The role of the faculty in institutional development.

PERHAPS WE'VE HEARD TOO MUCH about the "new challenges" facing higher education. In point of fact, American higher education has been in a state of transformation since its beginning. New curricula, new ways of learning, new groups of students, new types of institutions fill the pages of every history of American higher education. From the introduction of the scientific method in the nineteenth century, to the influx of first generation college students with the G.I. Bill of Rights in the 1950s, to the present, colleges and universities have been in a constant state of remaking, reforming, and transforming. The history of perpetual experiment and change has assured a wondrous heterogeneity in American higher education. We have public and private research universities, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive institutions, community colleges, and now even opportunities for distance education. These various sites of learning respond differently to change, but the responsiveness of American higher education to change reflects the values of freedom and opportunity that we cherish. It assures vitality. It produces new ideas. It is a reflection of our democratic society.

Despite the long history of "transformation" in higher education, we hear all around us a call to consider new challenges of a world in transition. And to what end? As with pronouncements of transformations in earlier periods, the claims and the conferences about imminent change are producing anxiety about how we might or might not be able to keep up with the change around us, uncertainty about how to prepare for "the transformation," and insecurity about institutional viability in an increasingly competitive world. These responses are sometimes strong enough to make a nonbeliever into a believer of "the doctrine of imminent change," but I'm not convinced that conversion through fear and loathing should be our goal. As the learning experts and our own experience in the classroom tell us, no one learns much in an atmosphere of fear and dread. My approach, therefore, to this conversation is to be reassuring, as only an historian can, that higher education has undergone change many times before. Those who went before us somehow moved with the transformations of their times. We, too, will survive the "paradigm shifts" of our times.

How to meet change

Having said that, I do think that the way we meet the "challenges of a world in transition" matters. It matters in terms of our values: our commitment to intellectual autonomy as well as our belief in the importance of vital academic communities. I am less interested in techniques, methods, and new tools for staying relevant--though I seek them out and employ them--than I am interested in how new tools, new programs, new types of institutions, and new groups of students prompt us to reflect upon our values. Times of transition, like the one we seem to be experiencing, can help us clarify our understanding of academic freedom and academic community, not only to strike a balance between freedom and community but to recognize the dynamic relationship--the synergy--between academic autonomy and community engagement. Our commitment to the values associated with academic autonomy and engaged communities will assure the continued vitality of learning and scholarship in times of change, but it needs to be a shared and deliberate commitment by faculty and their institutions if vitality is to be the outcome.

My reflections here grow out of my experience as a faculty member, relatively early in my career, at a private comprehensive college--North Central College in metropolitan Chicago. However, my ideas are rooted in ray participation in the Faculty Work Project of the Associated New American Colleges (ANAC). The Faculty Work Project gave me a unique opportunity to consider, together with faculty and administrators from other comprehensive universities, pressing issues in higher education. With the help of scholars and consultants in the field of higher education, we contemplated topics related to faculty development, institutional governance, and faculty work. The project was a chance for me, as a faculty member at a small school, to "see the forest and not just the trees." A monograph about our work, The New Academic Compact (2002), was the result of our conversations.

The New Academic Compact, edited by Linda McMillin and Jerry Berberet, sits nicely next to similar reports, for example, AAC&U's Building the Faculty We Need (2000), CIC's Reconsidering Faculty Roles and Rewards (1999), the American Association of State Colleges and University's Facing Change: Building the Faculty of the Future (1999), and AAHE's Heeding New Voices: Academic Careers for a New Generation (2000). These studies address the role of faculty in the "transformation" of higher education. All make recommendations regarding faculty work; they tell us to employ faculty development that is sensitive to phases of a career, to keep tenure but implement post-tenure review, to evaluate and reward faculty work in terms of their work's relationship to student learning, and to reform governance.

