As The Department Turns: What Causes Conflict, Drama And Other Energy Sapping Dynamics

Things can explode when you least expect it!

 This week's Chronicle of Higher Education features a blog post by David Perlmutter entitled "It's Not Your Fault."  Aimed mostly at helping assistant professors and graduate students understand how they might have unintentionally become the target of a senior person's anger or jealousy, Perlmutter explores six factors that might cause unwelcome behaviors by senior people.  While it is sometimes the case that a younger person's actions might have provoked the incident or ongoing dynamic, it is also likely that it didn't. The project of figuring out what went wrong can be just as agonizing for a younger person as the reprisals and criticisms themselves. 

As Perlmutter notes wisely, "sometimes the quickest relief comes from merely figuring out that a single tussle or a longstanding feud is not your fault but rather originates in the minds, culture, politics, or economic situation of others. So don't bang your head on the office door trying to uncover what you did to create an enemy. Sometimes the enemy is the problem, not you."  Knowing that you are not at fault does provide quick relief -- but real change can only come when a whole department adopts an ethic of civility and respect, and works hard to maintain it.

What makes the behaviors Perlmutter describes tolerable and normal in an academic setting, whereas in other settings they would be considered aberrant?  For example, a student who repeatedly shouted at other students would be perceived as an asocial bully; a corporate executive who schemed, cheated and manipulated things to serve only personal interests would be seen as a weak link in a well-run business; a politician who tolerates only his own values and enforces them ruthlessly is known as a dictator.

One answer to the question of how academia's maintains its exceptionalism is our rigid seniority system.  The tenure and promotion system gives some people absolute power over the fortunes of others, and it can easily transform nontenured people into bargaining chips, allies, enemies and/or surrogates.  A second, and less frequently discussed, dynamic of tenure is the tendency of faculty to work at one institution over the course of decades, causing them to over-invest in their sense of control and authority within the department rather than be ambitious in a larger world that is less easily controlled.

Perlmutter's theory suggests a kind of deference to the status quo:  be clear about what you are, and are not, responsible for in a department that will not change.  Alter behaviors of your own that are drawing negative attention if you can; accept those dynamics that you cannot change, and work hard to leave, if these dynamics are impossible to evade. This is one good approach, and I would certainly advocate it over participating in draining, time-consuming personal struggles against people who will cheerfully stab you in the back to get you out of their hair.  But how might a department's dynamics actually be altered over time to diminish or eliminate the conditions I have described above?  Here are a few suggestions.

Vote as little as possible.  I would put voting at the top of the list of department practices that create cascading damage.  Department cliques form around common ideological predilections that not only harden over time, but require recruitment to maintain themselves.  This affects hiring and promotion decisions as cliques strive to maintain dominance over department policies by controlling more votes.  It also means that younger and more vulnerable members of a department are always being scrutinized for their loyalties in ways that prevent them from making independent decisions for fear that they will be punished by one clique or another.  If you work in a department where there is a high insistence on secret ballots, you can be sure of three things:  that everyone knows, or will know, who voted which way; that the final vote does not reflect any collective agreement about what should happen; and that there is a system of informal punishment in play, probably run by those people who are insisting on the secret ballot in the name of "protecting" everyone who is not a full professor from retribution (by some other person, over there.)

If you must vote, find ways to reincorporate the minority and make compromises with it.  Department power brokers don't do this, not only because they don't have to, but because every time they win a vote their endorphins go off the scale.  This is what they live for:  to them, each vote won is another brick in the wall of their ideological fortress.

But it doesn't have to be that way.  Did you win a vote about a line going to one field rather than another?  This is the moment to reach out to the other group and find a way to define the line to take account of their interests; or to promise that the next available line will be dedicated to their excellent proposal.  Questions of department policy can be trickier, and for this reason, should never be voted on.  Because of the right to autonomy that disagreeable senior people can claim, a privilege that few administrators will challenge, no senior person has to abide by a policy that s/he did not vote for.  More time has to be taken to establish the grounds for a policy, and to establish a policy that everyone can live with.  Consider having these discussions facilitated by a professional if your department is very fragmented and can't make these decisions on its own.

Be creative in finding ways for younger people to practice contributing their views and running things.  All department committees do not have to be run by a tenured person, or have a tenured person on them.  Conversely, all departmental committees ought to have one untenured person on them, unless there are so few untenured people that this places an undue burden on them.  The transfer of influence to younger generations should be a project so continuous that it is hardly visible.  Instead, what many departments have is a situation where a few aging faculty are grimly holding onto the reins of everything until they retire.  What that conveys to younger generations (we can even be talking about people in their forties and fifties who are themselves fully promoted and well-regarded in their fields) is that they only way to get what you want is to become that same person. 

Have a department handbook and review it regularly to make sure that it matches desirable department practices.  We don't like to spend our time hashing these things out and writing things down, but a department that makes a practice of saying what it means and meaning what it says is going to be less vulnerable to power plays and the factionalism that is incited by bad guys.  The result of not having an updated handbook can be an unspoken sense of "how things are done" that is not written down anywhere, cannot be conveyed to others precisely, and is tremendously powerful because it represents "rules" that are invisible to all but those who wield enough influence to enforce them.  Often practices are "recalled" at a moment of decision-making, which politicizes the process and allows self-interest to substitute for transparent procedure. One version of this is the notion of "precedent,"which has tremendous force in my institution and in my department, even though it is only appropriate to the legal system.  When someone starts talking about "precedent" you know you are in the danger zone, and that an outcome will be determined by the most powerful people in the room because a) they have the longest memories; and b) even if their memories are not accurate, they have the power to enforce their memory anyway.  Remember:  there are things that are governed by the department handbook, and everything else is up for discussion. Ruling by precedent is another way of saying, "Things ain't gonna change.  Not in my lifetime."

Don't naturalize abuses of power by ignoring them.  One problem with Perlmutter's view about correctly locating responsibility for bad behavior is that it locates abuse of power in the dyad.  Any good executive, manager or shrink would tell you that asocial actions have a corrosive effect on everyone, not just the person at which they are aimed.

When acts of abusiveness and factionalism are perceived as isolated and not contextualized by the department's tolerance for them, something else occurs.  The department divides itself into bullies, the directly bullied, and the people who watch -- who are themselves being indirectly bullied.  Here's a scenario for you:  in the midst of a departmental disagreement, a member of the department starts screaming at another.  Silence falls.   This has happened before.  After a pause, the two actors in this drama drop out of the discussion, a decision is reached, the meeting ends.  The screamer leaves the room, and a number of well-wishers run up to the person who was screamed at and ask sympathetically:  "Are you all right?"

What is wrong with this picture?  First of all, it doesn't actually matter what decision was reached, it was a bad one because it was made under the wrong conditions.  Furthermore, having gotten away with this form of venting in the past, the screamer has done it again, and has corrupted the process of decision making completely without being censured by the group.  While the group has established its capacity to be sympathetic, it hasn't demonstrated its capacity to be ethical.

Don't gossip. Don't make commitments as to what you will support, or have conversations about departmental matters, unless you are actually in a meeting.  If you are doing this, for whatever reasons, you are subverting the group decision-making process.  The other thing you are doing is letting departmental business expand to fill time that would be better spent writing, reading, prepping for class, going to the gym or watching YouTube videos featuring cats doing tricks.

