Conveying Context

Rachel Toor’s piece in Inside Higher Ed Tuesday may have been overdrawn and reductionist, but it got at something that matters more than the piece intimates. And it helped me figure out why I do what I do, and have been for years.

In moving from faculty to administration, I was struck immediately by the pervasive presumption of sinister motives. My motives weren’t sinister, but proving a negative -- especially to a skeptical audience -- is impossible. In working at different colleges, I’ve seen something similar at each; in talking with colleagues elsewhere, they experience it, too. The cliche of “crossing over to the dark side” is so common because it captures a widely held perspective, even if in exaggerated form.

Many faculty don’t hold such attitudes, of course, but the ones who do tend to be loud, and the ones who don’t tend to be quiet. Over time, that adds up.

Having seen it over enough years and enough places, I have a few working hypotheses as to why the attitudes are so common.

Sometimes the root is situational. When the state cuts a college’s appropriation, that eventually makes its way to institutional and divisional budgets. At that point, some admin has to say “no” to a good idea, because there isn’t the uncommitted money in the budget for it. It can be tempting to blame the messenger.

And yes, some administrators either abuse their power or simply don’t know what they’re doing. Following someone like that is a challenge. At a previous college, I was the fourth person to take that role in four years, and I spent the first couple of years mostly cleaning up the damage from some predecessors’ ill-advised decisions. I couldn’t entirely blame people for having their guard up. Skepticism is learned behavior.

But I think much of it comes from something more basic. Most administrators on the academic side -- deans, VPAAs and the like -- have been faculty, but most faculty haven’t been administrators. There’s an information asymmetry that can lead to misunderstandings, even when everyone is acting in good faith. Questions that start with “why don’t they just …?” often assume away some very real constraints that might not be visible from certain angles. Or, which also happens, the frustrating realities on the ground are the cost of goods that we wouldn’t want to lose.

For example: “So-and-so is really negative. Why can’t you get rid of him?” Because negativity isn’t grounds for termination. “Why can’t we just mandate OER across the board?” Because academic freedom matters. In both cases, there may be truth in the initial assertion: some people really are annoyingly negative, and OER is, on balance, great for students. But thinking in terms of general principles and precedents sometimes means living with suboptimal specifics. Free speech protects groundbreaking renegades, but it also protects judgmental jerks. And that’s okay, because no matter how hard you try to be decent, someone, somewhere, probably doesn’t like you. It happens.

Political science as a field has long grappled with the “ignorant voter” problem. How do you best fulfill the will of the people when most people don’t understand what’s going on, or who think that every problem has a simple and obvious solution the lack of which can only be explained through fecklessness or corruption? Historically, the most effective solution has been mediating institutions, like political parties. But in campus shared governance, for the most part, we don’t have those. Some campuses have unions, but unions are supposed to represent everyone in a given role, regardless of their perspectives; I’ve never seen a campus on which two unions battled it out, like Republicans and Democrats. They have a different purpose. Political parties are only helpful when there is more than one of them.

In the absence of mediating institutions, I’ve seen two approaches. The first amounts to reducing the role of shared governance, or voters, as much as possible. If voters don’t know what they’re doing, this approach says, then best not to let them do very much. This approach has the virtue of consistency, though to my mind, it completely omits the role of self-interest. Experts in a given field may know much more about it than most people, but they have interests of their own. Unchecked power is likely to be abused, whether consciously or not. Even if they mean well, experts are as subject to confirmation bias and partial information as everyone else. The “minimize voter relevance” approach can lead to top-down tyranny, or go the other way and lead to a sort of devil-may-care libertarianism; the common denominator is the erasure of the public as a public.

The second approach, to which I’ve dedicated my career without entirely realizing it, is to spend time conveying context. In the context of educational institutions in particular, that’s consistent with the overall ethos of the place; the whole point of a college is to cure ignorance. Why that wouldn’t apply internally is beyond me. That means sharing data, making arguments publicly and even, in my case, explaining one’s ideas in writing, at length, in public, for years. If the choice is between deferring to a few experts and letting people who don’t know anything make the decision, then the best we can hope for is serendipity. But what if most people actually have a pretty good understanding? What if we reject the premise that the voter has to be ignorant?

It’s a difficult row to hoe, given turnover, competing demands for attention and the ever-present presumption of guilt. But even after all these years, and the occasional tomatoes I’ve had to duck, I still think it’s right. When large numbers of smart people get it, the odds of really good solutions coming to the fore increase drastically. Better to have many eyes on a problem.

That’s what the presumption of guilt endangers. A too-quick embrace of cynicism -- what Sloterdijk called “enlightened false consciousness” -- short-circuits understanding, and makes productive dialogue impossible. The task of leaders is to create a climate in which it’s possible to get past some deeply ingrained bad habits and to bring the group’s best thinking to bear.

If freedom is the insight into necessity, as Hegel put it, then facing necessity is the first step. That means taking the risk of suspending disbelief, putting cynicism on the back burner and speaking (and listening to) truth. It’s hard. It creates vulnerability. But it’s our best hope.

The dark side is always there, whether we cross over to it or not. Rising above it is a conscious choice that takes collective work over time. It’s not easy. But the work is worth it.