I'm nearing the end of my first year with new administrative responsibilities that give me oversight of a campus-wide program and the significant number of adjunct faculty and graduate students who teach in that program. As the semester draws to a close, I've found that I'm becoming paranoid about whether I'm doing a good job with this program. The problem isn't that I've been getting negative feedback: the problem is that I get almost no feedback at all, particularly from the people most affected by the decisions I make--the adjuncts and graduate students. A former chair once said to me that the hardest part of her position was that it changed the way people spoke to her--specifically, it made people less likely to do so. The revelation here isn't that people are reluctant to speak to their bosses; it's that this makes it difficult for the boss to do her job. I'm starting to understand now just how problematic the silence that surrounds power--in this case, power over people's employment situations and the conditions of work--can be. And this is revealing to me how such hierarchies, without strong protections in place for the workers, can make for bad managers.
Since I have taken over this managerial position ("administrative," in academic parlance, but that's just a way to obscure the management-worker relationship that is in fact the reality of academic labor just as with all other kinds of labor), I have heard very little from the adjunct faculty I oversee. Though I have tried to emphasize that I see mine as a support role--my job is to help secure for the instructors in the program the resources and support they need to do their jobs well--I rarely hear from anyone about problems they are facing in the classroom. Initially, I didn't understand why I heard from my faculty so rarely, and I was shocked and somewhat appalled when I realized that I'd only heard about a single case of plagiarism in the program in my first semester (statistics tell me that plagiarism is happening; either it isn't being caught, or when it is caught it isn't being reported). But when I stopped to think about why this might be happening, I realized that, however "open" and supportive I might try to be, the structure of my position relative to my instructors makes me all but inaccessible. I've certainly in the past, both as a graduate student and as a junior faculty member on the tenure-track, been nervous about bringing problems to my superiors, because I was worried about how those problems reflected on me and my abilities as a teacher. Maybe this rash of plagiarism is somehow my fault; or maybe this student is disruptive because I've mismanaged things somehow. And, even if that's not true, what if my supervisor thinks that's the case? Will my abilities be judged if I ask for help? I've asked these questions from positions with a certain amount of job security: as a graduate student, I knew I wasn't going to lose my fellowship, and as a junior faculty member on the tenure track, I knew that my department would need stronger inducements to get rid of me than a few problems in the classroom (academic job searches are exhausting, after all). I can only imagine how much more worried I would be about bringing problems to my supervisor's attention were I an adjunct faculty member, able to be fired (or rather, not re-hired) at the end of each semester for any reason--or no reason. The real miracle is that anyone ever comes to me at all.
The precariousness of my instructors' employment situation thus creates a problem that I can't overcome simply by telling everyone that I'm on their side. At the start of my first semester, I made the effort to drop by people's (shared) offices
to say hello, but I stopped soon after because I worried I was creating the impression more of
surveillance than of helpfulness: "The boss is checking up on me--what did I do?" It doesn't matter how "nice" or well-meaning I may be: I can't escape the fact that one of my roles is evaluative--I'm supposed to make sure that everyone in the program is doing their jobs--and I can't pretend that there isn't a power imbalance that separates me from the people I oversee and that colors every interaction I have with those people. That power imbalance encourages instructors to hide problems from me, rather than seeking out my help. Even worse, it likely silences any criticism my part-time faculty might have of the program, or of my management of it. No one likes to tell the boss she's wrong; but when the boss has the power to dismiss you without cause at any point--regardless of whether she's likely to exercise that power--the inducement to stay silent in cases of mismanagement is going to be overwhelming.
As a result, my contact with the people I oversee and support is limited, which is not ideal. If part of my role is evaluative, more of it is formative and supportive. The goal of my program is to provide the best quality instruction to our students that we can; it's thus my job as manager of that program to give the people I work with the resources to excel at their jobs, to provide useful, formative feedback, and to support them in trying out new things and tinkering with their instructional design. In an ideal world, instructors would leave the program better teachers than they come in, and my job would be to facilitate that. This supportive role is extremely difficult to perform, however, when the power dynamics of the situation discourage instructors from ever showing weak spots. Moreover, if no one can tell me when I make a bad choice, how do I fix my mistakes? How do I get better as an administrator if no one can offer me feedback on the success of my attempts at management?
Frequent feedback is how we identify strengths and weaknesses and thereby improve; it's why the faculty in my program are observed at least yearly. So why is there no structure in place to observe my performance and provide feedback? We say that we want to provide for our students the best instruction possible; but if the quality of instruction is in part tied to the support for that instruction--that is, to the management of the program--then why don't we put the same energy into assessing the bosses as we do the instructors? This lack of oversight for those in administrative roles is particularly galling when we consider that student evaluations remain a common metric for evaluating teaching.
We ask people who, particularly in lower-division classes, are just beginning to enter adulthood, to judge our performance at a task these evaluators have never
engaged in and have no training or expertise in; and the bosses think this is a
valid assessment tool. So why then are their no evaluations of
administrators by their faculty? Why don't we ask grown,
professional adults to assess the performance of bosses who
are, in terms of credentials and often in terms of experience, their colleagues?
The answer to the question is obvious: people in positions of power don't tend to create mechanisms that might limit that power. But this is a really bad thing. If it's good for the program for me to offer formative feedback to my colleagues working in the program, then it's also good for me to receive formative feedback in return, to find out from my instructors both what I've done right and what I can improve on. If a decision I make is a bad decision, I need to know that, and know why, so that I can rectify the situation and avoid making a similar mistake again. But the current structure makes the part-time faculty much more likely just to grin and bear the weight of any mismanagement on my part, rather than to point out the problem. This is not a recipe for successful management, or a successful program.
My ideal solution to this problem is simply to have a world without bosses, one in which programs are run by the faculty who teach in them, and in which no single member of the organization is granted so much power that they become difficult to criticize. I'm guessing the bylaws of most universities make that an impossibility (though bylaws can always be rewritten), so another solution that fits with the current structure of most institutions is to provide part-time faculty with (1) sufficient job security that they know they will not be subject to capricious sanctions by their boss, so that they can feel safer bringing problems, whether within the classroom or the program, to the boss's attention, and (2) a mouth-piece capable of approaching the boss with the concerns of the faculty without identifying particular faculty. In real world terms, one way to achieve this solution--one way that adjunct faculty members are achieving this solution--is with a union. A union contract generally requires that, when people are fired, they are fired for cause, and bargaining units get to elect stewards, whose job it is to serve as a kind of go-between between management and employees. As a result, the union structure gives employees the kind of voice and support they need to be able to provide feedback to the boss--feedback that, if the boss is doing her job, helps improve the program by improving the training and support that program can offer to its faculty to help them teach as well as possible.
Recently, Volkswagon came out in support of unionizing one of its U.S. factories, recognizing that it's good for business to enable employees to provide more input into decision making, and that a union structure can enable them in this way. If this is true for a car manufacturer, whose first priority is to maximize profit, it seems to me much more true for educational institutions, where the mission of the institution--to provide an education to its students--is carried out entirely by the people at the bottom of the hierarchy. The people on the front-lines know best how decisions made by the bosses affect the students, and affect the faculty's ability to educate students. Being a good boss in this situation means having access to feedback from the front-lines; and getting feedback means providing faculty with mechanisms for providing that feedback without fear of reprisal. Silence is--or should be--a boss's worst nightmare. What we want, if we want to provide our students a good education, is to have a conversation that travels the length of the academic hierarchy; and that only happens if there's more power in the hands of the faculty.