The following activities, conducted outside department meetings, contribute to factionalization that will eventually bite you in the butt:  saying spiteful things about people, regardless of how horrible they are; relating things as fact that are only speculation; representing someone else's thoughts on a matter; allowing another person to persuade you that you are uninformed and should follow the lead of your elders; receiving or seeking tales (that can never be completely true and may be false) about some other colleague's views about you and obsessing about them; becoming persuaded that only your group is right and the other group is not only wrong but that their success will be a disaster; assembling, or participating in, a bloc of committed votes prior to a departmental conversation about the issue at hand; and assuming that because someone has been nasty to you and your allies that you can be nasty to that person and hir allies without accelerating the damage.

I'm sure I could add to this list, and that readers will.  My point is that anything that happens in a department is part of a group dynamic that implicates every person who is a member of the group.  This is why departments acquire reputations for good or bad behavior, and it is why troubled departments cycle through the same scandals and difficulties over and over again.  Acting systematically to prevent that is as important as understanding and addressing any of the individual events and decisions that are the symptoms of dysfunction.

Where Women Gather, Trouble Follows: Letting Off Steam At The University Of Toledo

When you were flying over Ohio last week, did you see a big cloud over Toledo?  That was a bunch of steamed up faculty!  The Toledo Blade reports a wholesale restructuring of the University of Toledo that has comrades at that school in a state of distress.  According to Blade reporter Christopher Kirkpatrick,"President Lloyd Jacobs plans to break up the century-old College of Arts and Sciences and create three new colleges in its place."  These colleges will be "discipline-driven," and the humanities and social sciences have been promised an equal seat at the table with the professional schools and the sciences. Humanities and social science faculty are skeptical of this, and everything else about their future in the new university.  Jacobs was hired in 2006, promising the board of trustees that he would "create a UT academic experience more relevant to everyday life, and to ultimately remake the university into one of the best in the world."  Indeed, relevant can be a worrisome word.  This is not because being relevant is bad, but because an unspecific use of this word implies very strongly that the liberal arts model that the vast majority of faculty have committed their careers to is irrelevant -- and that they are, therefore, replaceable.  It was after Bennington President Elizabeth Coleman started using the word "relevant" in 1994 that she started firing faculty.  Bennington remains on the AAUP censure list to this day.

The published reports are pretty vague, so it is hard for an outsider to say whether the restructuring at UT, in and of itself, is an innovative idea or a way to turn the humanities and social sciences into service departments staffed by adjuncts.  The subtext of the faculty's discontent does seem to hint at the possibility of becoming vassals to a science-driven university.  This the president, and the committee that prepared the plan, denies.  "The move to break up arts and sciences," Kirkpatrick writes, "is an outgrowth of the near-carte blanche the board of trustees has given the president to increase the academic quality of its programs, students, and ultimately, its reputation. That in turn drives more research dollars and donations to the school."

There is very little real information in any of these news stories, so it remains a he said/they said kind of situation.  An unscientific poll by the UT student newspaper, The Independent Collegian, shows that, as of today, 71% of those voting in the poll do not feel fully informed or consulted by the strategic planning committee (14% do feel fully informed and 14% -- of which I am one, since you can't see the poll unless you vote -- don't know.  This is what I mean by unscientific.)  What is interesting to me is the article lists a series of criticisms of the Jacobs plan that are all too familiar.  These criticisms appear in practically the same language every time a university president anywhere tries to do either something bold and interesting, something evil and destructive, or just something.  The criticisms (areas where you could fill in the blank to reflect criticisms being articulated at your university are marked out in red) are as follows:

That President Jacobs is a surgeon and doesn't know enough about academic institutions to create a good restructuring plan;

That Jacobs is unacceptably autocratic and fails to consult fully with the faculty;

That Jacobs favors the sciences;

That the committee responsible for the plan was mostly made up of administrators and was entirely female (one critic wasn't sure that an all-female committee was necessarily a bad thing, but insisted that it was "strange" and "suspect."  We know faculty don't trust administrators, but are we admitting that male faculty don't trust women too?  This is worth the price of admission, if you ask me.)

That the report was released in the summer when the faculty were not there.

Changing anything at a university, no matter how small, always means kicking some a$$:  take it from someone who knows. I remember when some academics I know were outraged that they were being "forced" to learn to use computers. But kicking a$$ is something that trustees always want presidents to do on principle, just to show who is the boss.  It doesn't necessarily require a bold new plan. However, stay tuned:  the UT faculty may be on to something. Jacobs may indeed want to bust tenure, since he has indicated that a higher reliance on casual labor is an inevitable transformation that will occur in higher ed.

Lifeboat: A Conversation About The Incredible Shrinking Budget

Yesterday we had a big meeting at Zenith: more members of the faculty attended than at any previous meeting I can recall, except for one about ten years ago when our last newly hired president was introduced. The Radical and several co-conspirators used this unusual quorum to kill a major university committee to which they had been elected. It was a hideous, time-waster of a major committee, one that received institutional problems that no one wanted to do anything about, made recommendations after many circular and ill-informed debates, and saw those recommendations sent to The File That Has No Name by the administrator who had been appointed the boss of us. In retaliation -- I mean, response -- to this institutional travesty, we secretly devoted our energy, not to issues that were dumped on our doorstep, but to creating a rationale and a strategy for killing the committee. The problem was gaining not just a quorum, but a two-thirds majority necessary for altering the Faculty Handbook. And then voila! A new president was hired and everyone, we imagined, would come to the introductory meeting to get a glimpse of him. So we put our motion on the agenda, and here was the beauty of the whole thing. Because the people who came were people who are too apathetic to ever come to meetings, but made an exception for that one, they were instantly persuaded that we the committee shouldn't have go to meetings either. They voted resoundingly in favor of our motion before a somewhat dumbfounded set of administrative officers who discovered unexpectedly that they were not the boss of us. No sirree.

What was on the table yesterday was something different: how Zenith will close a yawning budget gap that is conservatively predicted at $15 million: read about our problems here. They probably aren't so different from your problems, right? Except if you teach at a public university or a community college your problems are worse.

I won't go into what was said at the meeting, as it is against my blogger ethic. But one of the things I would like to explore in future posts is the nature of community, and scholars' capacity for empathetic connection -- or lack thereof -- to other types of workers in and beyond our workplace. This becomes particularly apparent at a meeting like yesterday's, when it became clear how very tuition driven Zenith is (I have no idea how this compares to other institutions our size); how volatile we can expect our financial aid budget to be in the next few years (or maybe even starting tomorrow); how much the recession may drive other costs up (or down, in the case of fuel, for example); what the long term costs of certain kinds of temporary disinvestment are (Library, physical plant); and how few options a college has to generate immediate, extra cash to cover its expenses, assuming there is anyone to buy what we would offer.

That I can make this list in such a cogent way is some testimony to the presentation we saw yesterday, which was, I would say impressive and reassuring, to the extent that it addresses my basic problem: I don't want to run the university. I want to know that the people in charge are thoughtful, competent and doing the best they know how to do. But of course, what makes the future very anxious for me and many of my colleagues (in varying degrees) is what I did not put on the list: faculty salaries. And while this has not been decided, it looks like salaries will be frozen for next year. Where else do you get $2.3 million? Everybody pitch in and sell a kidney?

Needless to say a projection that salaries may flatline for an indefinite period produces resentment, fear and rage. So in the remainder of this post, I would like to toss out a couple questions that are worth asking yourself as you process your own resentment about your flat salary projection.

