Solidarity and the Future of Academe

The word “solidarity” has been making the rounds in discussions of the future of higher education lately. The adjunct union movement has been talking about it for some time, seeking to find allies and develop support as they band together to fight casualization in what is, to my mind, the single most hopeful force in higher education at present. Among ladder faculty, however, the meaning of solidarity is a bit more contested. In particular, A.W. Strouse’s recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education attacking the work of Rebecca Schuman has tried to draw lines in the sand that would distinguish “an ethics of solidarity” from more harsh forms of critique—forms which, according to Strouse, are more destructive than constructive (see also Rosemary Feal’s attempt to draw the same line over the angry responses to the MLA task force report on graduate programs). Karen Kelsky has already examined the extent to which “tone-policing” resembles the discourse of white privilege (Kelsky’s target is Claire Potter, but we can see the same thing happening in Strouse’s essay and Feal’s defense of the MLA report, and in countless other places–just look through responses to criticism of the MLA report, or responses to pretty much anything Schuman writes); and Marc Bousquet has pointed out the patent contradiction in calling for “solidarity” while taking a hachet to one of the strongest voices in the fight to improve higher education. What I want to add to this discussion is more a comment about strategy, to make the case for a more inclusive definition of solidarity.

There’s a storm a-brewin’ in higher education. More and more articles are being published on the crisis of student debt and on out-of-control administrator salaries. And now the government is increasingly trying to look like it’s taking on the problem of student debt (a crisis the government in fact perpetuated, but that’s for another day), while noise about rethinking accredidation and the rules for receiving federal funding is building in the background. The more information becomes available about how badly university funds have been mismanaged—that is, about how administrators and boards have continuously raised tuition to ridiculous levels and used that money for purposes other than the educational mission of the university—the closer we move to the moment when parents and students stand up and demand accountability from these high-priced institutions. And when that happens, faculty have a choice: we can show that we are part of the problem, or we can be part of the solution. That choice will determine the fate of academy, and the role of the professor within it.

The only line we should be drawing in the sand is between those who want to uphold the mission of the university as a place where students can learn and where new knowledge is produced, and those who want to interfere with that mission. Anyone seeking to diminish the quality of university education by, for instance, not giving faculty the resources they need to do their jobs (like, you know, office space, or a living wage), or by looking for ways to cut research funding, or by looking to pit faculty against each other in a war that no one wins (except administrators)—these people are the enemy. If and when the shit hits the fan and higher education gets restructured, these are the people who should be held accountable, by which I mean that these are the people who should be fired. The question for faculty, it seems to me, is this: if and when this happens, do we want to be standing next to those who have turned higher education into a business at the expense of the university’s mission, or do we want to be on record as having fought vigorously against and publicly criticized those people and their efforts to undermine the university?

How we answer this question matters. Reform, if it comes, will be driven by a rhetoric of fiscal accountability and responsibility to students and to the public good the university is supposed to serve. The problem is that some of the people most adept at wielding this rhetoric are politicians and corporate “reform” types, all folk who at best don’t know what they’re talking about, and at worst know exactly what they’re talking about and are skilled at getting people to believe that up is down. Only if we as faculty have a clear, demonstrable track-record of fighting against initiatives that interfere with our educational mission will we convince a broader audience that we, the faculty, (1) know what we’re talking about, and (2) are truly on the side of the students and the public good. Let’s face it: the popular image of the college professor isn’t one that the average Joe warms to. And to people outside the university, we’re likely to be seen more as part of this broken system than as beleaguered heroes struggling to shield our students from the worst depredations of management. We have to prove that we’re on the right side of history here if we’re going to convince the forces pushing for reform that we deserve to stick around. And we should have to prove it; because, if we can’t, then maybe we really are part of the problem.

Going easy on the problem isn’t going to save us; it’s much more likely to end us as a profession. If we want to survive to do our work, we’re going to need to be vocal about criticizing power—including, for us ladder faculty, our own. Instead of trying to police the tactics of the least powerful among us, we’d be much better served to think about the ways in which our own behavior helps enable the exploitation of our colleagues and our students, and to strategize ways to fight back. And by throwing our support behind the noisy critics of this unsustainable system, we can demonstrate to the rest of the world—and most importantly to our students, who ultimately foot the bill for these problems—that we are not willing participants in the perversion of the university system. This, it seems to me, is what solidarity would look like—and not like trying to redefine “solidarity” so that it encompasses only that critique that makes us comfortable (which is to say only that critique that doesn’t threaten our own power).

