Administrators Rendered Powerless

As administrators within this system, we too find ourselves rendered powerless either by those above us in the organizational structure or by our own policies and procedures. How many times has a department head delivered unpopular information to his or her department with the only explanation being “I have no power to change this” or “This is out of my control”? How many times has a dean been presented with an innovative idea by a faculty member only to respond, “That’s a great idea but our system can’t accommodate it”? How many times do academic administrators find themselves modifying or accepting less than optimal conditions for learning because of policies or decisions made by other divisions within the institution, whether it’s the custodial crew determining classroom arrangements or the computer software system driving curriculum configurations? From our experiences at varying levels of administration in multiple institutions, we would answer, “too often.” In part, this sense of powerlessness has arisen from a rise in professionalization of nonacademic functions within the university. The American Association of University Professors (2008) describes this movement:

For most of the history of U.S. higher education, faculty members performed the key administrative functions. The college president, dean of faculty, dean of students, and director of admissions were professors who simultaneously wore faculty and administrative hats. The bird’s-eye view of the institution’s different functions that faculty administrators had gave them an advantage in understanding the pedagogical consequences of administrative decisions, and their institutions benefited from the broad base of knowledge. In the post–World War II years, however, college and university enrollments grew dramatically, and specialization increasingly characterized professional administrative staff positions. This movement away from generalists and toward specialists has accelerated during the past twenty years, creating a disconnect between administrations and academic progress. As a result administrators sometimes do not appreciate the effects their decisions will have across other parts of the institution.

Working Habits in the Instructional Paradigm

Senge’s (1990) characterization of controlling organizations mirrors the values of the instructional paradigm. In his preface to the revised edition of The Fifth Discipline, Senge quotes Edward Deming: “Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn and joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and go on up through the university. . . . We will never transform the prevailing system of management without transforming our prevailing system of education. They are the same system” (xii–xiii).

Among the elements of traditional or controlling organizations that Senge (1990) identified were managing by fear, which results in focusing first on pleasing the boss (or teacher); dualistic thinking regarding right versus wrong answers, which results in overemphasis on technical problem solving; predictability and controllability evidenced in the belief that managing is controlling; and a recognition that excessive competitiveness leads to distrust—all of which leads to organizational fragmentation. Senge (1990) sees that leadership in traditional, controlling organizations is predicated upon a belief in people’s powerlessness, their need to be directed and led. This characterization of the traditional, controlling organization all too accurately describes the workplace governed by the instructional paradigm, the system that Deming claimed has destroyed our people.

A Paradigm of Isolation

The industrial model of the instructional paradigm is driven by competition, and this emphasis on competition fosters isolation. Students compete against one another within classes for grades. The competition among students for seats in certain high-profile programs exacerbates an overemphasis on grades and test scores at the expense of learning, encouraging students to take safe and easy choices in order to achieve the highest GPA. The same competition is fostered among faculty, who are judged in isolation for tenure, promotion, and merit by systems that, more often than not, privilege solo scholarship over collaborative works. And if faculty do collaborate, the hierarchy of lead author undercuts the concept of true collaboration. There may be no one more isolated than The industrial model of the instructional paradigm is driven by competition, and this emphasis on competition fosters isolation.

Students compete against one another within classes for grades. The competition among students for seats in certain high-profile programs exacerbates an overemphasis on grades and test scores at the expense of learning, encouraging students to take safe and easy choices in order to achieve the highest GPA. The same competition is fostered among faculty, who are judged in isolation for tenure, promotion, and merit by systems that, more often than not, privilege solo scholarship over collaborative works. And if faculty do collaborate, the hierarchy of lead author undercuts the concept of true collaboration. There may be no one more isolated than In the instructional paradigm, when a faculty member makes the transition to an administrative position, he or she, as well as others, often perceive the transition as moving to a different world and worldview. Faculty members often joke with their peers who move into administrative posts, saying things like “You’ve gone to the dark side,” in spite of the reality that most academic administrators retain their faculty status or hold tenure in an academic department. Stephen Brookfield (2006) examines what he labels “cultural suicide” in relation to adult learners who find themselves questioning their learning process because their family, peers, and social group act as if they have betrayed them by their choice to be a student, by making the choice to change. Although Brookfield’s discussion is related to students from minority groups or working class backgrounds, there is a strong parallel here to the faculty member who moves into administration. The person who makes this choice is sometimes seen as betraying the values and culture of his or her professional community. Brookfield describes students in this situation as feeling that their identities have been challenged, that they have become alienated from their families and social group.