Are you being asked to give back salary? And do you live more or less in debt, assuming that there will always be more money? There is no rule anywhere that prevents academics from being asked to take a salary cut. Therefore, you might consider being relieved that you will have the same salary this year as next: whether it will be worth the same amount of money or not is not the question. No one should assume they will always make more money forever. It is this philosophy, writ large, that has brought us to this pass: salaries will always rise, home prices will always go up, endless amounts of debt can be covered (almost) by next year's raise/bonus, increasing the pool of homeowners, by whatever means, is always better. You see what I mean? Rethink this, not just because you might want to lower your blood pressure, but because your life decisions and future happiness shouldn't always be pinned to having a salary that barely matches your expenditures. While you are at it, start watching Suze Orman on television.

I am getting tenure/promoted this year -- what about that big raise I was supposed to get? Well, I think they should find money in the budget to pay this out, frankly, because it will compress salaries in the middle ranks even more than they are compressed already. But don't forget what you will get for tenure -- a job for life. For life. That's more than the part-time clerical they just let go over there has.

In what way do you, really, in your heart, believe that faculty are the most important people in the institution and that everyone else is dispensable? Examine this, OK? Because it is not just that there are a range of people who directly support your professional existence (IT, librarians, more administrative assistants and secretaries than you know about, deans, blah, blah, blah) but actually, it is only rank snobbery that makes you think your work is inherently better than theirs. You need to know this about yourself and work on it.

Do you pay any attention to the general health of the institution, or how money is being misspent, except when your own self-interest is threatened? When was the last time you took an interest in whether the faculty lines authorized really addressed student demand and were worth committing funds to? Or whether you should stop copying the articles assigned to your seminar on the department machine only because you are too lazy to learn how to put them up on line? Or whether it is really ethical to process all of your pleasure reading through your research account? And furthermore -- that dean who you think is one dean too many -- how would you like to deal with the students who are so strung out at the end of the semester that they are endangering their health? Or the bulemia club over at Tau Theta Zeta? That might be a good job for you -- or you -- or you -- and we could save the money next time a dean vacates his or her job.

Isn't letting the administration get away with a salary freeze just lying down and letting them walk all over us? No, keeping your trap shut, repressing your anger at how you are treated, not disagreeing with anyone who might ever vote on your promotion, and never saying or writing anything you believe until you have a tenure letter in your pocket is letting people walk all over you. Agreeing to a salary freeze, when it is explained as part of a well-reasoned plan is sticking out your hand and playing your role as a partner in the enterprise.

The strangest thing I have heard -- and I have heard it from more than one person -- is the narrative of sacrifice, in which a faculty member claims to have chosen university teaching when other, far more lucrative work was possible, but in an act of self-abnegation chose to teach the unwashed masses who seem to cluster regularly at private colleges and universities. Having made this sacrifice, the story goes, no others should be required: nay, this person should receive raises while others near and far, working class and middle class people working in soulless occupations, lose their jobs.

While it is not required of us to be grateful for having jobs as unemployment gallops to new highs, it is worth remembering that life isn't fair. When we are not being rewarded with cash prizes for our accomplishments, it might be a good time to figure out if there are personal rewards other than money that cause you to stay committed to teaching and the production of knowledge. If there are not, I strongly suggest you use the safety of your tenured position to explore another line of work that would make you happy.

If not, my advice is this. Gratitude for your job security isn't required, but it might be seemly. And since this doesn't seem to be widely known, let me just say: being a university teacher is not the moral equivalent of being a priest, a social worker, a member of the Peace Corps, a safe-sex worker or a community activist, in which you have traded affluence to serve others. If you think that is the entire reason why you chose to teach and write you are, frankly, delusional, and suffer from profound status anxiety.

And just think: on that day that you looked at the two lines at Career Planning, one leading to the Graduate Record Exam, and the other leading to an interview with Bear, Stearns, when you followed your heart and became a scholar, the Goddess might have been actually looking out for you.

Don't disappoint her now.

Oh, Canada! The Radical Overcomes

So for the last few days I have been in a Far Northern City at a Legal History Conference. I was invited there to be on a panel organized by Princeton History department newbie Margot Canaday (whose book, by the way, is coming out in the spring -- keep your eyes peeled.) It was a great panel, and since I had never been to a meeting of this particular society before, actually a Different Experience (always nice to know you can have one, after almost 25 years of being an academic, isn't it?) Lots of the people attending were legal scholars, some were historians of the law, and others (like me) were kibitzers who stomp all over the field while we write a book that is sort of about the law. I spent time with two dear friends who I hadn't expected to see; a third, also a kibitzing historian, ran up to me at registration on Friday, and said: "Thank God I know someone here!" Folks in the law definitely live better than we in history or American Studies departments: the meeting was held at the Fairmount Laurier, named after a distant relative in the Canadian branch of the Radical family, Sir Wilfred Laurier, once Prime Minister of Canada.

You can see how much I have had to overcome to become the Radical.



Anyway, the beds were soft, the conversation sparkling, and the money large and clunky when it wasn't just odd colors with pictures of that nice old lady on it. I don't know how Canadians deal with the bags full of loonies they get as change every day, except to give them away to the homeless so their pockets don't fall apart. Which they probably do, being Canadian. As one of many delightful activities at the meeting, I attended a dinner last night organized by Mary Dudziac (and also attended by Dan Ernst) of Legal History Blog. Mary, Dan and I held court on the blogosphere: it seems like everywhere you go nowadays people want to know how blogging works, how you got into it, and how you know what to do once you get to the blogosphere. The answers to these questions, almost uniformly among bloggers, are:

1. Easy-peasy (sometimes follows a discussion on the merits of Blogspot versus Wordpress);
2. By accident and because I like to write; and
3. You figure it out as you go along.

Since there were a lot of lawyers around I also asked a number of anxious questions about fair use, since blogging often entails theft and re-printing.

Mary, and an unpleasant flame skirmish on the previous post which I have since erased, have almost persuaded me to stop taking anonymous comments and/or to use moderation. The down side -- and it's a real down side for a blog like this -- is that very few people comment when you make it even slightly cumbersome to do so. But, as Mary pointed out, having people write anything they want about you and circulate it on your own blog is unpleasant too.

I'm not sure which is worse about being flamed (pick one):

1. Someone I don't know writing something nasty and completely ignoring what I wrote in the post so that s/he can elaborate on how much s/he dislikes me or what an idiot I am.
2. Said person dropping hairpins that s/he is someone I know, so that I don't know whether said commenter is a sock puppet of a known commenter, someone I truly do not know, someone I sort of or used to know, or someone I work with every day who is actually a sick f***k using my own blog to pick on me.
3. Losing my temper and flaming back, and hence revealing myself as a person whose poise can be temporarily disabled.
4. Having said commenter respond to being attacked in an equally nasty way by writing in a hurt, disingenuous tone, "Gee, I (sniff) just wanted you to engage my ideas," when in fact there were no ideas to engage -- just an accusation that I am an idiot or a hypocrite or a power-mad Peronista.

As the ever-fabulous Robert Self of Brown had noted at dinner the night previous (and I paraphrase), it isn't clear that more communication on the internet is actually better communication. What we do know is that people who take the trouble to comment are a very small proportion of those who read: I would say on this blog fewer than 1% of readers are commenters, and I bet that is even true of very popular blogs who get two or three times the hits I get every day. Thus, those who comment are, as the pollsters say, motivated. What this means, in my view, is that they are either truly interested in the post or truly interested in making contact with the blogger, and in the latter case, negativity is probably as much a motivator as admiration, if not more so.

