How Deans Can Help End Service Slacking

At this year’s annual meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans, or ACAD—a rich gathering of 300-plus administrators throughout higher education—I led two roundtable discussions devoted to equity in faculty service. Trying to distribute the service work of faculty members more fairly is a vexing topic, one that has become even more pressing following the COVID pandemic, which both highlighted and exacerbated inequities in the academy and across society.

Research shows that service slacking has the greatest negative impact on women faculty members and faculty of color: They do more, get rewarded less and have other opportunities limited because of those commitments. Yet it was clear from conversations and multiple presentations on the topic at other ACAD sessions that many colleges and universities are directly confronting the question of service inequity and engaging in innovative practices that seek to chip away at this destructive phenomenon. Further, most of these steps don’t cost money and are replicable across different institutional settings.

A common thread among many of these strategies is to bring hidden labor out of the shadows—inequity tends to thrive best when its causes operate covertly. Among many other tasks, advising, mentoring, committee service, faculty and student recruiting, and showing up at events sit at the core of university life and student success. Yet they are not treated as such in institutional reward systems like tenure, promotion, merit raises and reassigned time.

Service is rarely tied to such traditional material incentives of university life, and thus service labor ends up becoming invisible to those not engaged in it. Thus, approaches that take the following three steps have a better chance of rooting out service inequity: documenting service work across the faculty; making that documentation transparent; and creating consequences for those not doing their fair share. Developing systems along such lines gives institutional value to this labor.

For institutions looking to improve in this area, here are some starting points.

Document hidden labor, and share that documentation among members of the community so slackers can’t hide. Most members of academic communities have a vague idea of who is doing their fair share. Recording all the various service activities of a department’s or program’s faculty members on a spreadsheet, however, and then sharing out the results with members of the unit will bring into stark relief any inequities. My own honors college faculty agreed to this practice as a way of targeting a particular amount of annual service where each activity is tied to a set number of points. That also has had the advantage of showing faculty members the many ways they can contribute to the collective service mission. Everyone’s totals are shared at the end of the year.

Give faculty members a choice and something to aim for. Allowing faculty members some flexibility for how they will fulfill that service and for how their traditional areas of work will be evaluated gives them more ownership over the process—particularly those whose previous hidden labor has gone unrewarded. Some colleges even let faculty members write a “service philosophy” so they can put all this hidden labor into context and give leadership a clearer account of that work.

Have consequences for not stepping up. Without a clear expectation for what constitutes service and an established system for documenting that work, it becomes difficult to enforce equity and admonish the people who don’t step up. Creating a clear system of objectives and assessment creates accountability. For example, the consequences for not pulling your weight might have an impact on your teaching schedule: perhaps slackers get last crack at the department’s coveted afternoon classes. Departmental resources can also help shape behavior. Consider whether additional conference support is directed to those with high marks in service instead of the research stars.

Rethink the language you use to describe service. “Service” as a term comes from Latin roots that evoke both servitude and slavery—hardly productive connotations for work that moves colleges and universities forward. Several institutions are employing more positive terminology to try to highlight the institutional value of this work. Oberlin College increasingly uses the word stewardship, according to Elizabeth Hamilton, associate dean of the College of the Arts and Sciences. Colby College is referring more often to “community building and governance,” Russell Johnson, senior associate provost for faculty affairs, has told me. Likewise, other institutions have tried to shy away from phrases like “protecting” first-year faculty from service, as if it were a virus that new hires should avoid at all costs while they launch into the supposedly more valuable work of teaching and research. Rebranding service—when combined with some of these other changes—can change the culture around the work.

Experiment with how you constitute faculty committee rosters. We are all familiar with the typical distribution of personnel across faculty governance where the service leaders sit on multiple committees while the shirkers manage to avoid even a single committee responsibility or strategically latch onto the group that still hasn’t elected a chair by winter break. Johnson notes that Colby College addresses that challenge by allowing the faculty committee that oversees the governance process the chance to appoint unelected faculty to various committees once the elected positions have been filled.

Assign literal value to service by converting the work into actual currency. Time is the real currency in the modern-day academy, particularly after COVID when faculty and staff members are being asked to do so much more: in one survey 82 percent of women faculty noted their workloads had increased as a result of the pandemic. (The figure was 70 percent for men.) Departments often allow faculty members to bank credits that come from working with individual students on independent research projects or independent studies and then eventually convert a set number of credits into a stipend or reassigned course. So, too, could the voluminous amount of hidden labor be quantified and equated with reassigned time or other forms of compensation.

Take things off people’s plates. Higher ed is great at starting things but terrible at shutting down activities and programs, even those that no longer bring value. It’s time to look at the entire portfolio of service work in the same way that we examine the academic program portfolio during periods of scarcity. What service is no longer mission aligned, no longer adding value to the institution? Struggling to eliminate the faculty parking committee that hasn’t met in two years? You might want to follow the lead of institutions that have blown up their entire committee system—a kind of zero-based committee formation—and start from scratch by reinstituting only the crucial activities of faculty governance.

Cast a wide net instead when targeting volunteers. When asking for volunteers, make the opportunity available to all the personnel in a unit instead of repeatedly targeting your service stars or prejudging who might be interested in the work—which can reveal your own biases. A number of years ago, I emailed about a half dozen faculty in my unit in search of someone to interact with our campus’s first-generation scholars’ program. I directed that outreach to select faculty members who were interested in this student population and gifted in supporting them. But then a colleague in that group pointed out to me that I had unintentionally contacted only women and faculty of color. That was a wake-up call for me, one I appreciated very much.

Don’t place responsibility for addressing service inequity on the shoulders of individual faculty members. It’s crucial to not adopt the philosophy of simply, “You should just learn to say ‘no’”—an approach that exploits the people most often asked to give. Instead, we should address the root causes at the institutional level and create systems that better ensure equity. For example, Kevin Dettmar’s advice in a recent essay on service slackers focuses on personal, individual situations rather than unpacking some of the underlying systemic issues. He asks chairs to sympathize with the service-resistant faculty member’s personal history and their affection for students, while also making committee assignments based on the quality of a faculty member’s diplomacy skills. Yet we need to reorient our understanding of service away from just models that see the work as fundamentally depending on “a generosity of spirit,” as Dettmar put it, toward more systems tied to clear institutional expectations and rewards.

The work of rectifying service inequity in the academy is taking place within the context of staffing reductions, falling enrollments and budget deficits, which have created a climate of fear and exhaustion. If we don’t deal with that inequity, we will continue to lose some of our most valuable, high performing faculty members, especially in light of the multiple pressures now facing academic workers, many of whom are considering leaving the industry.

All the approaches that I’ve suggested have their imperfections and are works in progress, but that does not mean we shouldn’t lean into new practices. Many institutions have this front of mind, judging from the hallway conversations at ACAD and strong attendance at conference sessions devoted to the topic.

Progress can be made when administrators partner with faculty members to seek solutions rather than have senior leaders approach them with an already-baked plan. In my own unit, faculty members provided the impetus for our discussions and led a retreat conversation about service inequity. They then approved a pilot approach that documented their involvement in the vast quantity of invisible labor in the honors college, in the hopes of bringing this oft-hidden work into the light and recognize it appropriately. That’s a goal I hope all institutions share.