The perceived divide between faculty and administration is at the very core of the problems we witness with the instructional paradigm. In the instructional paradigm, the faculty member who leaves the faculty position to become an administrator abandons the role of faculty and presumably adopts a new a set of values and ideals that are perceived to be in conflict with those previously held as a faculty member.

The overemphasis on competition and control in the instructional paradigm betrays a lack of respect for, as well as a fundamental distrust of, the individual. A colleague once described his institution as a place that valued jobs but not the people in them. Individuals at this institution typically became more embittered as the years passed because of the processes and decision making that perpetuated a climate of disrespect for all employees, faculty and staff alike. In places like this, rules and policies predominate; fear of legal reprisal governs decision making. At this institution legal counsel was so powerful that the university counsel sat next to the president on the stage at commencement. The prevailing attitude in the instructional paradigm is that students, faculty, and staff need to be controlled by rules, processes, and practices, which is demoralizing and limits creativity and innovation.

Ownership of Knowledge

This instructional paradigm views knowledge as a quantifiable commodity that can be isolated, identified, and controlled. In the traditional division of units, departments, and colleges according to academic discipline, the knowledge is owned by the discipline. Tagg (2003) writes that faculty as the core of educational institutions have been replaced by departments and that their influence on student learning is exercised through academic departments: “At most colleges, academic departments hire faculty members, and academic departments in the Instructional Paradigm college derive their power from their role as depositories for classes. Administrations, to the extent they are involved in undergraduate education, are largely structures for organizing and channelling the activities of departments” .

This ownership of knowledge dictates various processes within the university, among them hiring, promotion and merit, and curriculum development. The very concept of shared governance has at its roots ownership of discipline knowledge.

The core belief of shared governance is that faculty, because of their academic expertise and their long-term commitment to individual institutions (as opposed to academic administrators and governing board members whose terms at institutions are often relatively short in comparison to that of faculty), should govern the academic functions of their institutions, including the regulation of academic standards and curriculum and the hiring of faculty and staff. The purpose of shared governance is to maintain academic integrity by preventing political or commercial interests from influencing institutional decision making. One of the safeguards against outside pressure is the individual academic’s responsibility to maintain standards set by his or her discipline-specific professional organizations. The adherence to academic standards established by discipline, rather than by individual institution, was intended to provide balance and integrity of standards across institutions. While we would never argue against the importance of shared governance, shared governance within the instructional paradigm has contributed to a mindset that has fostered unnecessary divisiveness and fragmentation. As Vartan Gregorian writes, “Schools should not be treating each other as isolated silos, because the strength of the university is in its totality” (quoted in Hersh & Merrow, 2005, p. 94).

We can see the effect of this belief that knowledge is both owned and distributable in the curriculum review process; in some instances, professors are asked to delineate how many minutes per semester will be devoted to individual topics within the course out line, or accrediting bodies ask for the number of hours per semester devoted to specific knowledge. Tagg (2003) referred to this as educational atomism: “In the ‘educational atomism’ of the Instruction Paradigm, the parts of the teaching and learning process are seen as discrete entities. The parts exist prior to and independent of any whole; the whole is no more than the sum of the parts, or even less. The college interacts with students only in discrete, isolated environments, cut off from one another because the parts—the classes—are prior to the whole. A ‘college education’ is the sum of the student’s experience of a series of discrete, largely unrelated, three-credit classes”.

This view of knowledge and education cannot keep pace with the incredible rate of change in the twenty-first-century workforce. Many fields now cannot accelerate the transfer of information to students fast enough to keep up with the rate of change in the knowledge of the discipline. It is estimated, for example, that by the time engineering graduates walk across the stage with their diplomas, nearly half of the knowledge of their discipline is obsolete. When the focus is on knowledge rather than on learning, obsolescence is inevitable.

A Paradigm of Control

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.

