Re-evaluate the idea of the university
Perhaps the most fundamental reason why teaching and research are viewed as competing rather than interrelated activities—and a key cause of why it’s so difficult to reunite these processes in faculty load assignments and evaluation systems—is that colleges and universities themselves are structured as though instruction and scholarship were utterly distinct enterprises.

Examine the mission statement of almost any institution of higher education, and you’ll discover that teaching and research are listed as important but not necessarily related functions of the organization. In other words, relatively few mission statements present learning as a goal achieved through independent inquiry and research; even fewer describe discovery, integration, and application as results actively sought through teaching. Once again, the focus is on the activity rather than the result, and that perspective shapes everything that is familiar about the modern university.

• Departments are organized around disciplinary methods (activities) rather than important questions being asked or issues being explored (results).
• Individual courses are defined by “seat time” and contact hours (activities) rather than competencies gained and knowledge developed (results).
• Degrees are granted largely by the number of credits earned (activities) rather than the amount of growth achieved or improvement attained (results).

That same emphasis on the processes of teaching, research, and service rather than the outcomes of learning, innovation, and academic citizenship that we saw fragmenting faculty roles in Part 1 of this series ultimately fragments the university itself. In order to promote research while enhancing instruction, not even as separate yet complementary activities but as a single, integrated approach to fulfilling its mission, it’s necessary to reevaluate the entire idea of what a university is today, what value it adds to society, and what purposes it is trying to serve.

That re-evaluation is unlikely to be successful if institutions merely attempt to adapt their long-standing emphasis on teaching, research, and service to the evolving needs of a new century. It’s important at the university level, too, to define its mission and to determine its structure, not by all the effort that people are putting in, but by all the benefits that stakeholders are taking out.

Young institutions tend to define themselves on the SAT and GRE scores of their incoming students, the number of Nobel laureates and Guggenheim fellows they hire, and the international reputations of the administrative team. Truly world-class institutions tend to be defined in terms of the placement rates of their graduates, the number of Nobel laureates and Guggenheim fellows they produce, and the international contributions of the administrative team. See Salmi (2009). Cutting-edge research can seem to be a distraction from highly effective teaching as long as the institution is structured in such a way that academic affairs are administered in one unit, research in another. That distraction begins to disappear (and those competing administrative units become less necessary) once the institutional focus is on innovation rather than on all the different ways in which innovation might possibly be achieved.

Don Chu has described the tendency of faculty members to view departments as “closed systems” where professors provide the labor and where students and academic disciplines reap the results. See Chu (2006) 3–6. More accurately, Chu says, an academic department should be regarded as an “open system” in which both the stakeholders and beneficiaries are numerous: faculty members, students, alumni, parents of current students, accrediting agencies, legislatures, the local community, the individual disciplines, the higher education community, prospective employers of graduates, nongovernment organizations, funding agencies, and so on. In the 21st century, that same sort of approach needs to be applied to the institution as a whole.

Re-evaluating the idea of the university will mean approaching it not as a closed system in which professors teach and conduct research, but as an open, organic network that includes a vast system of constituents and stakeholders. It’s the same mind-set that both defines faculty load as, for example, 50 percent teaching, 40 percent research, and 10 percent service, and student achievement as 120 credit hours earned in 50-minute classes conducted over 15-week semesters. It is rapidly becoming accepted that there are alternative models for describing how students learn. It should be equally clear that alternative models also exist for describing how universities and university systems produce benefits for society.

Six strategies for promoting research while advancing instruction
In what is perhaps the most comprehensive approach to promoting research while advancing instruction to date, Alan Jenkins, Mick Healey, and Roger Zetter described six effective strategies that institutions can adopt in order to make timely progress in attaining this goal.

1. Work through individual disciplines to develop a clearer understanding of how teaching and research intersect in their own practices and methods.
2. Review areas where current culture seems to inhibit the cross-fertilization between teaching and research, and revise policies where appropriate. Assessment data, student surveys, organizational audits, and comprehensive program reviews can all provide helpful information in this regard.
3. Develop an institution-wide set of curricular goals for promoting research among all students, even at the undergraduate level.
4. Modify staffing policies so that future hires are likely to support the full integration of teaching and research.
5. Revise strategic planning goals and categories so that teaching objectives and research objectives better support one another.
6. Incorporate a fully integrated approach toward teaching and research into institutional culture. For instance, incorporate assessment of research knowledge into curricular assessment, encourage research clusters to become teaching teams, and give research wide visibility to students at all levels of the institution. Jenkins, Healey, and Zetter (2007) 52–61.

In other words, by shifting the mission of the university from “educating students and conducting research” to “educating students through conducting research,” institutions do a great deal more than merely create better synergy between two essential functions of the modern university; they also go a long way toward reintegrating their fractured identities. As the university of the 21st century ceases to define itself as the place where teaching, research, and service occur as quasi-independent activities and begins to define itself as the place where innovative learning promotes more engaged citizenship, more fundamental changes will be possible throughout higher education. We may even find ourselves wondering why we ever thought it necessary to speak about teaching and research as though they were unrelated and competing endeavors.

References
Chu, D. (2006). The Department Chair Primer: Leading and Managing Academic Departments. Bolton, Mass.: Anker.

Jenkins, A., Zetter, R., and Healey, M. J. (2007). Linking Teaching and Research in Disciplines and Departments. Heslington: Higher Educational Academy. Retrieved October 2, 2010, from www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/LinkingTeachingAndResearch_April07.pdf.

Salmi, J. (2009). The Challenges of Establishing World-Class Universities. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (2011) and other books on higher education administration, all of which are published by Jossey-Bass.

Reprinted from Academic Leader, 27.3 (2011): 3,7.

Reconsider the merit pay system
In Part 1, we examined several reasons why it’s important for universities to look at faculty work not in terms of the actions that are taken but rather in terms of the benefits that result. Of course, it’s one thing to say that changing how we view faculty roles can help promote research while advancing teaching; it’s another thing entirely to bring about such a massive change.

The problem is that the division of faculty duties into teaching, research, and service is not merely a matter of semantics; that same division also drives the faculty evaluation systems at most colleges and universities. For instance, if we examine the way in which merit increases are assigned in many systems, faculty members receive a larger raise if they score “excellent” or “outstanding” (or earn enough points on a rating scale that places them in these upper categories) in all three areas. There are two drawbacks to this process.

First, as I mentioned in an earlier article, most merit increase pools in higher education are so small that they prove to be disincentives at every level of performance. See Buller (2009) 7–8. In other words, if faculty members who reached a certain level of performance were ever assigned annual increases of 10 percent or more, merit pay systems might well be effective. But in many cases, merit increase pools are only 1 percent or 2 percent, leaving the effectiveness of this entire strategy in doubt. The most highly ranked among the faculty say things like, “All this extra work, and all I get is another 1 percent? I’m not going to try as hard next year.” Faculty members who receive a standard increase say, “All this hard work, and all I get is the average raise? I’m not going to try as hard next year.” And faculty members who end up low in the ratings say, “All the work that I’ve done, and they dock me 1 percent? I’m not going to try as hard next year.” As a result, morale decreases, the amount of effort plummets, and a system that was intended to encourage a higher quality of work in actuality has the opposite effect.

