In our September "how can we help you?" thread, Struggling Dissenter writes:
I am a junior faculty member. Concerning departmental affairs (or any affairs) I tend to have a different opinion than many others. I also tend to get misunderstood. I wonder if there are advice and experience on how to survive departmental meetings and similar decision making scenarios. E.g. Should I be more quiet?
An excellent query, and one that I suspect many new faculty identify with. One reader, Jaded Junior Faculty, submitted the follow response:
Department politics can be a hellhole of wasted energy and bad feelings. If you can stomach it, go to the meetings but stay out of the fray. If you can't keep your opinions to yourself, skip the meetings. I stopped going to meetings about a year ago and my life and job satisfaction and general stress levels improved dramatically. People had been nasty to me, yelled at each other and me, intentionally twisted my words around, accused each other of the worst motives, and so on. I thought I was simply offering my input in a friendly way, but I was "taking sides" on battles that have long been raging. It was shocking, coming from a generally convivial graduate institution. All that to say: These battles are not worth fighting. You will only make yourself and everyone else miserable. Either wait for the worst actors to retire or apply out.
Another reader, Also Dissented, submitted the following reply:
Pick your battles. I was in a department with some unsavory personalities, and I just made sure I only voiced an opposing opinion on the issues that really mattered. So you can let many of the small issues go - nothing will hang on them, at least nothing big. And if you are feeling you are misunderstood, when you raise remarks do it in a more teacherly manner - do not assume that they will understand your concerns. Instead, provide some background or motivation for what you want to say. Eg. "It seems that some of you think we should be teaching so much generally education. I can see your concerns, but I think we need to ensure that the department is seen as cooperative with the administration. And some of these courses can be ideal places to recruit new majors and minors."
I appreciate both perspectives, and suspect that which approach one should take probably depends on a variety of factors, including one's own tolerance for risk and how functional or dysfunctional one's department is. However, in my experience, it can also matter a great deal how you dissent in meetings--to do so, for example, in a charitable way that makes it clear that you're interested in working productively with your colleagues even when you disagree, rather than as an adversary.
Another tip I have is to try to talk to people individually before and outside of departmental meetings. This can not only help you sort of feel out points of agreement and disagreement before meetings or decision-making scenarios occur. It can also be good for forging positive interpersonal relationships with colleagues, showing that you proactively care about what they think as an individual. Moreover, my experience is that conversations may go a lot better outside of the complex dynamics of a group meeting. Finally, once you know how various parties feel individually (and how strongly they feel about various issues), you may be much better prepared to determine before a meeting occurs which battles are "worth fighting", and which forms of dissent are likely to blow up in a bad way (and which you may or may not want to avoid).
Anyway, these are just a few of my thoughts. What are yours?
Not going to faculty meetings--which is a required part of your job--is the kind of thing that is easy to list as a reason in a departmental negative tenure report. (They do in fact have to give reasons!) It's a failure to perform the basic duties of your job. Meetings might suck but I would really *strongly* advise people against not going to them. If you disagree respectfully and with reasons with your colleagues, it is harder (obviously not impossible!) for them to morph that into a negative tenure report.
Just my two cents--you should make sure you are satisfactorily performing the minimum required duties of your job, whatever other decisions you make, because not doing so is the single easiest way for your department to turn against you at tenure time.
Posted by: recently tenured | 10/16/2023 at 09:00 AM
Thanks recently tenured! I totally agree ... I didn't just skip out. I found reasons not to go, or to "attend virtually" and turn the sound off. It didn't come up in my tenure review.
You can request to teach at that time. That's one way to miss that can't be held against you.
Posted by: Jaded junior faculty--tenured now | 10/16/2023 at 09:37 AM
To paraphrase again that oft-cited bon mot, "The fights in academia are so vicious because so little is at stake." That's a good reason to stay out of it as much as you can.
But if it is a general department meeting, "recently tenured" is right that attendance is more or less required, and that non-attendance will likely result in strikes against you in the "department service" and "department citizen" parts of tenure review. Being there does not require speaking up, however. In fact, the advice for a long time was that junior faculty should keep their mouths shut until they get tenure. I don't believe in that myself, and in most cases I think it is extremely unlikely that disagreeing with a senior colleague on a departmental matter could lead to tenure denial. And if it did, it would usually be pretty easy to appeal.
To bolster one of Marcus's comments, I've heard it said that nothing is decided on the floor of the UN General Assembly: All the positions are discussed and negotiated in the hallways and offices, with only the formal votes taking place during the meeting itself, the results of which are pretty much known in advance (notwithstanding any grandstanding, putting things on the record, and other performative gestures). Taking this as advice for philosophy departments (and faculty senates) can end up supporting "old boys networks," but it can also be an avenue for less-dominant groups (including younger faculty) to carefully formulate a position in advance and come to meetings more prepared than the potential opposition, with a voting bloc already lined up. I find this sort of effort too tiresome to bother with unless there is something on the agenda that actually matters. And that is rarely the case (see the opening paragraph).
A friendly and reasonable chair or dean, or in a pinch another senior colleague, can offer advice on how to navigate the difficult personalities.
