such roles can also help to avoid ruining excellent professors by making them poor administrators.

Administrators can use "knowledge-management" resources and electronic platforms to increase the organizational identification of professionals and to help them see where their contribution fits into the entire university's structure and purpose. All too often, faculty members from different departments (not to mention schools) have negligible contact with one another. Nevertheless, faculty members across disciplines tend to be curious about their university's governing policies and financial operations. Essential strategic information can be covered during institution-wide postings and face-to-face assemblies.

Policy committees, task forces, study groups, and project centers staffed by representatives from different university departments constitute other integrative structures that can bring faculty together to perform critical policy-making and operating functions within the university. Many other means of initiating communication across faculties or between professors and administrators exist; to wit, intranets, bulletin boards, Web-based learning exchanges, cross-disciplinary seminars, and social events.

It may seem paradoxical to propose "project management" as a mediating strategy after suggesting that many faculty members don't like to supervise. But administering projects in one's discipline is different from supervising people in nonprofessional or business capacities, especially when it comes to trying out new ideas or methods. In this regard, administrators are wise to encourage a climate of entrepreneurialism in their system, that is, a culture that grants professors some opportunity to choose and work on their own projects without constant oversight. Moreover, the culture should allow the mavericks in the system not only to survive but to succeed. With sufficient seed money, some professors might even be able to buy out their time to accomplish some truly unique and valuable innovations.

Academic freedom—or professional autonomy—is not only the reason most of those in academe chose their profession; it is also the pivot around which the value of professionalism in the academy depends. Yet faculty members are also representatives of an organization. Absolute autonomy has limits. The boundary of the university matters. Hence academic freedom, al-though inviolable, needs to incorporate the constraints of institutional obligation. Still, institutional responsibility should not require faculty to assume subordinate roles as in a make-believe business environment. In the university setting, faculty and administrators must seek a satisfactory harmony between the autonomy expected from the professional role of faculty and the organizational commitment expected by the institution.

Joe Raelin holds the Asa Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education at Northeastern University.

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