Faculty Associates:
Administrative Bloat or Professional Opportunity
A casual tour of the Academic Affairs web site reveals all kinds of things happening. A few are listed below, along with projects, initiatives, programs, that are not formalized on the web site but always on-going.
Projects, programs, initiatives, etc., at the modern EMO:
Advising
Service-learning
Community outreach
Retention
Honors program
Remediation
Assessment of student learning, courses, curricula, programs,
blah-blah
Accountability report
Technology initiatives
Accreditation
GE
Faculty development, various kinds
Writing Center, other student development centers
Internationalization and international programs
Research, grants administration
Linkages with community colleges
Program review
Searches
Diversity
Student support
Graduate programs
Evaluation of faculty
MPP evaluation
Academic master plan/strategic planning
Institutional research of various kinds
Events like Regional Quarters, conferences, visits
Testing
Right now, we have a VPAA, three AVPs (one in absentia), a fourth coming down the pike, and I believe each of the AVPs has faculty associates. The AVP for Academic Programs has two, Faculty Affairs has two, and I am not sure about Academic Resources and Planning or whatever they are currently calling Bob Charles' erstwhile position. This administrative type is obviously metastasizing. The fourth AVP is going to be in charge of Research and Graduate Studies, so there'll undoubtedly be plenty of room for faculty associates there. Diversity and Compliance needs one. One of the tendencies of administrators is that they need to have stuff to do to justify their existence, and they want to have staffs and people reporting to them. The AVPs have been in a little power struggle for numbers of programs they are in charge of. I don't intend to personalize this; it is not a product of the personalities involved (entirely); it is a product of the transformation of the academy into a form of production of information, reports, graduates, meetings, and other measurable stuff. Set up a bureaucracy and it will automatically generate things for itself to do, seek to inflate its own size (and budget), and curry favor with its superior elements by adding to its perceived importance and ability to support said superiors in their actions. Whether its original constituency (e.g., recipients of remedial programs, faculty engaged in program review, students submitting to tests, faculty attending training charettes, and so on) are pleased with its performance or not, it remains in business because the real constituency is the other administrative offices, especially those on top, up to the system level.
Once you get an administrative position started, it never wants to go away, even if the original project was finished, or has gotten screwed up. It has to generate all kinds of additional work to stay alive, and that means initiatives, projects, programs, committees, assignments, research, whatever. You can't have just an administrator in a bureau, you have to have a bunch of clerics and other workers shoring 'em up. The administrator isn't going to do the actual implementation of whatever the project is; they're just gonna manage it. Where do we get the other workers, without just hiring an army of low-level managers, trainers, developers, planners? Faculty. We started complaining about our workload when we noticed we were doing all this carrying out of somebody's initiatives for free (or for RTP, FMI, and the occasional release from a course), and now we have faculty associates getting fully re-assigned to do it. (And we're still doing it for free because the volume of such work has ballooned some more.) We've had some really farcical versions of this game, for instance, the ACE Project. We were proud of being one of the 26 campuses chosen to carry out the technology initiative involved. The action itself was mostly imaginary. People got recruited to go to the meetings when the ACE people were on campus. There was a dysfunctional committee that someone who shall remain nameless struggled to manage. Faculty wrote lengthy reports on things that were happening that were supposed to be products of the project that had nothing directly to do with it, that were a collection of facts relatable to the concept. A tiny handful of people were doing anything. But there were visits to Washington, lots of paperwork, lots of reviewing, and the usual complaining about how no one (i.e., faculty) ever wants to do anything on our campus. It's a sure sign of over-management when you hear that complaint.
One of the big problems with this situation is that the individual programs are not necessarily evil. In fact, most of 'em, say the Honors Program, sound fine. Even assessment has some good things about it, except that it's become compulsory. If you're in a public setting trying to explain why the accountability reporting we have to do is bad, good luck, because it is really hard to express the notion that the faculty might not want to produce and present data on their and their departments' or universities' performance because it wastes our time and the public don't understand our idea of what we should be doing anyway. There's nothing really bad about the retention initiative, or service-learning, or even - gasp - self-study. The problem is we're doing all of this all the time, and we never say no to any proposal or 'innovation', and they all take a lot of time and management. Some of them are nothing but management. No learning involved. Even so, we still need to have some amount of management activity (planning, monitoring, organizing, coordinating, communicating … ). The AVPs work hard, so far as I can tell. Elhami regularly puts in 60+-hour work weeks, and he gives his faculty associates plenty to do. Your friendly local WASC Coordinator had a lot of work to do. So it's not the case that someone gets in a management position to relax, find a few foolish faculty associates, and let them grunt under the load of paper and meetings.