And as if I haven't been tested enough in the blogosphere in the last 24 hours -- presto! I just discovered that I was in danger of being bumped from my flight. Why? Because I didn't pay extra to guarantee that I would not be bumped from my flight. Isn't the free market wonderful?

Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe*: Or, How to Evaluate the Candidate Pool

One of the things everyone is talking about in the presidential race is the capacity for good decision-making, who has it, and what relationship that bears to previous experience making hard decisions. OK, so you are not running for national office, nor are you a pit bull with lipstick (or was that a hockey Mom who is a pig? I can never remember.) But you are on a search committee. And you have never been on one before. And there is a large drawer of files to evaluate. You have decisions to make. So today's topic is:

How do you evaluate a candidate pool and decide which 10-12 people you want to invite to a preliminary interview for a tenure-track job?

There are a number of criteria that will be in play, depending on what kind of slot your optimum candidate is expected to fill and how broadly you advertised in terms of field. But one of the things I think is important is to have some sense of what you are looking for, prior to reading the files; a sense of who the ideal candidate is that is well-defined, but also flexible. Your approach to reading files needs to simultaneously respect the ad that was approved by your colleagues and the administration and be responsive to the individual strengths and weaknesses of the actual candidate pool you have before you.

Thus, your evaluation of a file starts with the ad criteria, but then extends to the role that this candidate will fill in the department more generally. The basic questions that need to be asked of each candidate are:

1) How well does this candidate fit the job for which we advertised, in terms of rank, field and any stated subfields?

One of the reasons I advocate a carefully written ad that addresses department needs (and dreams) is that defining, or redefining, the job in relation to the candidate pool that you have can sometimes be necessary and desirable, but it can also create a lot of chaos on the committee, and later in department discussions. A committee member is most likely to be seen by others as "pushing an agenda" when s/he tries to persuade colleagues that a candidate who is inappropriate for the job actually fits the ad. Be honest: how well is each candidate responding to the ad? Does s/he actually do research in the field the department needs, or is that field really secondary to another focus? And, while all of us are likely to shift focus somewhat in our scholarly careers, does that candidate seem to want to sustain research in the field and -- this is the sign of someone to take more seriously, in my view -- seem to have ideas that are pushing the field in a new direction?

2) Does the candidate offer something special, in addition to the field in play, that would be an advantage to your department?

This is a tricky one. In the latter days of the Dark Ages, when I was interviewing for jobs in political history, at some point I would usually be asked: "And could you teach the women's history survey?" This question came up because I was a woman, of course, since I had not yet done any research or published in the field. Because historians of women were (except for Tom Dublin) women, it stood to reason that the opposite was true as well, so there were any number of departments who saw me as a "plus one." In other words, they could hire a woman to teach political history, and never have to worry about hiring a historian of women. Ta-da! I always said yes, of course (who wouldn't? I needed to eat too), and one day, someone actually gave me a job where that was part of what I was hired to do because my assertion that I could was never undermined by their curiosity about what kind of training might be necessary to teach the history of women.

This is a cautionary tale that actually has a happy ending. I learned to teach the course, and soon began to do research in the fields of gender and sexuality within political history. Better yet, that job led to another job, which led to a career in academic blogging. But be careful: people are not necessarily interested in studying or teaching about people "like them" as a favor to you. Unless she offers to, the Chicana woman who works on French colonies in North America probably doesn't have an ethnic history survey in her back pocket that she would love to develop for you so you can get the dean off your back, and she will resent being asked about it at in the preliminary interview.

However, when you see something on a vita that suggests the candidate brings something else to the table, that is evidence (as opposed to veiled bigotry), and the only way to pursue it is to interview the person. But the ancillary field should be raised as a question at the interview stage, not a new requirement for the job, and in a way that doesn't divert from the issue at hand: how well might the candidate address the needs your advertisement expressed?

To summarize: noticing that a candidate really does offer something special could be a reason to bounce hir to the next stage if only to find out whether the additional expertise is for real, and whether the person actually is a "plus one." If you are a small department, you might not be able to afford to devote a whole position to Italian history, but a historian of the French Renaissance whose research touches on Italy, and who has taught a section of an Italian history survey, is worth taking a longer look at.

3) What has the candidate published, and where? If the candidate is still a graduate student, how close is the dissertation to being done?

I think if one article on the curriculum vita has been seen through to publication, or has been accepted for publication, this should be counted as a real plus for a candidate. It shows maturity, and it shows that the candidate has been willing to accept the scrutiny of anonymous peer review and learn from it. Because publishing is long, hard, and often tedious work, I like to know that a job candidate has mastered the rudimentary discipline of submitting, revising, meeting deadlines and actually finishing something, an act that will have to be performed repeatedly if tenure is to be achieved. The only exception to this rule, in my book, is that there are some programs that are trying to move graduate students through more rapidly than the conventional seven years, and in that case, it may be that the bulk of the labor has gone into completing the dissertation, and the lack of a published article means nothing.

Encyclopedia articles, by the way, are nice, but don't count. They are a great thing to do for the community, but they aren't the same achievement as the sustained re-writing and re-thinking that go into a refereed article. Sorry. Book reviews: same.

As to the dissertation, if the job letter says that there are fewer than three chapters completed by mid-fall, I have concerns about whether the dissertation will be done by the time the candidate hits the ground in September, concerns that need to be addressed by the referees. The dissertation director, in particular, will be very specific about the timing of a defense if the defense is on the horizon. What is worse than that is mentors pushing students out on the market and rushing them through a quick and dirty defense on a first draft of a dissertation. This can mean that the process of turning the dissertation into a book can be a nightmare, both because the candidate has never successfully "finished" the dissertation (and thus has no clear sense of what it means to complete a major project) and because s/he may have a manuscript that s/he is embarrassed about and won't show any of hir new colleagues to get help for the next stage.

4) Does the candidate have teaching experience?

This is something the committee needs to discuss in advance. Do you need someone who can hit the ground running, in a field where there is enormous demand? Is it a new field where classes will likely be smaller in the candidate's first few years, and s/he has time to develop? Is teaching the most important thing at your institution, and candidates without experience cannot, in all fairness, be considered? (Hint: if this is so, I hope you put it in the ad.) Teaching a few classes doesn't mean the individual is an experienced teacher; not having taught at all doesn't mean the person won't be a quick study and do well in the classroom. But hiring very inexperienced teachers means that there should be institutional support for helping that person get through the first year or so until s/he develops confidence. It also means that members of the department need to be prepared to do observations early on, go over student evaluations, and look at syllabi prior to the beginning of classes to make sure that the novice teacher is on target. There is nothing sadder than a young teacher floundering in the classroom, working desperately to succeed, and not knowing how; unless it is a teacher who has floundered for three years and no one knows until reappointment. Nobody's teaching evaluations should be allowed to play God in a person's career.

Hence, teaching experience is important to consider in relation to the institutional context, not necessarily as a relative factor in the candidate pool. Teaching experience, in my view, might bounce someone onto a semi-finalist list, but lack of it should not exclude someone who seems to be an innovative scholar from your interview list because such a person can be taught to teach. Great teachers are not born: they are made, and helping a terrific young scholar become the teacher s/he can be is an interesting way to spend part of the following year.