The second problem with merit pay systems based on teaching, research, and service is that, by examining activities instead of results, they don’t reinforce the behaviors they’re intended to reward. A common administrative complaint is, “We keep rewarding excellence in teaching and research, yet we’re not seeing the increase in grant activity, publication of refereed research, recognition through national teaching awards, or development of innovative pedagogy that we had anticipated.” What the system has done is reward participation in a process that people hope will lead to certain results, when it would be far more effective to reward the results themselves. There are three major ways to avoid this problem:

• Targeted merit plans are the most direct method of making sure that the rewards a system is providing are directly tied to the results that the institution regards as particularly desirable. In these systems, the raises that most faculty members receive are distributed as across-the-board adjustments or cost-of-living increases. Merit increases are assigned only for promotion and for the achievement of specific, clearly identified goals. For instance, a faculty member might receive a merit increase (either as a permanent addition to the base or as a bonus to be paid out over a specific number of years) if he or she has written a successful grant proposal that was funded over a certain amount by an external agency, published a book of research with an established university press, been honored with a national or international award for teaching, and so on. These merit increases, though not common, are large enough to be a genuine incentive to a truly motivated faculty member. The university thus achieves the goal it has identified as important, and faculty members are rewarded for their successes, not merely their efforts.
• Post-tenure review systems can provide an opportunity for institutions to offer incentives for continued achievements, even in the later stages of a faculty member’s career. Today, post-tenure review at many institutions is regarded by professors as an unpopular and unproductive hurdle: an inconvenience at best, a threat to their livelihood at worst. But if more colleges and universities incorporated positive rewards for those faculty members who were doing exemplary work into a process largely known for its sanctions against those who were no longer productive, the entire activity could become far more beneficial both for the individual and the institution. Rewards for highly productive faculty members might include additional sabbatical time, bonuses or long-term salary increases, access to additional graduate assistantships, enhanced research or travel money, public recognition, or other benefits that would be regarded as particularly meaningful by each individual faculty member.
• Distinguished professorships carry the concept of enhanced post-tenure review even further and combine an extremely high level of public recognition with increased compensation. The difficulty many institutions face is that, with only a few ranks available for faculty promotion, relatively limited incentives exist for encouraging continued achievement once someone reaches the level of full professor. But by adding additional ranks above the level of professor—such as distinguished professor, eminent professor, or endowed chair—colleges and universities can reward those faculty members whose accomplishments continue to increase throughout their careers. Moreover, rather than continuing to encourage a false opposition between instruction and scholarship by the use of such titles as Distinguished Teaching Fellow or Eminent Research Scholar, these “super professorships” have the potential to promote research while advancing instruction through the designation that Bob Smith, the provost at Texas Tech, calls “the integrated scholar”: eminent faculty members who teach via their research and thereby serve both their communities and disciplines simultaneously.

Of course, the most comprehensive way to reintegrate teaching and research (as well as service) is to reevaluate the very idea of what a university is in the 21st century, and we’ll consider that approach in Part 3 [next week].

References:
Buller, J.L. (June 2009). The pros and cons of merit pay. Academic Leader. 25.6, 7–8.

Smith, B. (February, 2002). The integrated scholar: Have you seen one lately? All Things Academic. 3.1, 147–153. Retrieved September 16, 2010, from http://libinfo.uark.edu/ata/cumulation/content.pdf.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (2011) and other books on higher education administration, all of which are published by Jossey-Bass.

Reprinted from Academic Leader, 27.2 (2011): 3,7.

At many schools, the answers to these questions have consisted of little more than modest adjustments in existing practices—for instance, modifying the formulas used in setting faculty loads, rewriting tenure and promotion procedures so that they include a “teaching track” and a “research track” (each with different criteria), or sponsoring workshops on the scholarship of teaching—when in most cases a more revolutionary approach is required. Colleges and universities have changed significantly over the past few decades, and the time has come to redesign entirely the now outdated “academic triad,” rethink the whole concept of how merit pay is allocated, and reexamine the very mission of higher education. Only through such a radical strategy can institutions hope to promote research while still advancing instruction.

Redesign the three-legged stool
The standard division of faculty labor into three categories of activity—teaching, research, and service—is so common that most academics regard it as fundamental to the very way in which higher education works. To be sure, Ernest Boyer broadened the definition of what scholarship is with the publication of Scholarship Reconsidered, ideas that were then developed by Charles Glassick and others in Scholarship Assessed. See Boyer (1990) and Glassick, Huber, and Maeroff (1997). In much the same way, the notion of what teaching means at a college or university and where at the institution it occurs was explored by several student affairs associations in the two volumes of Learning Reconsidered. See Keeling (2004) and Keeling (2006). But, as helpful as these discussions were, it now seems time for Scholarship Reconsidered and Learning Reconsidered to be, well, reconsidered.

The fact is that broadening the definition of scholarship and recognizing that important learning takes place all throughout the university, while important first steps, simply don’t go far enough in helping institutions address what faculty members actually do in their work today.

Accreditation agencies have long abandoned self-studies that merely catalogue “inputs” and activities—the number of volumes in the library, the amount of research funding allocated per faculty member, student-faculty ratios, and so on—in favor of assessing “outcomes” and results—post-program competency versus pre-program competency, placement rates in careers or graduate programs, the impact factor of publications, and the like.

So, the question is: If it makes sense to shift from inputs and activities to outcomes and results when we consider what students do, why are we still using such an ineffective approach when we examine what faculty members do? If we replace the old academic triad of teaching, research, and service, with a new triad based on the effects of those activities—learning, innovation, and academic citizenship—our false dichotomy between instruction and scholarship vanishes. Here’s why.

• Learning at the postsecondary level includes not only the knowledge and skills that students gain from their formal course work but also the discoveries they make through their independent research, the personal development that occurs through their service learning and other forms of civic engagement, the growth in their leadership and teamwork skills that results from extracurricular activities, the expanded perspectives from activities such as internships and study-abroad opportunities, and a host of other benefits. In a parallel manner, faculty members continue their own learning in a lifelong process that includes expansion of their pedagogical expertise, new discoveries in their disciplines, the pursuit of new certifications, and the like. In other words, the revolution begun by Robert Barr and John Tagg (1995) has changed the way we look at what students do at a college or university, so why do we still insist on looking at teaching, research, and service as separate activities, rather than evaluating the learning that results from all three?
• Innovation may be observed when faculty members discover and apply new knowledge, develop or perform creative works, and engage in entrepreneurial activities either in their discipline or in service to the institution. In addition, innovation may be regarded as including educational improvements that lead to enhanced student learning, original ways of serving their community or profession, and programmatic advances that make a college or university more distinctive. In this way, innovation, like learning, is not itself an activity that faculty members engage in, but is instead a desirable result of such activities as teaching, research, creative pursuits, and service.
• Academic citizenship is demonstrated through the service that faculty members perform on various types of committees, in their professional organizations, through their uncompensated civic engagement, and through other professional efforts that benefit the community. But it also is reflected in the degree of collegiality and professionalism with which they interact with one another and all constituents of their institution. Furthermore, it is manifested in excellent teaching when faculty members go above and beyond their contractual obligations to act as mentors to their students, and in superior research when they participate in collaborative efforts, scholarship networks, and multi-institutional academic partnerships. See Buller (2010) 289-298.