Among this literature on faculty work, though, The New Academic Compact is distinctive. Its recommendations move beyond managing the faculty to advance a holistic vision of campus collaboration, with a special focus on the relationship between faculty and their institutions. Using terms like "reciprocal obligation," "civic professionalism," and "shared community," the Academic Compact asks that we consider our values as we respond to changes in higher education and that we take care that our responses to these changes are responses that maintain a commitment to knowledge and inquiry in an open and democratic community.

Most important from my perspective as a faculty member, the Academic Compact affirms the roles and responsibilities of faculty in institutional development. This vision resonates with me not only because I believe that a managed faculty is a dull faculty--and, therefore, an ineffectual faculty in nurturing students as active and responsible learners, but

because I am intrigued by dynamic institutions of higher education and committed to the creation and renewal of dynamic sites of learning. While buildings, slick brochures, and fat endowments can highlight institutional strength, truly dynamic institutions are those with creative and engaged faculty members laboring in the classroom as scholars and as institutional participants.

But how does an institution--and the individuals within an institution--create an "invigorating" learning environment, a community that gives life? Scholars of higher education are better prepared to answer this question with systematic research to support their claims, but let me share my thoughts about the values needed to assure a learning environment full of life. To illustrate my ideas, I will touch on three topics--student learning, faculty development, and shared governance.

Student learning

We need to make learning, formal and informal, central on our campuses. This, I realize, is not a new admonition. And let me note that faculty who hear this plea to make learning central--uttered often by some faculty development consultant brought to campus or, worse still, by the assessment industry--generally resent it. Why? Not because we don't care about learning but because most faculty--even those at research universities--spend a considerable amount of time and energy focused on student learning.

I have become convinced that teaching is like childbirth. Memories of teaching, like memories of childbirth, are very selective, whether in the mind of an administrator who has not taught in many years or of faculty members when we have a break from the classroom. We remember the "ah ha" moments when students not only "get it" but extend their new knowledge in research of their own. We don't remember--gone completely from our minds--are the truly difficult, sometimes painful, aspects of teaching, the search for the appropriate reading material, the design of experiments and class activities that convey information while fostering learning, the assessment of class outcomes and student learning (which is what grading is about, and it's endless), and the student or group of students who do not have an "ah ha" experience and who, worse, don't think an "ah ha" should be a requirement.

The result of the selective memory about teaching is that the effort needed to create a learning environment is underestimated. This underestimation plays out when faculty are asked to craft, implement, and assess new curricula--sometimes far from their field of expertise--without the resources and institutional support to achieve success. It is also underestimated when faculty and student affairs professionals are asked to collaborate on new programs. Seldom is time given for these groups of professionals--trained in distinctly different ways--to understand each other. Instead, we implement programs that take, what I call, an associative approach, meaning, we work side by side but not really together. It is also seen in the limited training faculty receive for their work as advisors--work that Richard Light has shown is key to college learning. It's not surprising, then, when national surveys of faculty, including the one conducted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the ANAC Faculty Work Project, indicate that faculty members, young and old, sense a lack of reciprocal support from their institutions. In these surveys and focus groups, we hear faculty saying: "I'm doing everything I've been asked to do, but I haven't really been given the support I need to do it really well. Good enough, yes. Excellent, not really."

At this, administrators might think to themselves: yet another whining faculty member asking for more--more time, more course release, additional resources. You better believe it. The creation of dynamic learning environments does not just happen. It is the product of faculty effort, expertise, and engagement, all of which take time, demand support, and need a community of collaborators. Hiring bright faculty and "setting them loose," just like admitting bright students and "letting them learn," is not sufficient to create a dynamic institution. It sounds so democratic and "bottom up" to avoid institutional strategizing around learning, and if an institution has, indeed, recruited truly exceptional people you'll see some bubbling up. But, without institutional support, faculty effort to nurture learning cannot be sustained.