I understand the motivations of people who move from regular faculty positions into administration, whether via faculty associateships or other entry-level positions. Not all of us remain enamored of our disciplines; not all continue to be excited by teaching and students; maybe not all are good teachers in the first place, and think maybe we'd be better administrators. Certainly, the opportunity structure looks a lot healthier in educational administration than it does in college teaching (unless, I guess, you teach some kind of computer stuff). Once you're a professor, there's no more advancement, except into administration. Being a professor used to be the pinnacle of achievement from which there was no 'up' to aspire to, but never mind my nostalgia. Or a person may not be successful in research or publication and feel squeezed out of the faculty. Some people don't have very friendly departments. Some kinds of administration are interesting. I liked directing the International Center, though I'm glad I'm not there now to serve under CEU! I learned a lot from doing WASC, but I don't want to do it forever. Teaching is better. Students are fun to be with. But I don't blame the individuals who engage the system to improve their career prospects or whatever; however, having talented people disappearing from our ranks so frequently and being semi-replaced is not a thrilling experience.
The class structure of the modern EMO looks more corporate than it used to, as many people have pointed out. All of the administrators dress up for work, including the faculty associates. Jeans to class, panty hose to office. It really creeps me out (of course, I feel a little like I'm cross-dressing when I put on those panty hose, anyway). Pay alone does not define the privileged management elite; they are actually supposed to put in more hours than ordinary staff, to be available on weekends, to use their vacations for work at home. Their rendez-vous may take place at resorts, but they start at 7 a.m. and go late. It's nuts. Who has that much work? That much to manage? Any 'educator' can think of a million things to do, to tinker with a system, to 'make it higher quality', to manage it better, to manipulate the personnel, etc. Education is never-ending. But it takes a wise one to know where to draw the line, what to put off, what to not do, when to stop. The American university used to have a rather amorphous class structure, or a protean one that blurred the lines of authority. The British had a feudal structure and seem to be turning into EMOs now, too. I thought our system was a better environment, mainly because sociolinguistic theory indicates that the greater commonality between interlocutors there is, the more information they can exchange. This commonality is going fast.
The corporate thralls have a different culture now from that commonality. I hate to use that word 'culture', because one of the ways the managers have mystified and controlled us is through abusing bits of language, such as culture, community, and other words dear to me. There was a probably apocryphal story floating around during WASC, in which the Prez said to a certain Exec. Assoc. Poobah that it was time to do some more strategic planning, and the latter said it wasn't time yet, the natives were restless. This showed us two things: a) the top brass are not in touch with our reality, or think it worthless, and b) we natives can only delay the inevitable. (Actually, it showed a third, as well, which was that the Poobah had some cojones.) Thinking, reading, simple talking, writing, seeing and hearing, caring - these things are hard to manage and harder to count. They are valued by faculty, but we don't have time for them any more. Corporate culture doesn't give a damn.
We could actually use some leadership with sticky problems like GE. Here we've developed a new 'program' with a different idea of how it fits into the undergraduate curriculum, how it's going to be managed (assessment), what the objectives are, etc. We did that mainly to get WASC off our backs, which was good, because otherwise we might now have an ad out for a new dean of GE or some other administrative atrocity. But we haven't really changed the means of production around the academic units - the FTES, class size modes, pay scale for lecturers, class/activity/lab requirements, pre-requisites, the way courses get into support or GE or other categories for majors, etc. Now the GE Committee is going to be inundated with new proposals for synthesis courses that clone some existing course. Many of them will be great courses. Many of them will be authored by our friends. Many departments are worried about their livelihood, if their student numbers drop as a consequence of loss of participation in GE, so they have to keep trying to get their courses into the new sequence. We need help with this problem. Where is the administration?
Gosh, I see I'm going on too long. I'm sorry, but I'm worried. It'll be interesting to see if anyone applies for the positions. We have to start fighting some of these initiatives, not on the grounds that they're bad, but that they need to be evaluated and prioritized (barf, to use terms they understand). And then that we don't need to do them all now.
D. D. Wills, Anthropology