In other words, once we shift our focus from looking at faculty responsibilities in terms of what people contribute and consider instead the benefits that result, the seemingly antagonistic relationship between teaching and research in reduced. The next steps are then to make this new framework operational in our evaluation and merit pay systems and to use it to guide our institutional approaches to mission, vision, and strategic planning. Those approaches will be explored [Thursday] in Part 2.

References
Barr, R. B. & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change. 27(6), 12-55.

Boyer E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Buller, J. L. (2010). The essential college professor: A practical guide to an academic career. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Glassick, C. E., Huber, M. T., & Maeroff, G. I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Keeling, R.P. (ed.) 2004. Learning reconsidered 1: A campus-wide focus on the student experience. Washington, DC: National Association of Student Personnel Administrators and American College Personnel Association.

Keeling, R.P. (ed.) 2006. Learning reconsidered 2: A practical guide to implementing a campus-wide focus on the student experience. Washington, DC: National Association of Student Personnel Administrators and American College Personnel Association.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (2011) and other books on higher education administration, all of which are published by Jossey-Bass.

Reprinted from Academic Leader, 27.1 (2011): 3,7.

• the window of opportunity that suggests it’s easier for new administrators to make significant changes early in their positions, when the community’s excitement is at its highest and people most expect innovations to occur; and
• the notion that “you shouldn’t start to rearrange the furniture until you understand the décor,” which suggests that academic leaders are better off waiting until their learning curve is a little less steep before they start implementing significant changes.

Certainly, most administrators would agree that there’s a desirable midpoint between trying to change everything in the first year or two of a position and refusing to alter anything until after several years have passed. The trick, of course, is identifying precisely where that midpoint lies and understanding the factors that tend to make each administrative challenge unique.

If you’re about to embark on a new administrative assignment, the following factors are worth keeping in mind as you consider how extensively to begin rearranging the academic furniture in the programs under your supervision.

• What were you hired to do? If you were brought to your position specifically to be a change agent, or if it is clear that the areas you will lead are likely to face an imminent disaster on their present course, then significant change as quickly as possible is probably in order. By waiting to see the lay of the land, you may inadvertently be sending a message to the supervisor or board that hired you that you’re not prepared to make the extensive changes you appeared to sanction during the interview process. Make it clear that you regard making mistakes as less problematic than taking no action whatsoever, and be aggressive in pursuing a plan of rapid change. But if you were hired primarily to build on an area’s past successes, then trying to change too much too soon is likely to send precisely the wrong message to both your supervisor(s) and your employees. By not waiting to understand all the issues involved in your programs’ strengths, you may end up making changes that inadvertently undermine the very factors that allowed the institution to succeed in the past.
• Were you hired into the institution from the outside? If your new position involves becoming a chair of a department where you’ve long served as a faculty member, provost of an institution where you’ve worked for five or more years as dean, or something similar, it is probably best for you to proceed with changes that you believe to be necessary in a relatively short time frame. You’ve already had an opportunity to identify the major issues, the causes of the various problems you’re trying to solve, and the most important stakeholders who need to be consulted as your proposals are put into place. But if you’re hired into a new institution from the outside, you will need to be far more circumspect about implementing changes quickly. No matter how similar your new institution is to your former college or university, it is likely to be far more different than you initially believe. Even if some of the challenges are similar, the school’s history and the principal players involved in the decisions that are made will probably be quite different. You will need time to determine whose perspective and advice you can really trust.
• Where are the alliances that you’ll need in order to succeed? One of the great contributions that Lee Bolman and Terry Deal have made to the understanding of how organizations work is their analysis that there’s only so much we can learn from the policy manuals, organizational charts, and committee minutes of the programs we supervise. In addition to the structural frame of each organization, Bolman and Deal also talk about the importance of the political frame: alliances, coalitions, partnerships, and conflicts. In other words, sometimes people in any organization support or oppose an idea at least as much because of the person in favor of it as because of the idea’s inherent merits. In every situation, it’s important to ask: Who are the most important constituents for this initiative to move forward? If you are entering your position with their support already in place, then you can begin rearranging the academic furniture rather quickly. If you need time to build alliances or to understand the political relationships of the various players in your program, it’s preferable to proceed slowly.

In this way, there’s no one single answer for chancellors, provosts, deans, and chairs who are wondering how quickly to implement changes after they start a new position. But by considering the three questions outlined above, you’ll develop a better understanding of just how quickly you should begin to press your agenda for major initiatives.

References: Bolman, L.G. & Deal, T.E. (2003). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Dr. Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. His latest book is Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Excerpted from “Rearranging the Academic Furniture.” Academic Leader, 26.8 (2010): 3, 8.

Supervisors frequently use language of this sort when they are trying to have it both ways: they want to be seen as strong supporters of employees at the same time they are giving constructive advice on how the employees’ performance could be improved. But attributing concern to a “perception by others” rather than to clear and documented behavior is a cop-out at best, and has potential for a serious legal challenge at worst.

In other words, when the supervisor says, “I’m not saying that’s my opinion or that it’s even justified,” he or she is essentially saying, “Other people here are wrong about you, but I’m expecting you to fix this problem. In fact, you may well suffer negative consequences if you don’t correct the false impressions of others.” The supervisor can thus be regarded as setting the employee up for failure by obliquely threatening punishment for circumstances beyond the employee’s own control, indeed for what appear to be the mistaken impressions of others.

So, what should academic leaders do about “the perception problem”? First, be sure to eliminate use of this expression from your own vocabulary. Supervisors may believe that it’s an effective but face-saving way to alert an employee about potential concerns, but, in fact, it’s simply a poor management practice. An employee will inevitably see through this transparent ruse, and rather than feeling grateful to the supervisor for having offered collegial support, the employee will probably resent the supervisor because he or she didn’t have enough respect to be candid about the issue. Although many performance problems cannot easily be quantified, it’s the duty of a supervisor to base his or her advice and evaluation on specific behaviors, not on vague impressions or subterfuges.