5) Has the candidate been active in institutional work and in professional organizations?

This may seem obvious, but you are hiring a scholar, a teacher and a colleague. People who have been involved with their graduate student organizations, TA unions, campus organizing and whatnot are people who "get it" that a university or college is a living thing that needs care and feeding. The lack of such experience should not be a negative, since sometimes a graduate school is not congenial, or a person's community activities may be based in a neighborhood, church or other sphere. But institutional work is learned, and being responsible to others is the mark of a scholar who will keep up hir end of the bargain when it comes to departmental work.

As for professional organizations, the only advantage this gives a candidate from my perspective is that again, it communicates maturity. This person is starting to network, make connections in hir field, and is making the transition from graduate student to colleague already.

6) Does this candidate add diversity to our department?

There are federal laws when it comes to diversity hiring. As important, your institution has regulations. Be familiar with them, with the categories of human being who need to be identified, and with practices appropriate to the full consideration of such candidates. If you are a really "with it" search committee, you will have met with your university's affirmative action officer to discuss what kind of diversity needs to be encouraged. And there may be forms of diversity that do not count under federal law that you may value all the same: an international scholar, a scholar who speaks an extraordinary number of languages, a military veteran, or a GLBT candidate. In my view, it is wise to discuss this in advance, and keep discussing diversity in your hire as long as it is relevant.

In conclusion: I have a couple pieces of advice to keep the committee functioning as it should. First, the committee needs to meet at least once prior to reviewing the files to talk about evaluating the pool, not just so that everyone is on the same page more or less, but so that when it recommends the final three to four candidates to the department it can say why. Second, keep good notes. I create a xeroxed sheet that I fill out as I am reading, so that I have the same information for each candidate. Otherwise, how can you compare them? But also, as the committee discusses the candidates, that discussion should be pinned to actual evidence of who the candidate is and what s/he has accomplished, evidence that can be easily referenced in the file.

Your optimum state is consensus, and try not to quarrel, particularly over the petty things that carry over from other moments in departmental and university life. Interview an extra candidate if you must to prevent antagonism or division among committee members. I actually think one viable strategy is to give every committee member their top pick as a semi finalist, and then fill out the rest of the list during the ensuing discussion. As a gesture, it shows respect for the expertise every member of the committee brings to this enterprise. As a practical matter, it also means no member of the committee goes away feeling so frustrated or disappointed that s/he starts to lose commitment to the process.

And finally, no candidate should be perceived as fitting into -- or frustrating -- the ambitions of a particular faction in the department. Not only is this unfair to the candidate pool more generally, but the man who looks like a conservative on paper may be exactly the colleague that you and your feminist friends would enjoy sparring and collaborating with. Furthermore, if you are doing that, you are not seeing who they are: you are judging them in relation to who they might be to you. And the search isn't about you. It's about the department, and the scholar, deep in the pile, whose career is about to take a happy turn for the better.

*The genealogy of this title which dates it to, among other things, an early Celtic sheep counting rhyme, can be found here.

The No Asshole Rule: A Reflection

As you know if you make a close study of Tenured Radical 2.0 in all of its features, I have been reading Robert I. Sutton's The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. And to get to the punchline quickly: you should read it too. It is short, it is well written and Sutton -- a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University -- has written a book that nicely bridges the worlds of business and intellectual work.

What occasioned my purchase of this book? Well, it doesn't really matter, does it, because I loved it and I wish something like it had been available to me years ago. I would also say that the bulk of my labor this year will be administrative, and because there is no formal mentoring in this kind of work, I do what I can to learn management techniques, either by observing adminstrators at Zenith closely and seeing why they do or do not succeed, or by reading. This is the point at which the post could sprawl and take all morning but let me give you a few highlights that should get you to read this book, whether you are an administrator or a faculty member, whether you are an administrative assistant, a full professor, a student or a dean.

First, Sutton emphasizes that we can all be prone to acting badly, and that it is important to distinguish between temporary assholes who exhibit nasty behaviors occasionally (losing one's temper, telling a gossipy story as passive-aggressive revenge or as a self-agrandisement strategy, glaring at and belittling others, yelling) and certified assholes, who deploy bullying, intimidating and demeaning behavior toward others as a matter of course. He also notes that the first step in thinking about this is to categorize oneself. Be honest: are you an asshole? What have you done in the past that resembles this behavior, and how often in the course of daily life do you behave like an asshole? One of the differences between temporary and certified assholes is not just frequency of behavior, but that temporary assholes have enough objectivity and empathy to perceive the effect they have on others, understand that what they have done is wrong, apologize and change. Certified assholes believe that they are always right, often do not remember what they have done, and if they do, justify it as a normal response to being in struggle with stupid people who are a threat to them, their values, and the good of the institution. They don't change: they force the rest of us to accomodate to them, and because of this, create an atmosphere of fear and loathing among both the direct objects of their bullying and those who observe it second hand.

We'll start here: I can be a real asshole. Read some of the posts on this blog, prior to the 2.0 edition and when I thought I was anonymous, if you don't believe me. Better yet: don't. Just believe me.

But that said, I am not a certified asshole, and because it is too self-congratulatory -- even for me -- I'm not going to tell you why I know this. But here are some asshole behaviors that are particular to the academy, in my experience, and at one time or another I have been guilty of several:

1. Yelling at people to win an argument or force everyone to do things your way. Now, we all yell at people occasionally -- often when provoked by an asshole or an airline employee -- but not uncommonly yelling occurs in meetings, because that is where faculty do most of their business. Certified assholes use this as a consistent tactic, and it sometimes extends to tantrums. I have a friend elsewhere who has described a colleague that, when on the brink of losing his temper, begins to turn a different color, become physically tight and tense, and then, immediately prior to the explosion, appears almost to levitate. The threat of what is to come, she argues, is as oppressive to the atmosphere as the eventual outburst itself, and often results in people strategizing what they say in order to prevent the tantrum, not to discuss the issue at hand in the most open possible way.

2. Physical intimidation. This means getting in someone's personal space while yelling, saying intimidating things that threaten someone's future directly or obliquely, commenting on someone's appearance and/or weight relentlessly, and inappropriate or unwelcome touching. It can include telling people to shut up, interrupting, name calling, and persistent profanity. It can also include trapping people: demanding that someone "report" to your office, or entering theirs (worse in my view), and closing the door without permission.

3. Describing people as "not smart," and dismissing their intellectual work because you don't like them or you don't like their politics or they are in a field of which your disapproval is so vast that you read nothing in it. I am sorry to say that people on the left are just as guilty of this as people on the right, with the difference that people on the left --perhaps as the residue of feminist consciousness raising, historic leftist sexism and homophobia and Marxist criticism/self criticism sessions -- do it to each other as well as to their political opposites, whereas people on the right, in my experience, are willing to excuse a range of sins within the group in order to keep everyone who is conservative voting together.

4. Lying. Certified assholes use this as a consistent strategy to get what they want, which includes lying on behalf of their allies to promote their interests over the interests of those who are not their allies. They excuse it because they think what they want is always right, and when other people get in the way, they should be defeated by any means necessary. George W. Bush and Nanny Dick are like this, I think. And let me say -- I think lying can sometimes be a subset of gossiping, because often when people spread gossip, for whatever reason, they are often spreading damaging information that is not true, or has been twisted for a particular effect. When I was a newbie at Zenith, a friend told me that she made it a point never to gossip, and although I thought at the time it was kind of prissy -- I was in an information-gathering stage of life after all and needed gossip desperately -- much later in life I came to understand that this was, in fact, a highly ethical position. And by the way, if you are well-known as an indiscriminate gossip, you will also be well-known as someone who cannot keep a secret and should not be brought into a position where secrets need to be kept.