Faculty view

Let me turn, though, to the faculty side of the "reciprocal obligations to create a learning community." Here, we must address the apparent tensions that some have identified between institutional needs and faculty values. Reviewing the scholarship on faculty values, Jon Wergin (2001) tells us that autonomy is a powerful motivation for our work. More than community, recognition, efficacy, and, obviously, pay, faculty members make a life commitment to their profession because of the autonomy it offers. And ardent champions of that autonomy insist that faculty independence assures academic freedom and, therefore, unregulated student learning. Yes and no, I think.

Academic freedom, like all freedom, has no meaning outside of the community that assures it. Our work with students, on curriculum, as advisors, in the classroom, needs to be the expression of independent scholars and teachers; but its measure of value is found in the community that respects that freedom. A community that assures autonomy of thought is not a community that lets anything pass in the name of academic freedom but one that demands engagement, assessment, and review as part and parcel of that freedom. Faculty members understand this in terms of peer review within their disciplines, but we need to reflect on our work as teachers and scholars in terms of its connection to our communities closer to home--our campuses. To do so does not limit individual autonomy but rather invigorates our work, much as peer review within our discipline does.

The synergy between intellectual autonomy and community should be at the very center of faculty development. Jacqueline Mintz (2002) and others have urged us to adopt a holistic model for faculty development, one that considers every member of the community as an evolving individual. The new literature on faculty development is particularly good in stressing the reciprocal relationship between faculty and their institutions. Colleges and universities could do a better job implementing these ideas. Much faculty development at the pre-tenure stage remains disaggregated--teaching, scholarship, service--rather than holistic. And post-tenure faculty, with or without reviews, usually understand institutional measures of faculty development as bureaucratic necessities of little value.

One response to this failure in faculty development is to manage faculty development more tightly, to reign in faculty autonomy, to align faculty work more directly with institutional needs and programs. This, in my opinion, is not the direction we should go. I reiterate, the managed faculty is the dull faculty. The intellectually engaged faculty is the dynamic faculty. Thus, faculty development programs need to offer the scaffolding of community support, evaluation, and assessment but should not restrict faculty from building the knowledge, expertise, and excellence that invigorates them as scholars and teachers.

Shared governance

For sure, the balance between academic independence and community needs is a delicate tree, constantly demanding attention. It is because of this that shared governance is so important. Having spent several years talking and thinking about governance on the ANAC project and spending time on my own campus's governance reform task force, I know that governance is a headache of a topic.

I remember my first meeting with the governance group of the Faculty Work Project. We were told by a leading expert in the field: "The structure doesn't matter." The cynic in me thought, "This guy has made a living researching and consulting on governance, and that's the best he can do?" In fact, the structure does and doesn't matter (and as the project unfolded I came to understand that Jack Schuster, to whom I am referring, would agree). The structure does matter in that it should be one in which faculty can engage in all levels of institutional decision making where their expertise, perspective, and voice are of significance.

I realize that faculty members have difficulty, as everyone does, measuring their importance, our significance in institutional decision making. Some lean too far one way demanding a say in everything right down to the type of flowers adorning the commencement stage, while others lean so far away from institutional concerns that the college's academic programs could be moving in a new direction and they wouldn't know or, worse, wouldn't care. Leaders (faculty and administrators) within the governance structure have the responsibility of sorting out the level of significance of various groups to the decision-making process. In doing so, these leaders, not the structure, make shared governance effective and meaningful.

Like American democracy, shared institutional governance will not be a pure, direct democracy but a democracy expressed in a variety of ways. In his study of the history of American civic life, Michael Schudson (1998) discusses the various types of citizenship we see at play in the United States: deferential, party and interest group, and expert. He traces an unfolding from one to the next, but he concludes that American democracy represent, a blending of these variations on citizenship and allows for still newer forms of civic engagement.