Second, academic leaders should be proactive in eliminating “the perception problem” from the practice of others. If the individual who attributes a problem to “other people’s perception” happens to have a reporting relationship with you, your solution is fairly straightforward. Both as a mentor and as that person’s supervisor, you should advise that person on how he or she can be more effective in evaluating the staff and thus avoid potential grievances. But if the individual is one of your peers or your own boss, the situation can be a bit more challenging. You may need to use all your diplomatic skills and break through the facade of “perception” to arrive at the observable behaviors that the person believes to be causing the problem. If, in the end, he or she can’t offer any specific instances of problematic behavior but remains adamant that the “perception” of other people is the real problem, then you will need to alter your approach. Tactfully suggest that the appropriate way of handling this challenge, then, is not with the employee himself or herself but with those people whose perceptions appear to be flawed.

Third, each institution ought to review its procedures for evaluating and mentoring employees to make certain that they’re based on legally defensible means of achieving the institution’s most important goals. There’s absolutely no reason why even senior employees or tenured faculty members cannot be reprimanded or dismissed for poor interpersonal skills, a lack of collegiality, or simply an inappropriate “fit” with the evolving needs and environment of the institution. That conclusion must, however, be based on documented instances of behaviors that cause problems, not on something as intangible as a vague “perception.”

In conclusion, therefore, while it’s tempting to avoid responsibility for negative assessments by attributing them to the perceptions of others rather than to one’s own judgment, sound academic leadership can never be based on the avoidance of responsibility. The “perception problem” often arises from a misguided desire to spare an employee’s feelings, which ends up causing far more problems than it prevents. If you can’t replace the phrase “There’s an impression out there that …” with “It’s my professional judgment that…,” you’re probably on the verge of making an observation you shouldn’t really be making anyway.

Dr. Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. His latest book is Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Excerpted from “The Perception Problem.” Academic Leader, 26.4 (2010): 1-2.

Groupthink occurs when superficial concord and agreement are prized even more than candor. At times, members of the faculty, staff, or administration censor themselves in public settings out of a desire to fit it. After all, it can be extremely uncomfortable to be the only person in the room advocating a specific point of view, especially if you’re untenured or serving at the pleasure of the president or provost. Conformity of opinion also develops when people rush to end a discussion in order to tend to seemingly more-pressing duties, don’t feel invested in the issue under consideration, or believe that their views won’t be considered seriously even if they offer them. Groupthink can emerge at any level of a college or university—from the most routine subcommittee to the most senior advisory council of the president or chancellor. What, then, can we do to avoid this problem … without lapsing into the destructive uncollegiality that groupthink often masks?

Play devil’s advocate
People who are in charge of a committee or academic unit can unintentionally encourage groupthink by acting in such a way that causes them to be seen as advocates for a specific approach rather than as impartial arbiters of all possible approaches. Once an academic leader is viewed as promoting a given approach, others (particularly those who believe that their tenure or continued livelihood depends on this administrator) may be less likely to propose alternative solutions. They may feel threatened or believe that further discussion is pointless, since the person in charge seems to have already made up his or her mind.

You can prevent this situation from happening by developing a culture in your unit where alternative opinions are always explored before decisions are made. Assign yourself the role of devil’s advocate and refrain from exploring one idea without offering a clear alternative in as objective a manner as possible. Provide positive reinforcement to those who challenge your views, and be willing to accept criticism graciously. Naturally, you don’t want to prolong discussions just for the sake of a good debate, but try not to allow the group to lapse into consensus too hastily either.

Permit anonymous reactions
Regardless of the efforts you make to encourage free-flowing and nonthreatening discussion of issues, there will always be those who don’t feel comfortable objecting to the ideas of others in public, even though they may have many important perspectives to share. To take full advantage of everyone’s insight, it can be useful to provide a venue where people can state their views anonymously. Many course management systems, such as Blackboard, permit users to post comments anonymously on discussion boards.

If you’re chairing the meeting, begin by presenting all the suggestions from the discussion board in an unbiased manner, and then facilitate a discussion of these ideas. Encourage those who seem more diffident, and rein in those who try to “steamroll” their opponents. Insist that the issues themselves, not the personalities of the people who are in favor of them, be addressed.

Break into subgroups
Perhaps the most effective way of avoiding groupthink is to prevent the group itself from coalescing, at least initially. Particularly when the issue under consideration is significant or controversial, it can be helpful to break the entire body into several subgroups, each of which is charged with making independent recommendations. Use of breakout groups allows for a level of “prediscussion” that almost always enriches the quality of the entire committee’s discussion.

Include outsiders whenever possible
Another means of introducing new ideas into the group is to include new members from time to time. A representative of another department or committee will frequently bring different perspectives to the table, since he or she works in an area where the personalities, politics, and academic methods are different. The presence of outsiders can be important, because we’re sometimes so close to our own problems that we’re unable to see them in any way we haven’t already considered.

Follow decision making with rebuilding
Finally, since avoiding groupthink necessarily involves preventing consensus from emerging too soon, it’s necessary to reestablish consensus after a decision has been made. Once final agreement has been reached or the vote has been taken, reinforcing the collegiality of the working relationship becomes extremely important. Each member of the group can be asked to name the three greatest advantages that will result from the approach being taken, outline his or her preferred role in making the strategy successful, or describe how best to promote the idea to someone who might remain skeptical about it. All these approaches help members of the group move from spotting possible flaws in the plan to seeing themselves as supporters of a group decision. The result is that people will be less likely to undermine the result after the meeting or to lapse into incivility because their suggestions were not taken.

Excerpted from “Avoiding Groupthink.” Academic Leader, 26.5 (2010): 1-8.

Dr. Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. His latest book is Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

What is perhaps more surprising is the extent to which legislators, trustees, and university administrators are increasingly also defining the purposes of a college education as an issue of return on investment. Whereas once discussions of cultural, social, and intellectual impact were carried on side by side with reference to a university’s economic impact, most analyses about American higher education today take for granted that its purpose is to make graduates more employable, to make the nation competitive in world markets, and to add to the economy’s of the university’s service area. For this reason, undergraduate education, particularly in the first two years when most students take the majority of their general education courses, often becomes a sequence of survey courses taken either online or in large lecture sections, with few extensive papers written, little oral defense of ideas in seminar settings, and insufficient opportunities to create or even to experience original art, music, dance, and theater. In other words, the very activities that are most likely to enhance a student’s critical and creative thinking are also those that have become far less common in many undergraduate programs.

Administrators are fond of noting that most studies of large and small classes suggest no difference in the degree to which students master the material and that online courses require much more work and student engagement than many critics suggest. They pose false dichotomies such as whether it is better to sit in a classroom a hundred feet away from a Nobel Prize winner or four feet away from someone whose last publication was his or her dissertation and use the terms “strategic planning” and “viability” as euphemisms for the mere counting of student credit hour production, graduation rates, and course evaluation scores.

The experience that a student will have, and the type of education he or she will receive, will be dramatically different depending on the amount of writing and speaking the student does in each course, the degree to which quantitative skills and research methods are taught across the disciplines, the extent to which he or she is challenged not only by the professors but also by his or her fellow students, the time spent learning and reflecting on issues independently outside the classroom, and whether the student’s residential environment provides a further source of intellectual, cultural, and professional development.