5. Accusing someone else of lying, publicly or to a third party, without confronting the other person privately. This is also something of which I do not believe I am guilty, but I have been accused of lying by others, and I have seen other people accused. At its best, it is a careless act; at its worst, I think it is one of the nastiest things one academic can do to another because personal integrity is so crucial to the scholarly world. Now, if someone has committed a serious ethical breach, that is one thing, but the things I have most frequently seen classified as lies are often far better characterized as misunderstandings, miscommunication, or someone leaping to a conclusion. Most frequently, in my experience, it is faculty accusing administrators of lying, in a conscious or unconscious move to disempower and humiliate in retaliation for some real or imagined slight.

6. Hitting on people sexually when they have evidenced no interest in either recreational sex with you or romantic love towards you. I would extend this to hitting on people sexually who have expressed this interest, but are interested in a kind of short-term personal gain or thrill that you know perfectly well will lead to tears. I would extend even this further to the whole question of responding to advances from those -- students, very junior faculty -- whose attraction to you is really an attraction to power, or some idealization of what you are or could be in their lives. Long-time readers might recall a series I did on the Pokey Chatman case, in which Chatman, a very talented basketball coach, appears to have had her resignation forced because a tangle of affairs with players and assistants came to light: click here and here. Several of my readers chastised me for not being hard enough on Chatman for this: well, I still don't think she should have had to leave her job. But there is no question that she was an asshole, and that LSU was willing to tolerate her messy love life until it became public information. That's the part that I think is a little more complicated, and needs to be examined and discussed, because Chatman may not have been an asshole in other ways. And other asshole behaviors persist at LSU that are not stigmatized, including what is commonly called sexual harassment, because the institution clearly tolerates assholes -- as nearly all academic institutions do.

7. Students can be assholes, to each other and to their teachers: it is a large, and ugly, subtext of the academic blogging world. And of course, some graduate students are assholes in training, and they learn to do it by watching professor assholes gain advantage over others through the range of tactics described here. Student asshole behaviors include: passing notes, giggling and whispering while other students are talking; repeating what someone else just said as if it were your idea; directing their remarks only to the teacher and not acknowledging the other students; interrupting; telling other students that something they have said is "wrong" or interrupting with a loud "no" when someone else is talking; publicly calling someone a bigot as a routine way of commenting on their lack of sophistication, their analysis or their apparent ideological position; saying thoughtless things about identity groups represented by people in the room; delegitimizing other students' right to speak because of their identity position or lack of sophistication in the field; and -- my favorite --anonymous, cruel attacks on others that are justified by a self-professed or actual lack of social power in a given situation. There is no justification, except perhaps being invaded and/or colonized by a foreign nation, for an anonymous attack, and what it expresses is rage and fear of the consequences, not actual powerlessness.

What is great about The No Asshole Rule is that Sutton's examples help identify the asshole behavior that is particular to one's own workplace, how to identify it in oneself, and how to resist it. He also demonstrates the damage caused by assholes, several of which seem particularly relevant to academic institutions, in my experience. One is that asshole behavior is contagious: if effective interventions are not made, people who are not certified assholes become more prone to temporary asshole behaviors as they try to resist domination and seizures of power.

Potentially, entire departments and faculties can be taken over, by assholes and by people who are forced into asshole management. Another crucial point -- and of course this resonated to my experience during the Unfortunate Events -- is that people who must resist being constantly demeaned and emotionally battered pay a terrific price in their energy and creativity, and do less and less well professionally, are less able to write, and often less able to function as teachers, scholars and colleagues on a day to day basis. Thus, what is often touted as a hierarchy of merit can also be a hierarchy of - can we say oppression? - where decent people are subject to the rule of the ruthless, and as a result their talents become hidden or submerged, and their capacity to function as university citizens who can and should be rewarded is severely eroded. Very often they simply withdraw and focus their lives at home: they come in, teach their classes and leave; do not come to meetings; and are not available for the work of running a department or a university. One of the benefits of going through a period of being bullied relentlessly by assholes is that you develop a kind of compassion for people who of whom you may have been previously dismissive.

Sutton can be visited on line at his blogs: click here and here. You might also want to look at a report on a conference on academic leadership, where a colleague of mine is quoted on the topic of "academic bullies."

Life as a Broker: The Role of the Committee Chair in Faculty-Administration Relations

In order to stay better informed, your Radical has signed up for the free daily updates from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Like every other periodical and newspaper that comes into this house, I can't read all of the update, much less all of the Chronicle, which is why I did not use my remaining research monies to buy a horrendously expensive on-line subscription. But I do like scanning the update for items of interest: I also started scanning Inside Higher Ed when they started linking me, which may be part of their strategy for linking bloggers: "Bring 'em into the light, boys!" Sometimes what I see in my daily scan are items of great interest, sometimes they are small pieces that cause me to think. And when I think, I blog. It's inescapable.

Today's food for thought was by a fellow named Gene Fant, who was a department chair at a small southern college, recently became a dean there, and is writing about how one is transformed in the eyes of one's colleagues upon becoming an administrator: you can read it yourself here. One thought that struck home was his description of a colleague watching him cut a piece of cake to see if, as a dean, he cut it differently. Ouch. One imagines folks peeking in the bedroom window to check how he is putting his pants on too. This is a good reminder that one of the down sides of taking on administrative responsibilities above the level of chair means having one's colleagues remind one of the possibility of pariah status that is imminent should one come to be perceived, as we say at Zenith, as "a tool of the administration."

In Tony Soprano's world, some of the things that are said to administrators, or faculty consorting with administrators, would cause a person to sleep with a semi-automatic under the pillow. I know this because although I have never been a dean (not at Zenith, anyway), I have been a chair of a major university committee. And after I became chair of the committee, I cannot tell you how many senior people came up to growl in my ear, "Just remember, you are there to defend the faculty from the administration." I was still an associate professor at the time, and it has occurred to me more than once that the Unfortunate Events were not entirely disassociated from the fact that I did well on this committee, which generated fear that I might Do Too Well and Rise Too High -- higher than a Radical ought, in any case. Some of the whisperers, and their cronies, were critically involved in the Events, and the connection seems - well, odd, shall we say.

But who's counting? As the working class kid in The History Boys says to one of his teachers, " 'Istory's just one fuckin' thing arfter another, in'nit Miss?"

Anyway. My experience differs from Dean Fant's in many ways, in that I was not in charge of budgetary matters. Specifically, Fant refers to the pain of having to say "no" to so many people, and worries -- in a play on the "girl who cain't say no" in the musical Oklahoma -- that he will be perceived as "The Dean Who Just Says No." When I look back on my experience as a committee chair, "no" would have been easier than some of the difficult things we had to figure out as a committee. I was in charge of trying to make policy and implement policy, mustering faculty votes on items of greater or lesser consequence (what changes are *not* seen by the faculty as matters of great consequence? I ask you), keeping a university committee moving as quickly as possible through an agenda without jamming my opinions down their throats, and making sure that the appropriate people were consulted about things.