Academic Decision Making

I have in recent posts been defending the ability of university faculty to participate more in the running of the university. While I continue to believe strongly in our ability to do so, recent conversations about the difficulty faculty often seem to have making group decisions have reminded me that the work of thinking about problems and the work of solving them are not necessarily the same thing, and that faculty must therefore, if we are to take a greater role in the day-to-day of our institutions, perhaps retrain ourselves somewhat to be better, more efficient problem-solvers. I suspect that the reluctance of faculty to get more involved in university management in part grows naturally out of negative experiences with committee work and faculty meetings. Understanding the difference between the skills that serve us academically and those that will serve us in the practical business of running a department, division, or institutions might help us find our our power again.

Anyone who has spent much time in faculty meetings has had the experience of interminable conversations about a problem that doesn’t seem that difficult but that seems never to get solved. After the requisite period of railing against the problem itself—either bemoaning the fact that the problem exists or denouncing the notion that the problem is, in fact, a problem (“back in my day…”)—discussion moves on to possible solutions, and from there things devolve quickly. A proposal is made. Someone responds immediately with reasons why it will never work. People argue over those reasons. Another proposal is made, radically different from the first. The same thing happens. Eventually (this is like Godwin’s Law for academics in faculty meetings) someone “goes meta”: “I don’t think we can even have this conversation about how to address low enrollments in our Hamster Fur Weaving minor without first having a conversation about what a Hamster Fur Weaving really is as a discipline.” Then half the room starts arguing over the state of the discipline, while the other half debates whether the conversation really needs to take place. Anytime the room moves too close to consensus, someone will note, “Well, I agree, but someone who didn’t agree with this might say…,” and then everyone has to deal with the objection that no one in the room actually wants to pose. This goes on for several months or even years, before everyone finally—and begrudgingly—settles on a proposal that looks remarkably like the one first proposed. I’ve seen this cycle at multiple institutions and among faculty from several different disciplines within the liberal arts (broadly construed). I don’t know if scientists have these problems, but among humanists even very functional departments (like the one I currently work in) seem to fall into this cycle of indecision whenever important decisions need to be made.

It’s this experience that can give us, as academics, the impression that faculty are just bad at making decisions. It’s too much like herding cats, the argument goes: put too many independent-minded people in a room (particularly when some of those people have some pretty impressive egos), and it all goes to hell. I’ve occasionally thought this myself, buying into the academic-as-hopelessly-impractical-eccentric fiction that keeps the outside world from taking us seriously. Recently, however, I was reading the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating and Agreement Without Giving In at the recommendation of a colleague, and one of the authors’ insights into how negotiations can stall out helped me see that the issue isn’t that academics are too independent; it’s that we’re trained in skills that get in the way of our problem-solving ability. One of their arguments is that negotiations get stuck when the parties involved think they must choose one of a very limited number of options, rather than looking for ways to rethink the problem and develop new possibilities. They note, “Nothing is so harmful to inventing as a critical sense waiting to pounce on the drawbacks of any new idea. Judgment hinders imagination.”

If there’s one thing all of us in the humanities have (or should have), it’s a “critical sense waiting to pounce.” In the humanities, we are trained primarily in critique. Our job is to question assumptions, look for problems, put pressure on ideologies, find opposing view-points, etc., and to teach others to do the same. This is, in most situations, a virtue. Because we are trained in critique, we are great at the vital skill of diagnosing problems, and at teaching our students the one thing we usually point to as the most valuable take-away from a college education: critical thinking skills. But when I read the quotation above, it dawned on me that our finely-honed critical abilities actually get in the way of attempts to solve the problems we diagnose. At the end of the day, few solutions in the real world are perfect: in most cases, we can find something wrong or potentially wrong, either practically or philosophically, with just about any proposal we can make. And because critique is what we do, we automatically move straight from any proposal to finding those problems.