Not every college degree is alike, and not every university provides the same type of education, even though many people speak of college graduates as though they all received identical experiences. If America is indeed a society in which market forces are among the most dominant factors, then we as administrators need to do a better job of explaining to students, parents, legislators, and trustees what services we provide and why they continue to be important to a free society.

Dr. Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. His latest book is Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Seen in this way, interviews are often less about demonstrating the qualities you possess in order to convince the committee that you deserve the position than they are about not demonstrating the qualities that might rule you out from further consideration. It is not uncommon for search committees to discover that a candidate who has all the right qualifications “on paper” acts so inappropriately that one begins to wonder, “Is this person actively trying not to be offered the job?”

In fact, this experience occurs often enough that, as a public service, we would like to provide tips on how to talk your way out of a job during an interview. Follow these simple guidelines, and you’ll significantly increase the likelihood that the position will be offered to someone else.

1.Treat the interview like a vacation. If your goal is to eliminate yourself from serious consideration even before you set foot on campus, simply approach the interview as though it were a free vacation. Treat the administrative assistant who’s arranging the trip as though he or she were a personal travel agent, insist upon extending your visit a few extra days for sightseeing or personal purposes, inquire about bringing along members of the family (when the institution hasn’t specifically invited them), and try to conduct personal business between interview sessions. These simple actions will convey the impression that you’re the sort of person who’s willing to inconvenience others for your own purposes and thus not the type of colleague anyone would want. Many people at the school will decide that they don’t want to hire you before they’ve even met you.

2. Act like you’d be doing the institution a favor by working there. Interviews force candidates to strike a precarious balance: They have to talk extensively about their own accomplishments without appearing arrogant or overly impressed with themselves. But if you really don’t want to be offered the position, it’s easy to get around this inconvenience. Simply convey the impression that you’re overqualified for the position or too good for the institution and you’re well on your way to talking yourself out of a job. After all, “You’d be fortunate to have this person on your staff” is something for a candidate’s references to say, not for you to say yourself.

Successful candidates tend to mix discussion of their own attributes with positive statements about the position, program, or institution. Your goal should be to turn the conversation back to yourself any time it begins to drift to any of the needs or goals that other people may have. Remember that search committees want to hire people who seem excited about the prospect of working there, not those who will condescend to accept an offer of employment that is beneath them. So, do whatever you can to place yourself in the latter category.

3. Focus on what you’ll get out of the position rather than what you’ll contribute. Administrators and search chairs see an immediate red flag whenever candidates seem to care only about the salary, benefits, and other personal advantages of a job. Certainly, no one expects you to take a position without adequate compensation, and there will be an appropriate time during the interview process for serious candidates to inquire about the salary range and benefit package. But if you’d like to get out of the running fast, give the people you’re talking to the impression that all you’re really interested is what you’ll get out of the job, rather than what you’ll put into it.

For instance, several of your meetings are likely to conclude with someone asking you, “Do you have any questions for us?” Rather than having a few substantive questions in mind and perhaps asking about the salary range after you’ve discussed five or six other issues, lead with this question immediately. The person you’re talking to is likely to conclude that, if he or she makes the mistake of hiring you, your first priority will always be advancing your own interests, not those of the institution as a whole. In fact, you’re likely to be the sort of person who will be in your supervisor’s office constantly, complaining about your compensation package and wanting a raise. Most colleges and universities have plenty of employees like that already, and they’ll probably conclude that it’s a good idea to diversify the staff so that it includes a greater number of collegial, team-spirited employees.

4. Ask for or even demand special treatment. No search committee will refuse to make special accommodations for a candidate who requires reasonable assistance because of a disability. But they’ll probably resent making a lot of changes to the itinerary because of a candidate’s individual requests. It can be a logistical nightmare to set up even the most basic interview schedule because of the complexity of everyone’s schedule. So, when a candidate starts requesting changes to that schedule, the problems arise very quickly. By asking for special treatment, you’ll make it clear that, if you’re already “high maintenance” even before you’ve been offered the job, you’ll make their lives miserable once you’re hired.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). All are published by Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from “How to Talk Yourself Out of a Job.” Academic Leader, 26:12 (2009): 3, 7.

When an internal candidate applies for a position, it is important that he or she not have an unfair advantage over external applicants. Moreover, it is important that other applicants not receive the impression that an internal candidate has had an unfair advantage.

If the search proves to be very contentious, an applicant who believes that a search was improperly conducted may file a lawsuit or a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission against the school, alleging unfair labor practices. Even in searches where this outcome seems unlikely, external applicants may emerge from the process with hard feelings toward the college or university; if the person then shares those sentiments with others, there could be very undesirable consequences with potential students or donors, and the impact may be far greater than on the search alone. The goal, therefore, must be for all candidates to be treated honestly throughout the search, and that goal is more easily achieved if colleges and universities adhere to the following guidelines.

1. Never extend an internal candidate a “courtesy interview.” Some people believe that, because internal candidates are already employees, they should be interviewed even when they are not strong contenders for the position. The assumption seems to be that this type of “courtesy interview” will make internal applicants feel better about themselves or protect their self-esteem against the stigma of being screened out early in the process. But this type of courtesy interview frequently backfires. It gives the internal applicant the false impression that he or she has a better chance of being offered the position than is actually the case, and it may make external applicants believe that the institution is not conducting an open search. Although it can be awkward to inform an internal candidate early in the process that he or she will not be advanced any further in the search, having that conversation is far preferable to the alternative, where both internal and external candidates are misled about the integrity of the search.
2. When internal candidates are granted interviews, these interviews should take place before those of external candidates. Throughout any search, even privileged information tends to leak. People hear which questions candidates are asked repeatedly, which concerns tend to arise, and the responses (both good and bad) of earlier applicants. Since it is not proper for an internal candidate to benefit from this knowledge, it is simply good practice to interview all internal candidates before external candidates start arriving on campus.
3. Internal candidates should have an experience as close as possible to that of all other candidates. It can be tempting, because an internal candidate lives in the area, to speak to this applicant in person even though other candidates must be reached by phone, or to extend that person’s interview process over an entire week, even though other candidates spend only a day or two on campus. These changes make the experience of the internal candidate substantively different from that of any other candidate. In person, the internal candidate may pick up on visual cues, such as an expression of doubt or a frown of disapproval, which other applicants cannot see when they communicate by telephone. When called in their offices, external candidates may surround themselves with notes or discreetly check a fact on the Internet, an opportunity that is not open to an internal candidate who is interviewed in person. Moreover, internal candidates may be put at a disadvantage if they have to sustain their energy for an extended period of interviews that other candidates were able to complete in a shorter period of time. So, in order to be fair to all applicants, it is important to conduct the process in the same way regardless of whether a candidate lives nearby or must travel a great distance.
4. Once an internal candidate has completed an interview, he or she should not be involved in the search process in any other way. While it may seem obvious that an internal candidate would not participate in evaluating other applicants for the position, some search committees see no harm in permitting internal candidates to participate in social events where another applicant is present. The problem with this practice is that an external candidate who learns a rival candidate is in the room may be made uncomfortable enough that it affects the outcome of the search. Moreover, if the external candidate later withdraws from the search for any reason, you’ll never know for certain that the real issue was not an unfortunate remark that the internal candidate made in even the most innocuous social setting. In order to avoid any doubt about the integrity of the search, it is highly desirable to limit the role of all internal candidates to that of being applicants only.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). All are published by Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from Searches with Incumbents or Internal Candidates, Academic Leader, vol. 25, no. 5, pg. 4-5.