Committee chairs are also in a strange position for which there are very few rules or customs. They are not administrators but, on a faculty that imagines it wants to govern itself without being told what to do by "the administration," they occupy numerous roles that could be described as "deaning lite": they are buffers between policy makers and those governed by policy; in a leadership position where they are more or less making policy on behalf of the faculty and persuading administrators to go along with it; conduits for administrative desires that the faculty is being asked to variously address or accept; and receivers of all opinions, great and small, about virtually everything. My committee had broad oversight of what was loosely termed "educational policy": this sometimes included what was taught (authorizing new majors, and major changes in existing majors); the conditions under which teaching occurred (schedules, grading modes, instructional computing that had a direct impact on faculty work); and shifts in pedagogical philosophy or strategy.



Without going into the details of what I did, let me say that it was a huge learning experience that has forever changed how I understand university politics and how universities work. And while, unlike Dean Gene, I did not have to say no to people who wanted money, I did sometimes have to say no to my different constituencies: no, that won't work; no, I can't put that on the agenda; no, I can't let you make that change because it will contradict other policies we are already committed to; no, you can't agree to one thing when you are alone with me and then go tell your friends, when it proves to be unpopular, that I am a shill for the administration and you never went along with that policy in the first place.

Have you ever been called a liar in public? I have. Actually, it was in an email written by one of the authors of the Events, so it was more or less private. Try less.

To conclude, except for a few really nasty people, it was actually a pretty positive experience, since there aren't a lot of opportunities in university life to learn something entirely new. I can't tell you everything I learned, but here are a few things that should be useful to all faculty, regardless of rank, when thinking about their relationship to the daily struggles we are involved in:

1. I was blessed with an extraordinarily thoughtful committee, including two wonderful students who had great ideas and were not shy about about expressing them, and who represented their constituency well. I also worked with some really good administrators, who were terrific resources at important moments. But even if you aren't working with the people you would have chosen, remember: everyone, absolutely everyone, has strengths that can be relied upon, even people you have had a dim view of previously. Find out what those strengths are and encourage them to employ them. Furthermore, those to whom you have been historically ideologically opposed have a point of view too, and often they share that point of view with a great many others. Hence, such people are an important liaison to that community. Try not to let discussions get polarized, and focus on converging points of view whenever possible. Taking the time for individual meetings to discuss what similarities can be assembled on any issue, before people take sides in public, is well worth it.

2. Because of the above dynamic, I would propose a theory that most universities operate in a huge ideological middle ground that has a tendency to isolate those on the left and on the right. Part of your job, when in charge, is to preserve that middle ground and help people on the margins make compromises; the other part of your job is to preserve the intellectual and pedagogical freedom of those on the left and on the right, and make sure that their interests remain connected to and supported by the broad middle.

3. Never allow a vote to be taken unless and until you know how it will turn out. I learned this from Lyndon Johnson.

4. You are in charge of preserving features of academic freedom on most committees you might ever be elected to or chair. That said, some of your colleagues will try to get away with all kinds of shit in the name of academic freedom that are really about bettering their own lot, or shutting down a discussion that they don't want to have. There are two ways of handling this, and saying "no" is rarely an option, because you really have no authority other than what people will consent to give you. One way to get around such an obstacle is to say, "Look, this is what I need from you and why. Now, here's something I might be able to do in return." It was always my philosophy that you should never go into a meeting without something on the table that you are willing to give away, even if you have put it on the agenda deliberately so that you can throw it away. And you should never go into a meeting without something that the other person hasn't thought of that they might really like: for me, these things never cost a dime, because I had no budgetary power -- but my committee did have the power to shape people's lives. And when you have a chance to do someone a favor by bending the rules appropriately, do it.

OK -- but when someone is trying to get away with something stupid and obnoxious, sometimes you just have to tell them to stuff it. This is -- and needs to be -- very, very rare. At one point I had to point-blank tell a chair s/he was going to make a certain change if I had to make it myself since *both* of us knew that the reason presented for not making the change was utterly ridiculous and designed only to block the policy on principle: a dean, and two people from the provost's office looked at me with horrified pleasure as I did something for which they would have been crucified on the college Great Lawn. I cannot tell you what this thing was because it breaks my final rule, which is:

5. Discretion. Never do or say anything that you would be ashamed to admit, publicly, in front of the entire faculty, but also -- part of brokering deals with people, or even forcing their hand, is not going out and making them look stupid or weak afterward. I learned this from the British Raj. In fact, you need to go out of your way to thank those who have conceded what you want from them and give them credit for the outcome, even if the negotiation has been very unpleasant. If your policy, once brokered, is to not founder at the point of implementation, your best move can sometimes be to present what has occurred in such a way as to put the other person in the best light possible and minimize your own role. This becomes particularly difficult at times because, I am sorry to say, people will lie, or say that you lied (see above) about what they have said or done to protect their own reputations at the expense of yours, and you have to suck it up. Defending yourself puts you in a position of weakness: move on to the next thing, and if the policy you have implemented is a good one, people will soon forget.

Ask the Radical: The Dreaded Grade Dispute

From time to time, the Radical will take direct questions about how to proceed in delicate matters not occurring at Zenith (refresh your memory of the Blogger Ethic, or just try to imagine the consequences, if you don't understand why she does not address controversial events at Zenith any more.)

This dispatch is just in from the Land of Contingent Labor:

"Dear Professor Radical: I was recently accused of giving a student a failing grade because I am allegedly biased against him. When he lodged the original complaint about the grade, I provided him with all of the reasons for his grade, including not answering assigned questions, not addressing gay people in a class about sexuality, and not answering questions when asked during his presentations even though answering questions was part of what was expected in the presentation. His response to my explanation was to accuse me of reverse discrimination.

"The Chair of my department has chosen to take both the grade dispute and the accusation seriously because of another incident in which a student used a racial slur in my class, and my disagreement with how this was handled.

"Any thoughts on how to address the issue with the student and with the Chair, since I am leaving this job soon anyway?"

Well, first of all, it's good that you are leaving the job. And I would say that even if you and the Chair did not have a vexed relationship stemming from a previous incident, unfortunate as it may seem, s/he is obliged to take a complaint seriously if it has been made (although I hope that s/he has the good sense to correct the student that what is being alleged is *discrimination,* period. "Reverse discrimination" is one of those phrases -- like "partial birth abortion" - that has been specially designed by radical conservatives to give a particular ideological spin to such a situation.)

But what should be done? And what does a faculty member -- contingent or not -- have a right to expect in such a situation? As Director of American Studies off and on I have periodically been asked to step into grade disputes in which both the student and the faculty member are in a state of outrage, and my job, as I perceived it, has been to resolve the situation but not necessarily decide who is telling the truth, even when I think I know. Let me give you two situations, each drawn from real experiences:

1. Student A appeared in my office in tears, saying that Professor X had refused to look at, much less grade, her senior work, because the agreed upon terms of the tutorial (that A and X would meet on a weekly basis to discuss said work) were violated by A. A never showed up for the tutorial appointments, X charged. A, on the other hand, claimed that after much back and forth over meeting times, X was never able to establish a regular time, and often did not show up at times that had been scheduled with A. A became discouraged, stopped trying to schedule appointments, and just wrote the paper. X rebutted this vociferously, claiming that A was "a liar."

