We have this Humanities professor who has always been everybody’s favorite. When we suddenly lost our Dean and then our Chancellor, this professor was appointed first to the deanship and then to the chancellorship on a pro tempore basis. Everybody was overjoyed because the idea of having a colleague, a fellow educator and not some professional administrator in this role was very appealing. (I hated him from the start but that’s because I have a profound insight into human nature. Everybody else jumped around with joy and some people even drew celebratory posters and cartoons because of how happy the appointment made them).
Being an administrator, however, spoils people. It infects them with the administrative rot that they don’t seem to be able to resist. It took a very short time for our colleague turned administrator to start treating us like any typical admin would. As you know, our state still doesn’t have a budget, and it increasingly looks like the situation might become permanent. As a result, professors finally decided to unionize. Our part-timers are unionized, and the union has been great for them, so now tenure-track and tenured faculty members want a union, too.
So what do we hear from our newly minted administrator on this subject? That the union is a bad idea because it will make the relationship between faculty and administration “too adversarial” and, anyway, we have “a special environment” on campus and a union will somehow destroy all that specialness. Also, a union will end our shared governance (which I personally don’t mind since that shared governance is a total joke anyway.)
This is how it works, folks. You give a fellow a chance to smell an administrative appointment and he becomes a sell-out in a second.
Clarissa's Blog 
Shared governance is not a joke in all cases. I have seen faculty overrule administrators on P&T cases more than once. Not always, of course, but it does happen sometimes.
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Yes, of course. I meant specifically at our university. I believe in the importance of shared governance but we don’t have it.
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“Special environment”, my ass. If monopolies are a legitimate part of capitalism so are unions. There’s nothing “special” about failing to pay wages or benefits and if the situation has gotten bad enough that professors don’t think “I’m so special and unique with my life of the mind that I have significant individual leverage” then the administration only has themselves to blame.
Generally speaking: And surely if companies are international, couldn’t you internationalize a union? I’m sure I’m far from the first person to think this. The same forces which allow for Mechanical Turk work also allow for people to connect to other people in places thousands of miles away.
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Our dean got his role because he was much beloved by the liberal arts faculty. He is completely ineffective, thankfully, because he turned on the faculty in a heartbeat. If he actually were competent, we’d be in worse trouble.
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With you all the way. When I came to the institution I had a feeling the shared governance was robust. Over the 12 years I’ve been a prof, I have seen it erode. Our chair, who was a beloved faculty member, has been a chair a bit too long; he’s a bit too eager to bend over in the department’s name when the higher administration imposes yet another capricious move.
Yes, the relationship between faculty and administration is adversarial, enough with glad-handing bullshit. Good for you for unionizing!
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The anti-union sentiment is an extension of the personal flaw that you noted in the earlier post you linked to about the guy. A union is all about recognizing the adversarial relationships that structure the workplace and giving workers power within them. Someone who is motivated by the desire to be universally liked is NOT going to enjoy the frank acknowledgement that he’s management and therefore operating from a different set of interests than those he manages. Administrators who know what they’re doing it (and I firmly believe that such creatures exist and can even work to the benefit of faculty) recognize that conflicting interests are a necessary feature of the landscape. The all-too-rare good administrator will make rational decisions that take those conflicts into account without somehow fearing like the existence of the conflict represents some failure on his or her part.
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“Someone who is motivated by the desire to be universally liked …”
… is ripe for being undermined by the people who he wants to like him.
So he wants to have a workplace free of unions?
Very well — now you work for the faculty, and not the administration, because the only way you don’t get a worker’s revolt is by doing precisely that.
Don’t like it? Well, I’m sure someone in the humanities department is a fairly good artist and can come up with some amusing posters for the upcoming faculty protest …
[… hears sounds of a certain administrator who wanted to be liked going into moderate cardiac arrest …]
🙂
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Great observations, GEP! I didn’t see the connection but you are absolutely right.
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What is the conflict of interest between administrators and faculty? I have an inkling, but I would love to have it spelled it out for me by people with more experience.
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Standard organisational politics, essentially …
Political ambitions press downward, achievement ambitions press upward.
“Our Man in Administration” who is in the middle should understand that to service only one of these may make him a made person in the eyes of those he’s serving as well as a made target in the eyes of those he’s not.
Admittedly, being the “made target” rather than the “made person” can have certain life-altering characteristics if you’re working with a certain type of people …
[… which was probably why the standard procedure back in the day was to blame all such “reassignments” on enemy action, rather than infighting …]
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Administrators want us to do more unpaid menial work and we want to do less. 🙂
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Faculty want to teach their classes and do their research and perform such service as will optimize the conditions for doing those two things. Administrators want to keep a department/institutional unit/institution running smoothly. “Smoothly” may or may not mean “in a way that optimizes conditions for faculty teaching and research.” Depending on what master the administrator answers to, it may mean “making it so that those pesky faculty members do their work with fewer resources,” “subtly encouraging those faculty members to seek employment elsewhere,” “getting the faculty members that are there to do the work of twice as many faculty members” or “ignoring the needs of faculty members in order to devote time and resources to priorities like the sports program, a new online learning initiative, or courting rich donors.”
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