Your own personal zombie may be a suspicion that major changes are imminent, whole departments will close, a wholesale change in the school’s mission will occur, or massive layoffs are in sight. In a time of fiscal uncertainty, these institutional zombies return again and again, each time recurring just when you thought you had put the matter to rest. The single-sex college will go coed. The school on the quarter system will adopt a semester-system calendar. January term, May term, or intersession will be eliminated. Departments will be merged or split. The exact nature of the local zombie is unique for every school, but it resembles all others in its resilience. You just can’t seem to quell these rumors. After all, people may say, isn’t the fact that you’re denying them just part of the overall plan?

Doesn’t it feel that, like their fictional counterparts, your own institutional zombies are eating your brains?

The once-on-my-watch approach
One of the few successful strategies for freeing a college or university from its own individual zombie, at least temporarily, is the once-on-my-watch approach. This is a technique that is best implemented by a member of the upper administration: Presidents and provosts can employ it best although, if the issue is confined to a specific college or department, the dean or the chair may be able to use this strategy.

The approach works as follows: The administrator says, “From time to time, we keep hearing that [identify the zombie] is likely. Some people think that’s a good idea, while others express a great deal of anxiety or concern over it. I’d like to address this issue head-on. We’re going to take this year and examine this question from every possible perspective. We’ll discuss it with stakeholders at all levels of the institution. We’re going to consider whether making this change is reasonable, serves our best interests, and is cost-effective. And if we decide to go in this direction, we’re not going to keep talking about it year after year; we’re going to make it happen quickly. But at the same time, if we decide that it’s a bad idea, we’re not going to keep revisiting this issue. The topic will be closed for as long as I’m [president, provost, dean, chair], and we won’t waste any more time on it. In other words, we’re going to deal with this question exactly once on my watch.”

The advantage of this strategy is that, rather than simply denying the rumor, the institution takes it on directly. It provides everyone with an opportunity to state their hopes or fears, balances all the various advantages and disadvantages, and places a firm time limit on when the decision will be made. The process then compels people to back up their suspicions with hard facts, not beliefs or anecdotal evidence. It provides a solid rationale for either proceeding or not.

People can relax because the matter, rather than being discussed in hallways and offices, is being debated openly and thoroughly. And if the decision is not to make the change that was suggested, members of the community are finally empowered to kill the zombie: “You heard what? No, we studied that issue extensively back in [year] and decided it was a terrible idea. There’s no way that’s going to happen.” Certainly, administrators who adopt the once-on-my-watch approach need to enter the process openly. While they may well have strong opinions about what they’d prefer the outcome to be, they should let the process play out or their credibility will be sorely strained. Compelling the discussions to yield a preordained result not only fails to kill the current zombie, but also unleashes hordes of even more such dangers in the years to come.

Transparency and future zombies
Once you’ve addressed whatever zombie is currently afflicting you, your next strategy should be how to prevent similar situations from occurring in the future. While garlic and mirrors may provide a modicum of protection against fictional vampires, in the real world the most reliable defense against institutional zombies is complete candor. In other words, administrators need not only to be transparent, but also to make their transparency explicit. That is to say, you can tell a group of constituents absolutely everything you know about an issue, but unless you indicate to them that you have shared all the information you have, suspicions may remain that there’s more to the story than what you’ve admitted.

Consistent phrases like “in an effort to keep you fully informed” or “because I always try to tell you absolutely everything I know” about the issue, if they are genuine, can go a long way toward developing the environment of trust that is an institution’s best protection against future zombies. Keep in mind, however, that although trust takes an incredibly long time to build, it can be destroyed in an instant, so academic leaders should never make a pretense of candor when there’s really much more they could share.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). All are published by Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from Killing Institutional Zombies, Academic Leader, July 2009.

In other words, great conductors aren’t those who demonstrate their creativity through skill on an instrument or the beauty of their own performances. Rather, they are judged by their ability to produce an environment in which the artistry of others may emerge and the quality of that performance may be experienced.

Academic administrators may be said to occupy a similar position in their institutions. They frequently have been highly successful as instructors, researchers, and academic citizens. Indeed, they often are encouraged to pursue administrative careers precisely because of their expertise in these areas. But once they become administrators, academic leaders are judged no longer on the quality of their own teaching, scholarship, and service, but on the quality of what their faculties produce. Presidents, provosts, deans, and chairs may be rare members of their institutions in that they hold academic rank but often teach no classes, write no grant proposals, publish no books or articles, and are elected to no committees. Nevertheless, they play a vital role in seeing that all these activities occur … and occur at increasing levels of quality.

Academic leadership qualities
How does it change the perspective of administrators when they begin to think of themselves as conductors? Zander describes his sudden awareness of who the conductor was as a life-altering event. When a performance was not going well, he could no longer see it as the fault primarily of the musicians. Rather, he began to ask what it was that he was conveying, intentionally or not, that prevented the performers from achieving all they were capable of achieving.

In a similar way, administrators who see themselves as conductors can begin to ask new kinds of questions when faculty members fall short of their high aspirations. “What is it that people may be seeing in me that is failing to motivate them as well as it should? What might I be expressing that does not inspire the type of performance of which we are all capable?”

People always support the ideas they generate themselves. The role of the administrator is not to “sell” an idea or vision, but to create a fertile environment where important ideas flourish. The best administrators lead without leading, guide without guiding, and rule without ruling. They trust those around them and inspire trust in themselves in return. In an orchestra, harmony can be destroyed when the voice of the conductor intrudes on the music of the performers.

Similarly, in a college or university, harmony is destroyed when administrators see their role as that of virtuoso soloists or even performers in a small ensemble rather than as catalysts who evoke great performances from others. Academic leaders who see themselves as conductors of a magnificent orchestra become successful, not because of their own power but because of their ability to empower others.

Reference

Zander, B. (2009). Classical music with shining eyes. Retrieved February 24, 2009, from www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). All are published by Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from The Academic Leader as Conductor, Academic Leader, April 2009.