This is bad for a variety of reasons. First, it means that we tend to devote a lot more energy to shooting down possibilities than we do to inventing them. For any proposal, we can come up with multiple critiques, so more time gets spent discussing why we can’t do something than how we can. Second, speaking at least for my own experience, the tendency towards critique rather than invention encourages a lot of self-censoring. If I come up with a possible solution to the problem, my own critical faculties can usually find problems with the idea before I can put it on the table; and if I can see problems with my idea, I’m not likely to say anything, both because I don’t want to offer a flawed proposal, and because, as an academic who trades in ideas, I don’t want to seem like the purveyor of bad ideas to my colleagues. Even if I don’t immediately pick up on the possible problems with my proposal, however, I’m still going to be hesitant to speak the idea aloud if I know that it will immediately be set upon by others’ critical faculties. Criticism of our ideas is something we all live with, and part of being successful as an academic means learning to take that criticism in stride. Still, if every time I go to open my mouth, I know my idea will get shot down, there’s very little incentive there for me to keep speaking—or to keep trying to come up with solutions. I don’t imagine I’m the only one who has had this experience. In the end, the effect of our cumulative critical sensibilities is that we end up with fewer ideas to work with, because our approach discourages us from offering all but the most iron-clad (and, often, safe) of proposals.

The issue, then, is that we are trained as good problem-finders, but not as good problem-solvers. Happily, this diagnosis offers its own prescription: if the problem is that our critical sense gets in the way of our ability to invent solutions, then the solution to that problem is to find ways to side-line that critical sense, or to re-direct it towards something constructive. As the authors of Getting to Yes put it, we need to “separate inventing from deciding.” Their suggestion is to have brainstorming sessions in which there is no critique: any proposal can go up, and no one is allowed to say anything about why it can’t work. The idea here is both to offer a variety of possibilities to start working with and—perhaps more importantly for the academic context—to make space for the creative faculties to kick in, to give our imaginations some room to flex their muscles. The next step Getting to Yes proposes, after a period of brainstorming, is not to start eliminating possibilities, but instead to start focusing on the most promising possibilities and developing them further. What would it take to make this happen? What modifications can we make to it to make it a stronger proposal? Once several of the best proposals have been developed, then the critical faculties can be re-engaged to decide which among several options is the best to pursue.

In this approach, the focus is on how can we make this work? rather than why won’t this work?, which strikes me as a much more positive, and thus more emotionally rewarding, way to problem-solve than what we typically see happening in faculty meetings. And by first engaging on our creative abilities—which is also part of our training but which usually takes a back-seat to our critical sense—we empower ourselves by demonstrating to ourselves that we are, in fact, capable of coming up with lots of solutions to a problem. In committee contexts, it’s too easy for us to experience our hard-earned intelligence as a disabling cynicism—we can see the problems, and we can see the problems behind the problems, and we know no solution will solve all of the problems. By purposefully silencing the critical faculty, though only temporarily, to ask what could we do?, we can, I think, discover that our big brains can build just as well as they can deconstruct. In learning to make space for creativity that is safe (again, temporarily) from critique, we might be able to retrain ourselves in more constructive and efficient forms of decision-making by using our considerable mental resources to seek out new possibilities and imaginative solutions.

Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting a Pollyanna-ish notion that we’d all be happier and more productive if we’d just stop being so negative all the time. The cynicism we experience as faculty is come by honestly; it is based in dismal realities that are not going to go away through a few creative brain-storming sessions. In the big picture, our ability to see and critique the problems facing higher education is vital for any attempt to start remedying those problems. But if critique is necessary to the process of improving the university, it is not sufficient. Critique can tell us what we want to change and why, but it takes creativity to offers us ways to change it. What I am suggesting is that, in order to become better problem-solvers in the practical work of running a program, department, or university, we need to make room to develop our creative abilities so that they match our critical ones. By making a conscious effort to focus on what we can do in the process of making decisions, and by learning to maximize the number of possible avenues for action before we start making choices, we just might be able to transform faculty meetings into a much more productive, and therefore much more empowering, experience. Knowing that we can work together to solve problems, and showing administrators, students, and parents that we are capable of doing so, would be a good first step towards taking back our universities.