A caution to OP, or folks in their position. If you are a junior faculty member and find yourself regularly disagreeing with the positions taken by your department generally, or by experienced faculty members specifically, the cause of the disagreement might be information, experience, or judgement that you happen to be missing at your career stage. Maybe there's an old policy, a tendency of the dean's, or an event in university history that's relevant to the issue that you just don't know about. I'd recommend asking senior colleagues you disagree with to help educate you on the topic. "I would have thought x; can you say more about why you think y?" Pitched correctly, this is giving them an opportunity to "prof-splain" things to you, which will likely make them feel good and may allow you to learn something.
Many of these disputes pretend to be about facts (which set of classes the department should offer, which job candidate is better, etc.) when really they are about values (what does it mean to have an adequate undergrad education in philosophy, whether research or teaching is more important for our department, etc.). Values are much less susceptible to reasoned discourse than we would hope (especially as philosophers!). You aren't likely to be able to persuade anyone to change their values much, especially not in a heated and polarized department meeting. Sometimes the way to avoid or limit acrimony is to just vote and get it over with (Calling the Question under Robert's Rules of Order, etc.). Having formal meeting guidelines on the length of time someone can speak, the number of times they can speak (e.g., once until everyone has spoken, twice max), etc., can be useful, too.
Posted by: Bill Vanderburgh | 10/16/2023 at 03:48 PM
I'm recently tenured in a department that was a minefield of faction fights when I first got there. One practice I found useful was adopting a policy -- not uncommon across academia, I had learned -- of not voting on personnel matters, besides routine stepwise promotions, until I'm tenured. So no votes on tenure or hiring. I think this is a good policy for departments to have in general, a way to protect junior faculty and avoid coerced votes. But either way it may help to adopt it for yourself.
Posted by: Newly Tenured | 10/17/2023 at 04:31 AM
One thing not mentioned here is email. While untenured, I had some extremely unpleasant experiences through email with a senior member of my department. Snark, derisiveness, what felt to me like veiled threats. That they were tenured made it all the worse. It turned out this was a common experience with this person's emails--but no one said anything, we just dealt with it.
(Learning this made me reflect on my own email practices. Perhaps my emails also sent unintended implications, or could be read that way. I might never know because academics seem to prefer to just step over the missing stair. That's a whole other topic, though.)
Eventually, I decided not to engage in discussion through email if at all possible and tried to encourage this as a policy for our faculty. I also stopped replying immediately, preferring to wait (what emergencies are there in academia?). It is easy to misinterpret emails and fire off an email that raises stakes unnecessarily.
Posted by: A survivor | 10/17/2023 at 12:16 PM
I really appreciate the OP’s questions and these helpful responses.
I would add that forging friendships with faculty and staff in other parts of your university can make your life and work much better if you find yourself in the situation described. Ill just here speak from my experience navigating tenure track years.
One reason my friends outside the department were a lifeline to me is that they supported and encouraged me through the tenure of track years in a way that no one in my department did. They often had encountered similar challenges and had great advice, or gave me a window into how more functional departments operate in the same institutional context. And there was no competition as there might be with other junior folks in your department- just pure good will and support.
Another reason this ended up being crucial is that I was able to find out when my colleagues or chair were acting on bad information or disregarding policies. Comparing notes with people in other departments often helps unveil misinformation.
Finally, I’ve ended up being part of grassroots organizing efforts that have been effective in changing some university wide policies. College or university wide policies that allow departments to run undemocratically, for toxic individuals to tank searches, etc. need to be changed, but no one dept or faculty has power to effect change. When our provost saw that there was a pattern leading to poor outcomes across multiple departments (like low retention of junior or diverse faculty) , they were moved to create new policies to alter that pattern.
Posted by: Recently tenured 2 | 10/17/2023 at 04:10 PM
Of colleagues who seem to enjoy investing their energy in departmental matters (and campus politics), I take the approach of thinking that that is a THEM problem, not a me problem. Don't get too invested or pay much attention to them. For some of them, it is sadly all they have. And as others have said, it can result in a lot of wasted energy and unnecessary stress.
Posted by: whatever | 10/18/2023 at 06:03 PM
If there are particular faculty who are threatening you you can request a meeting with your dean. You don't have to name names. Some 30 years ago I had such a meeting and did not name names, but reported that I had been threatened by multiple faculty over an ugly matter.
Luckily for me that dean was still around when I came up for tenure and my department vote was in my favor but too close for comfort and the executive committee also split as a result. I had a helpful chair by the time I came up and that mattered a lot. But still, I'm pretty confident the dean knew what was behind at least some of the odd abstentions and negative votes and this helped me get tenure by the skin of my teeth.
Also, all academic politics is local. So the advice to find friends in other departments if you can't find them within the department seems like good advice to me. Though be aware that local can mean *very* local, including local to departments.
Living untenured (or tenured for that matter) in a warring department is not fun. Lucky for me our department got its shit together not long after I got tenure. I think that in fact living through the bad years led a number of us to commit to not letting that happen again. I'm still there and like my colleagues.
Posted by: Mark van Roojen | 10/21/2023 at 08:11 PM