Invest in people
Challenges to faculty and staff morale tend to increase when people feel unappreciated or sense that their contributions do not matter. Difficult times at an institution mean that academic leaders often need to redouble their efforts at recognizing groups and individuals. Take time at meetings to single out those who have gone the extra mile. Place an expression of thanks on the group Listserv. Keep a box of thank-you notes in your desk and spend half an hour each day writing five or six notes to the people you’ve been depending on.

But don’t be superficial in thanking someone. Whenever you express gratitude to a person, be as specific as you can. A simple “thanks for everything you do” has far less impact than a message in which it is clear you have noticed exactly what that person has contributed and the impact it has had.

Explore alternative rewards
Although financial challenges frequently make it impossible to reward employees through raises or bonuses, it sometimes becomes possible to find other ways to acknowledge the high quality of an employee’s work.

One-year, expendable money may be easier to identify than the ongoing funding that would be required for a raise. For instance, salary savings resulting from a sabbatical or leave of absence may give you the opportunity to shift funds temporarily from personnel to supplies, equipment, and travel.
Upgrading an employee’s computer or purchasing a new type of equipment or software can often make their work easier, more enjoyable, and more productive. Funding a workshop or conference can allow the person to enjoy a brief respite from daily responsibilities on campus.

In the case of support staff, even small gifts that you purchase on your own can be very welcome. Don’t wait for Administrative Assistants Day to arrive; instead, thank the person with a gift certificate to his or her favorite restaurant, a massage or spa day, flowers with a thank-you card, or anything else that is both professionally appropriate and meaningful to the recipient.

Finally, if no other alternative is possible, consider whether you can relieve someone of a duty that the person finds particularly unpleasant. Excusing a faculty member from a committee or reassigning a task from full-time support staff to student workers can make an immediate difference in the experience people have on the job.

Communicate frequently and openly
It can be tempting for academic leaders to immerse themselves in addressing problems during difficult times, spending every minute of every day working on the challenges rather than devoting time to public meetings and informational sessions. But members of the faculty and staff need more information during a crisis, not less. When people do not have access to clear and accurate information about what is going on around them, they yield to fears that are almost always worse than reality. Rumors become mistaken as facts, and the administrator’s desire to focus exclusively on the problem becomes misinterpreted as a “bunker mentality.”

Those who “barricade themselves in their offices” are perceived as shutting out those who could help them or, even worse, preparing job applications for other, more prosperous institutions.

During difficult times, therefore, it may be necessary for monthly faculty and staff meetings to be held weekly, weekly email announcements to be sent daily, and additional efforts to be made so that all communication is open and transparent. At times, simply knowing that something is being done can cause people to feel that challenging problems can be solved.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). All are published by Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from Improving Morale during Difficult Times, March 2009, Academic Leader.

All of this energy and concern is wonderful, if only it can be directed to some productive purpose rather than be counterproductive to their children’s ability to solve their own problems and receive the quality of education that they deserve.

One way of approaching this challenge is to create a parents’ council. Parents’ councils can be created on behalf of an entire institution, or they may be sponsored by specific colleges or departments. Creating a parents’ council can effectively channel parents’ desire to help toward projects that institutions and their individual units actually need.

To achieve this goal, however, it is helpful to develop a charter that clearly specifies what the council does and does not do. Provide no restrictions on the responsibilities of a parents’ council, and it will soon try to advise you on matters such as which new programs you should develop, faculty members you should promote or terminate, and budgetary priorities you should set. Call the group a Parents’ Advisory Council, and it will proceed to advise you … even in areas for which you do not want their advice and in areas about which its members know very little.

The most desirable situation is to develop a charter for the group that specifies particular areas of concern for the council—such as recruitment and retention, advancement, and community relations—while clearly stating that other matters remain outside the purview of the council. Within the specified areas, however, a parent’s council can produce a great number of benefits.

Recruitment and retention
Members of a parent’s council can be wonderful representatives at college fairs, particularly at institutions where the admissions staff finds it difficult to attend all the programs that are available throughout the region. Parents can speak directly to parents of prospective students and discuss the benefits that an institution or its curriculum has had on their own children. They can host receptions for prospective students or, even better, for students in their area who have been admitted but who have not yet agreed to attend the school.

Advancement
Because they have direct “buy in” to the mission of the institution, members of a parent’s council are more likely to contribute to a school’s annual fund themselves and to encourage others to do so. Rather than a letter from a dean or president asking parents to contribute to a school’s annual fund, a letter from another parent inviting the reader to “join me in giving” can provide a powerful appeal. At a meeting with a prospective donor, a parent can provide a perspective that an employee of the institution doesn’t have, and a parent’s voice is “purer” or less suspect than a statement made by a paid employee.

Community relations
Parents of current students actively promote events that they feel will interest their friends and colleagues. They can provide word-of-mouth advertising for lecture series, travel programs, and special events that are hosted by an institution. For first-time parents of college students, they can offer a sympathetic ear for concerns and a supportive voice when advice is necessary. They can provide volunteer labor for printed or electronic newsletters, mass mailings, and email blasts. They can serve as greeters at campus events, reinforcing the campus’ reputation as a friendly and welcoming place, distribute flyers, and contact their local media when student achievements need to be highlighted. They can help smooth troubled town/gown relations, since they effectively have a foot in each of these “camps.”

As long as the group’s mission and areas of concern are carefully focused, the creation of a parents’ council can be an excellent approach to the challenge caused by parents who have a great desire to become involved in their children’s education but relatively little knowledge of the most effective way to achieve this goal.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). (All are published by Jossey-Bass.)

Excerpted from Creating a Parents’ Council, November 2008, Academic Leader.

The resources devoted to a center for teaching and learning can help excellent professors become even more effective in the classroom, bring improvement to instructors who face challenges in their teaching duties, assist graduate students with learning how to become effective teachers before they ever enter a classroom, and provide all students with improved strategies for college-level learning.

Despite these successes—or perhaps because of them—it has become ever more apparent that teaching and research are not the only responsibilities in which faculty members engage and for which they need training in how to be more effective.

College professors serve on committees, eventually are asked to chair these bodies, act collectively in faculty assemblies and senates, initiate course proposals and curricular reforms, and challenge policies that are no longer useful or productive. They may go on to become department chairs, division coordinators, program heads, deans, provosts, or even presidents. They are expected to demonstrate leadership in their courses and in their service responsibilities, manage resources responsibly, and supervise student workers or members of the staff.

If many faculty members still receive little formal training in how to teach, most still have almost no access to formal programs in how to lead, even though shared governance requires many members of the faculty to assume leadership roles. For this reason, the time has come for colleges and universities to consider a corollary to their centers for excellence in teaching and learning, the Center for Professional Development and Leadership, which can provide formal training for members of the institution who seek or are asked to accept positions of responsibility over others.