What I thought I knew: that A was kind of a sweet, slightly out of it, young woman who I knew superficially and had never, to my knowledge, been involved in a dispute of this kind. I also had no reason to suspect that A was not being truthful, and what she said resonated with other complaints I had received about Professor X. My experience with X was that s/he was extraordinarily creative, somewhat high-strung, more likely to get into disputes with other faculty than some colleagues, forgetful, and unlikely to perceive that s/he had contributed to the misunderstanding, however unintentionally. My instinct was that Student A was probably telling some version of the truth; furthermore, A could not graduate without getting a grade for this work, so somehow a grade needed to be produced lest the dispute get really ugly.

2. I got a call from Faculty Y, saying that s/he was outraged on behalf of student B, who was taking a class with Professor Z. B had turned up in Y's office hours in despair, saying that the term paper that sie wrote for Z had received a failing grade. Y claimed that Z's grade was due to transphobia: that B, as a transgendered student writing on a trans topic, did not hirself believe the work was graded fairly, and furthermore, that in all hir meetings with Z during the term, felt harassed and criticized, tried to do what was asked, but nothing ever seemed to be good enough for Z. Y demanded that I confront Z about transphobia and insist that the paper be re-graded fairly.

What I thought I knew: I had taught B, who was an average student but had not distinguished hirself in any way that was apparent to me; Z was a young colleague, with very high standards, whose courses were universally perceived as quite rigorous. But Z was also queer, very politically conscious, and a devoted teacher; therefore I thought that discrimination against a particular student was unlikely. My sense was that Z was probably in the right in this matter, and that B was not lodging the complaint out of spite, but out of some genuine frustration about how to meet Z's standards. Complication: Y, who had originally called me, was a very senior colleague, and Z was very junior.

In both situations, what I did was this: I interviewed all parties, gathered information on their perspectives and then asked them to agree that final work would be submitted to me for my evaluation and submission of a final grade. Both students received grades sufficiently good to, in one case, graduate the student; and in the other case, move that student into hir major of choice. While both pieces of work were inferior, I did not believe that a disputed grade was a good reason to bar the student from progressing on to the next stage. In neither case, therefore, did I fully validate the faculty member's position, although I worked very hard to be supportive and sympathetic to each.

In the case of A, no actual grade had to be assigned, since the senior work was pass/fail: thus, while the work itself was admittedly quite odd, and bore the marks of not having been critiqued and supervised by a mentor, the student had clearly made a good faith effort to complete it, it was quite long, and represented what would normally be considered to be minimally acceptable in terms of meeting the graduation requirement.

In the case of B, I asked hir for previously submitted written work; I asked Z for the course syllabus and for the roster of other grades given in the course. I also asked that Z write several paragraphs that covered B's ungraded work for the class -- participation, absences, visits to office hours. B and I talked about this document, and with a few minor emendations, we were able to agree that it fairly represented hir efforts in the course, which had been slight in these areas. I also talked to B about the course readings enough to get a sense that sie had not done much of the reading for the course, which probably contributed to hir confusion about what sie was ultimately being asked to do -- or could do -- in the term paper. And when I saw the term paper, I understood that the paper sie had written was autobiographical, and not the critical essay engaging class readings that sie had been asked to write. When talking to B, I also learned that sie had submitted similar personal essays to Professor Y in another course, and received high marks for them. Therefore, although it was not Z's fault, B was correct in thinking that sie was being held to a standards different from those sie had previously experienced: Professor Y's concern for B's well-being during a difficult life transition had caused Y to allow B to not meet the course requirements and submit more personal writing instead. It was unclear to me whether Professor Y had explained to B that sie had been exempted from the standard Y had used to evaluate the rest of the class.

Neither of these incidents exactly mirrors the problems my correspondent's question raises, one of which is very disturbing: that the instructor being accused of discrimination has reason to believe that s/he is being discriminated against. It seems to me legitimate that a faculty member ask a student to modify offensive behavior and be supported by the Chair; and I would question what the student who did not wish to talk about gay people was doing in a class about sexuality. The latter student does not seem to be there for legitimate learning purposes, and Professor Contingent was right to ask him to participate honestly in the course.

That said, what does the faculty member have a right to expect from the Chair in relation to these incidents? Certainly that her side of the story will be listened to, taken into account and perhaps even given sympathy. But if the Chair is doing the job right, s/he will solve this problem in a way that is least likely to have reverberating effects for the faculty member and for the Department, even if it means tempering support of the faculty member by recognizing that the student has a legitimate point of view. This is even more likely as an outcome if Professor Contingent's contract is due to expire shortly: having an ongoing dispute with a student on behalf of a faculty member who you will never see again is a lot of wasted labor and unwanted attention for no gain. The Chair will also recognize that most disputes represent conflicting points of view in a "he-said-she said" situation that are not likely to be resolved by more talk, either because one party has an interest in covering up the truth, or because the situation was genuinely perceived differently by two individuals committed to differing points of view. In either case, the faculty member is unlikely to have her perspective completely validated, because to do that would invalidate the student's perspective and prolong the dispute to no good purpose. And prolonging the dispute -- or opening up the curriculum of the program to ideological scrutiny -- is not in the Chair's interest. So if I were the Chair, I would do what I did in both situations above: make all parties feel listened to and grade the work myself.

What can the faculty member do? Well, I would have a couple suggestions for the future.

1. Students are often drawn to controversial classes, and controversial teachers, for reasons they themselves do not understand, and their form of resistance to ideas that upset their worlds can be refusing to learn and getting into conflicts with the teacher to get attention. Furthermore, in some public systems, students can have difficulty getting into the classes they need to fulfill graduation requirements, and might end up in a queer, critical race or feminist literature course because it fit their schedule or there was a seat open. I could not recommend more strongly that controversial courses be offered with a credit/fail option, partly because students with ambivalent feelings about the material do not have to be graded on prior knowledge or affinity for the material at hand, and partly because it encourages students to take risks and not become hostile and defensive when they aren't understanding the material or don't wish to fully engage.

2. For many years after a particularly unpleasant incident in one of my classes (which included unfounded charges of sexual harassment and racism) I had a code of civility on my syllabus: students were asked, in the first class, to discuss the code while I was out of the room, amend it if they wished, and then we would all agree to it. At the time, I was also having particular trouble with students being disrepectful to each other, which inevitably produced conflict with me as well. This "contract" worked like a charm -- less because I could use the code to discipline students, but because we talked about how we would treat each other and students felt that they were full partners to the agreement.

3. For any faculty member, at any level of experience, I would also say: if you find that you are persistently getting into conflict with students, without necessarily ascribing blame, you need to ask yourself why and how to address conflict, or avoid it, without intervention from outsiders. Most frequently, asking a student for a private meeting to discuss what is happening, perhaps even with another colleague present, is a better way to address bad behavior than to confront a student in front of the class (which may have escalated Professor Contingent's problem with the student in the sexuality course) And giving a student a C- without any oppoprtunity to do extra credit work, or re-do failing work, is also bound to cause a conflict with a student to escalate, particularly when the student has framed the problem as an ideological dispute from the get-go. It's unfair but true: sometimes it is worth finding a reason to give the student a reasonable grade just to get them out of your life. And it is simply the case that some students -- like those people who are constantly suing others for real and imagined insults - go around fishing for trouble, and you need to be alert to them when they show up. Don't get stuck fighting out a crazy situation because you "know" you are right. Right you may be, but it sometimes isn't worth your peace of mind to fight it out to the end.