Sadly, what passes as governance on most campuses is hardly as dynamic as the history of American democracy is. Often what we see is merely faculty deliberation, usually understood as advisory. In the busy life of administrators and faculty members, little is brought to advisory meetings in terms of preparation and focus. It's nice to share ideas, review procedures, reflect on curriculum, but unless the real work of institution building is happening, with all the needed information in the room and the appropriate people present, it is work that has very little meaning, and, worse, it is work that takes faculty away from the vigorous and intellectually challenging effort of teaching and scholarship.

I am not ranking intellectual work higher than service responsibilities, as was done in the MLA's 1996 policy paper on faculty service and governance. I am ranking intellectual work higher than phony shared governance activities. Authentic shared governance is at the very heart of a dynamic learning community. It reflects the values of a free and democratic society. With truly shared governance, service is recast as citizenship, and faculty, along with other members of the institution, bear the responsibilities of assuring a learning community that fosters important, some might even say sacred, rights--academic freedom, freedom of thought and speech, and the right to dissent. Students privileged to learn in a community with shared governance are getting a lesson in much more than the disciplines they are pursuing. They are learning in a crucible of democracy. The context around them, if authentic in its civic responsiveness, will inspire student learning and a sense of community responsibility over a lifetime.

Thus, it is our values we should consider as we envision higher education in the twenty-first century. As we emphasize learning, as we train and develop the professoriate, and as we look for new ways to govern our institutions, we should be sure that we strengthen the dynamic interplay between faculty and their institutions, between intellectual autonomy and community engagement, and between the learning environments in individual classrooms and larger institutional efforts to assure student learning. Guarding these relationships--better still, enhancing these relationships--is crucial as we face this latest transformation of higher education.

To respond to this article, e-mail [e-mail], with author's name on the subject line.

WORKS CITED

American Association of State Colleges and Universities. 1999. Facing change: Building the faculty of the future. Washington, D.C.: American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Association of American Colleges and Universities. 2000. Building the faculty we need: Colleges and universities working together. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Denham, R., C. Kramsch, L. Phelps, J. Rassias, J. Slevin, and J. Swaffar. 1996. Making faculty work visible: Reinterpreting professional service, teaching, and research in the fields of language and literature. Modern Language Association Commission on Professional Service Report. In Profession. New York: Modern Language Association.

Light, Richard R. 2001. Making the most of college: Students speak their minds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

McMillin, Linda A. and William G. Berberet, eds. 2002. New academic compact: Revisioning the relationship between faculty and their institutions. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company.

Mintz, J. 2002. A holistic model for faculty and institutional development. In L.A. McMillin and W. J. Berberet, eds. New academic compact: Revisioning the relationship between faculty and their institutions. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company.

Schudson, Michael. 1998. The good citizen: A history of American civic life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Wergin, J.F. 2001. Beyond carrots and sticks: What really motivates faculty. Liberal Education, 87: 1, 50-53.

Zahorski, Kenneth J. and Roger Cognard. 1999. Reconsidering faculty roles and rewards: Promising practices for institutional transformation and enhanced learning. Washington, DC: Council of Independent Colleges.

FACULTY FUTURES: MARGINAL OR CENTRAL?

The Fall 1999 (Vol. 88, No. 4) issue of Liberal Education examined the state of the professoriate. The Discourse Section included a variety of perspectives.

* "A Profession in Difficult Times: The Future of Faculty," by Mary Burgan, Robert Weisbuch, and Susan Lowry

* Marginal or Mainstream? Full-Time Faculty off the Tenure Track," by Jay Chronister and Roger Baldwin 

* "Are We Speaking the Same Language? Comparing AAUP and AGB," by Neil Hamilton 

* "The Professoriate and Institutional Citizenship: Toward a Scholarship of Service," by Jerry Berberet.

If you missed these issues, order them at [e-mail] or phone [phone]

SUSAN TRAVERSO is associate professor of history at North Central College. Adapted from a talk given at AAC&U's conference, Faculty Work and Student Learning: Meeting New Challenges of a World in Transition, November 2002.