The Instructional Paradigm

The values, attitudes, and biases inherent in the instructional paradigm are predicated upon an industrial model of human learning. This factory model of education values quality control, which is ironic since higher education is currently under such intense scrutiny to be accountable for the quality of graduates. Concern over the business/factory influence on higher education is certainly not new. John Jay Chapman wrote in 1909, “The men who stand for education and scholarship have ideals of business men. . . . They are, in truth, business men. The men who control [universities] today are very little else than businessmen running a large department store which dispenses education to the millions” (quoted in Lucas, 1994, p. 192). Most of the critics of the growing bureaucracy in higher education admitted that it could not be eliminated, but still decried its current form which had a tendency to “dehumanize collegiate life” (Lucas, 1994 p. 193). A more recent criticism in a report issued by the American Association of University Professors (2008) placed the factory analogy in contemporary perspective as U.S. colleges and universities “are embracing the operating strategies of for-profit corporations with growing fervor. . . . [C]olleges and universities increasingly conceptualize higher education as a commodity and attempt to provide it at the lowest cost. They do so by reorganizing themselves as ‘knowledge factories’ in which a variety of internal functions (for example, dining services and facilities maintenance) are outsourced to for-profit contractors who pay their workers minimum wages and in which the central teaching and research functions are outsourced to legions of poorly paid nontenure-track adjunct faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students” . Similarly, Dolence and Norris (1995) described the transition from the industrial age to the information age, noting that the factory model that characterized education in the industrial age was insufficiently flexible and focused on outputs and processes rather than on learning.

In this factory model, students’ potential is determined by ACT, SAT, HSGPA, and sometimes other quantifiable measures. Depending upon our institutional standards, students are deemed to be the acceptable quality of raw material for our product. Quality control is especially evident in the freshman year, during which the weaker material is sorted out. The Wingspread Group on Higher Education (1993) charged that “Our education system is better organized to discourage students—to weed them out—than it is to cultivate and support our most important national resource, our people”. Students are directed to take a prescribed collection of courses in a prescribed sequence in order to assure quality control over the exiting product, our graduates. This model devalues the individual. In the mass production mentality that this model represents, students assimilate information at equivalent rates with equivalent responses, thus creating like products. This assembly line of education presupposes a sameness to individuals, so that regardless of prior learning, individual differences, or extracurricular experiences, each student following a like path will emerge from the assembly line like all the others.

Rewards of Administrative Work

What are the rewards of administrative work? We asked a number of our colleagues that question, and it was a surprisingly difficult one for them to answer—their initial response was usually either sarcasm or a contemptuous snort. Some who had been involved with building renovation or procurement of necessary equipment commented on the satisfaction they felt because they had created something tangible, a physical manifestation of the work accomplished, something that people could see. So much of our work is unseen and somewhat abstract that one can lose sight of its consequences. Although a revised transfer policy affects students and the institution in many significant ways, the written document does not reflect the tremendous amount of time, energy, and negotiation it took to create it, at least not in the way that a multimilliondollar library or a newly renovated student center does (Cullen, 2007).

In pondering this question ourselves, we agreed that for us, the greatest rewards have come from the individual students, faculty, and administrative colleagues whom we were able to support or promote in some way, such as reengaging someone in the department, publicly acknowledging someone’s work or success, or assisting new members in their transition to our academic community. Regardless of the role we play within our academic community, the difference that we can make in the lives of those around us, maximizing their potential for success, will always be, for us, the most rewarding part of our work. Of the many accomplishments that we could list, our most rewarding have all dealt with situations that supported community building, collaboration, and collegiality. These examples stand out to us because the creation of community and collegiality seems to be such a difficult task to accomplish in our current system.

Lucas (1994) notes a recurring theme regarding loss of community in late twentieth-century commentaries on higher education. He points to George Douglas’s analysis as the most insightful of many during this period. Douglas commented that universities were failing to provide the type of human setting in which education worthy of the term could thrive. They were too big, too full of activity to be places of authentic learning. Instead he claimed they had become factories for producing specialized expertise or for imparting information. The prevailing opinion in the 1990s was that the sheer size of modern universities militated against the creation of community (Lucas, 1994, p. 288).

We would argue that the frustration of working in higher education, in a system that seems to preclude change, is not solely the result of the size of institutions, but rather that it is caused by the paradigm that governs all institutions, large and small. The instructional paradigm we work in is not conducive to community nor to individuality or creativity. In fact, it is at odds with most of the values espoused by today’s colleges and universities. It is a paradigm that has fostered alienation and an unhealthy divisiveness between and among faculty and administration as well as between academics and nonacademics within institutions. Our paradigm must change if higher education is to change.