A fully developed center for professional development and training would provide opportunities for:

• undergraduate students to learn parliamentary procedure, budget planning, and other skills they will need in order to be effective leaders in student government, campus organizations, and life after graduation;
• graduate students to learn successful strategies in leadership that will prepare them for their roles as faculty members, lawyers, physicians, managers, and other positions for which they are preparing;
• faculty members to learn effective ways of conducting meetings, developing new initiatives, preparing for an administrative position, supervising others, resolving conflict, and developing their own career plans;
• department chairs and deans to learn best practices in conducting performance evaluations, planning and supervising budgets, developing good morale within their units, moving an area forward, solving personnel problems, and meeting the many other challenges that arise when one is in an administrative position; and
• provosts, other vice presidents, and the president or chancellor to learn advanced approaches to strategic planning, securing additional resources, dealing with the media, developing a vision, promoting diversity, and dealing with the stress that arises from leadership positions.

An effective center for professional development and training should offer workshops and Web courses for those who wish to develop their leadership skills, individual consultations for those who are experiencing specific challenges, remediation when a supervisor has received evaluations indicating that improvements are necessary, and a highly visible proof of an institution’s commitment to visionary leadership and the best principles of management.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). (All are published by Jossey-Bass.)

Excerpted from Academic Leader, July 2008.

Here are a few tips on how you can respond to administrative fads without alienating your supervisor or losing credibility with those who report to you.

Gauge your supervisor’s commitment to the idea. You may well already know whether the person you work for is a member of the “Management Idea of the Month Club.” If he or she is, you can safely assume that by the time you ramp up the effort to implement the “new paradigm,” it will already be the old paradigm. In this case, you are probably better off making a token effort for the sake of institutional harmony and waiting it out.

Find ways of relating the new idea to current practice. One of the few good qualities shared by nearly every management fad is that it is based on what is ultimately neither very difficult nor particularly complex. In fact, with a little careful analysis you’ll discover that a number of the techniques’ strongest points are probably already being practiced somewhere in your unit.

Identify the most beneficial aspect of the new idea (or at least the one you can live with) and implement it with a flourish. For all their disadvantages, management fads frequently are based on a few useful ideas. Rather than completely revising every policy, procedure, and structure in your unit, find one of these useful ideas, implement it, and be sure your supervisor notices that you have implemented it. By allowing your supervisor to point to the innovation you have made and take partial credit for it, you are satisfying that person’s need to document improvement, identifying yourself as a “good team player,” and not imposing unnecessary or undesirable work on the faculty and staff of your unit.

Implement a genuine change that you believe to be necessary under the guise of the administrative fad. You almost certainly have identified a number of changes that you have concluded are necessary in order to serve the students better, improve faculty morale, make processes more efficient, or address a need that is currently being underserved. Administrative fads offer you a framework for bringing about the changes that you wanted to introduce anyway, but with an added level of support from your supervisor, who is enthusiastic about the benefits of the new management technique.

Tie implementation of the new system to an increase in resources. New management systems almost never result in initial cost savings, although they may claim to do so. Implementation of the new approach almost always requires start-up funding for training, assumption of new duties, reprinting of materials, updating of electronic resources, and the like. If your supervisor is truly committed to the new idea—and the only way of implementing it is through an increase in funding—then you have an opportunity to tie success of the new management approach to an increased allocation of resources.

Remember, good college administration requires vision, a capacity to master details, hard work, consistency without inflexibility, and a capacity to build consensus. No management fad will ever provide a shortcut for those.

Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of The Essential Department Chair: A Practical Guide to College Administration (2006), The Essential Academic Dean: A Practical Guide to College Leadership (2007), and The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career (forthcoming). All are published by Jossey-Bass.

Excerpted from Coping with Fads in Administrative or Management Techniques, Academic Leader, February 2008.

1. Institutions should never require candidates to supply information or documentation that can be readily obtained elsewhere. It should go without saying that forcing candidates to gather material that is easily available elsewhere is not the best use of the candidates’ time. But such a requirement is also detrimental to the committee’s work. For instance, committees may feel obliged to review documentation, not because it is particularly useful or informative, but simply because the candidate has gone to the trouble to collect it.

Common examples of information that, at most institutions, candidates should not be asked to gather include aggregated student evaluation scores and term-by-term course loads. Where centralized sources of this information are available, these sources will be far more consistent in the way in which that information is presented; for instance, the office of institutional research is likely to calculate averages or median scores on student evaluations in a consistent manner for all faculty members, whereas individuals may use any number of methods, producing results that are misleading to the committee where they attempt to make comparisons.

2. Candidates should be asked to provide a sampling of material that reflects each candidate’s best contributions. When applicants for promotion or tenure submit large quantities of material, there tends to be very little distinction in their documentation between the extremely important and the relatively insignificant. In an attempt to provide the committee with everything that its members could possibly want, candidates run the risk of having their truly important material become lost in the sheer welter of their documentation.

This problem can best be avoided if documentation guidelines are revised so that candidates provide a selection of their materials along with a justification of why those materials are important. For instance, candidates could be asked to list all the products of their scholarship (books, articles, presentations, performances, and the like), but also to submit documentary evidence of their three most important scholarly contributions, along with a statement about why those items are significant.

Rather than submitting syllabi for all of their courses, candidates could be asked to provide the three best syllabi they have written, accompanied by a paragraph that explains why these particular examples are of high quality. Focusing requests in this way encourages candidates, not merely to “dump” everything that they have collected onto a review committee, but rather to reflect on what they believe to be important, why it is important, and what constitutes high achievement in their disciplines.

3. Candidates should be asked to supply fewer documents, but they should also be asked to annotate those documents. Another problem with reviewing multiple binders filled with unedited documents is that, although they contain a great deal of data, they do not always provide a great deal of information. For instance, unless a member of a review committee happens to be very familiar with the discipline in question, he or she is unlikely to know which journals in a field are really important, which conferences do not accept every proposal submitted, and which courses tend to evoke lower scores on evaluations primarily because students resent having to take them. For this reason, an annotated résumé—one that includes acceptance rates for each journal in which the faculty member has published, essential information about the conferences where the candidate has presented, and background about how the candidate’s courses fit into the overall curriculum of the discipline—can end up revealing far more to the committee than huge stacks of non-annotated documents.

In a similar way, an annotated syllabus, describing how and why the instructor has improved the course over time, can tell the committee a great deal about the individual’s quality of instruction and can be much more helpful all those notes from students reading “Good professor! I really liked this class.”

In other words, documentation for promotion and tenure applications can be significantly improved if those who are responsible for setting policies would begin asking, “What insight do we hope to gain from the supporting material provided by the applicant that we simply cannot obtain elsewhere?”

Reference:

Seldin, P., & Miller, J.E. (2008). The Academic Portfolio: A Practical Guide to Documenting Teaching, Research, And Service. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Dr. Jeffrey L. Buller is dean of the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College at Florida Atlantic University.

Excerpted from Improving Documentation for Promotion and Tenure, Distance Education Report, Nov. 2007. To read this article in its entirety, download a copy of the FREE REPORT, Faculty Promotion and Tenure: Eight Ways to Improve the Tenure Review Process at Your Institution.