The instructional paradigm is a paradigm of control. It is not supportive of leadership and innovation. In it, everyone is controlled by someone. Students are controlled by professors who hold the power of the grade. Learning is an assimilative process whereby the professor, the owner of knowledge, dispenses it to the students. The professor holds power and control over the students, who must meet the expectations of the professor whether or not those expectations were clearly delineated or articulated. Students are discouraged from collaborating in this competitive environment. They are judged on their individual abilities in competition with the others in the class. The teacher is not a facilitator or mentor but, rather, a judge and, often, a gatekeeper.
Junior faculty find themselves in a similar situation as they begin becoming acculturated into the system. The Harvard Study of New Scholars (Trower & Bleak, 2002), a study of the dissatisfaction that junior faculty experience, reported that junior faculty are increasingly discontented in this authoritarian environment in which there is one way of knowing, one way of conducting research, one way to assimilate into a department or unit, one way to demonstrate success, and one way to achieve tenure and rank.
It’s interesting to think about what it means to administer in the traditional paradigm. The synonyms of the word administer in the thesaurus provide an interesting view of our perceived function: manage, direct, run, order, control, oversee, and our favorite, do paperwork. This list of synonyms illustrates the definition of the perceived role of the administrator in our current paradigm.
Junior faculty find themselves in a similar situation as they begin becoming acculturated into the system. The Harvard Study of New Scholars (Trower & Bleak, 2002), a study of the dissatisfaction that junior faculty experience, reported that junior faculty are increasingly discontented in this authoritarian environment in which there is one way of knowing, one way of conducting research, one way to assimilate into a department or unit, one way to demonstrate success, and one way to achieve tenure and rank.
It’s interesting to think about what it means to administer in the traditional paradigm. The synonyms of the word administer in the thesaurus provide an interesting view of our perceived function: manage, direct, run, order, control, oversee, and our favorite, do paperwork. This list of synonyms illustrates the definition of the perceived role of the administrator in our current paradigm.
