Parsing Organizational Confusion

Hidden Cultures in the Academy

I recently worked through Erin Meyer's The Culture Map. While this book is about working across cultures primarily in the area of business, it occurred to me that I may have observed some of these cultural differences even within my own university.

Because we are talking about assumptions, it occurred to me that one reason why various professors and administrators may talk past each other, not to mention past potential students and stakeholders, may be a reflection of cultural differences. And as universities aim for greater diversity, these sorts of underlying tensions are only bound to increase.

Here is a list of contrasting priorities that may underlie some organizational conflicts:

1. Explicit versus implicit communicators
Some people are wired to spell out things clearly and in detail. I have experienced times when my repetition has crossed a line of annoyance. After reading this book I realized that some cultures consider it insulting when you spell things out too explicitly. "What, do you think I'm stupid?"

2. Why versus how people
America at large is wired to the "how." As I read this contrast, I remembered times when one set of faculty were thinking, "Just tell me what to do," while someone else felt it was essential to explain the why and give extensive background.

Similarly, there are many professors who think if you do not give extensive theoretical background, you are not yet ready to talk about relevance or concrete implications. Suffice it to say, as prevalent as this "culture" is for academicians, it rubs against the broader culture of the majority of students, who want to know what to do with what is being taught.

3. Egalitarian vs Hierarchical
I have observed within the academy varied assumptions about hierarchy. So I have known some leaders who are very hierarchical. For them, you communicate through the hierarchy. A professor should not contact the president and a division chair should not contact a Dean from another school. Same level communicates with same level.

But others have a much more "egalitarian" sense of communication. We used to call one of the presidents at Asbury Seminary the "open door" president. One president at IWU used to say, anyone can contact me but I will respond through the established channels. Suffice it to say, there is great potential for conflict if everyone is not on the same page about these things.

4. Who makes decisions?
Another cultural difference has to do with who makes decisions and how set they are once they are made. Some faculty bodies are very consensual. They want to reach a consensus before a decision is made. In other situations, a leader gets input from everyone but it is understood that the leader will make the final decision.

The German-Dutch-North European model is a consensus model. You do lots of ground work, the team (including the leader) reach a consensus, then you stick with the decision. I have observed faculty following this sort of a pattern in recent years. "Shared governance" seems to mean, we collectively make all decisions rather than, we have authority in some areas and the administration has authority in others.

The adaptability of decisions is another area where people differ. For some a decision made is done. Others view decisions more as adaptable if new information or factors arise.

Again, a lack of clarity on such matters is bound to lead to confusion and unnecessary conflict.

5. In-your-face conflict?
Many academic cultures are very conflictual. This gets at another cultural variation--how much negativity is considered appropriate and how damaging is such negativity. For some personalities, in your face conflict is perfectly normal. For others, it is deeply alienating.

6. Relationships vs. Tasks
Some people want to build relationships. It's important to eat together and like each other. How can you work together if you do not ever go to lunch with each other? Others are about getting the job done. You do your job and I'll do mine.

People may assume it's one or the other. Which is it for your team?

7. Keeping the Schedule
It is possible as universities get more diverse that we will see conflict over the question of schedule. How important are deadlines? How important is it to be on time?

At the top is a chart that may capture some of these often unexamined assumptions.

Who Christian Colleges Hire...

If a college wants Christian faith to be a key aspect of its identity, then it seems that hiring Christian faculty would be a key strategy. But there are many different flavors when it comes to Christians. What flavor of Christian should a Christian college hire?

1. Christian faith can impact a professor in several different areas:

• It can affect the piety of the professor. Are professors people who go to church and worship regularly? Do professors pray? Do they pray in class? How does the professor treat students? What formational values, if any, does a professor have?
• It can affect the ethics of the professor. What guides the application of the subject matter a professor teaches?
• It can affect the ideas of the professor. Does the professor accept the possibility that God interacts with the world? What role does the Bible play in a professor's teaching? Are there particular theological perspectives that shape the professor's approach to his or her topic?

2. I have a sense that there are some Christian universities where some naive assumptions about these sorts of things can create a climate where a college's identity "takes a walk." Here are some examples of unexamined assumptions you see here and there:

• So some Christian institutions might assume that truth is truth wherever it's taught. So we just hire someone who self-identifies as a Christian and let them do their stuff without any further ado. Research excellence becomes the unifying factor.
• There is the assumption that being a Christian college is primarily about having some set of beliefs. If a person signs off on a particular creed, they're good to go. Depending on how generic those beliefs are, there may be very little to form identity here.
• There is the assumption that the Bible in some way is the basis of unity or identity. Clearly that approach has left us with 20,000 different churches. It's not going to provide a unified identity unless there are other hidden assumptions on what the Bible means.
• One variation on the three above is the assumption that evangelical values be the basis of unity. Generic evangelical identity has solidified into a somewhat standard form of values that are assumed to be biblical.

3. I doubt that a generic evangelical identity is enough to attract a faithful clientele. We end up with a bunch of mini-Wheatons across the US or a bunch of mini-Liberties on the more fundamentalist side. The flavor here is vanilla.

Of course I think the Wesleyan Church has been growing to have a very attractive flavor these last years. I see it as a recipe for growth and success as a college too. These include:

• A "good news" culture. The older twentieth-century "bad news" Wesleyanism didn't attract anyone. So the "anti" folk in our midst aren't going to grow anything long term. The reason the Wesleyan Church is growing is because we are welcoming and optimistic about changing the world for good. Joanne Lyon embodies this. Wayne Schmidt embodies this. Enthusiasm grows things.
• A culture of hospitality. I blurred into this in the previous bullet. Someone who is hospitable knows who he or she is, and thus is not threatened by those who disagree. You have to have a core identity here, but can be hospitable to those in your midst who don't share it. Love is the heart of the Bible, and an identity of love grows things.
• A "get it done" culture. Idealists eventually kill things, although they can have a good burn until they burn out or burn everything down. A culture that sees multiple paths to get more basic goals done, and that doesn't get stuck on process or ideological details, creates an excitement.
• Pertinence. "Relevance" has become a bad word, so I'll use "pertinence" to mean relevance with substance. A growing ministry or service will interact with the most pressing matters of its context in ways that are perceived to bring wisdom and insight to the table. Usually, "going back to the way we used to do things" doesn't do it.
• Self-awareness. There is a depth when you know where you've come from and how it affects who you are. Throwing away the past doesn't lead you anywhere, like someone dropped in the middle of a city without a map. If you're going somewhere, you have to start from where you are.

4. I've wandered a little. The bottom line is that you can't just hire "evangelicals who publish" and think you're going to end up with a growing college with an identity that prospective students are drawn to. And a college with a specific traditional past that looks at hiring this way will soon undergo an identity crisis.

For growth, hire faculty who:

• are in continuity with the college's tradition but aren't robots to it
• who have a "good news," "loving" attitude toward others and especially toward students
• who aren't ideologues who clog up the works and don't play well with others
• who can read the times and where things are headed, and are disposed to play a part in the future, not to burn everything down if we don't do it the way we used to
• who are not only experts in their discipline and competent teachers, but who are aware of their own assumptions on a deep level

Some thoughts on who a Christian college should hire...

Academic "price fixing" at SBL?

I'm on the periphery of a group for SBL that was denied this year even though it had quite a significant line up for this Fall and probably would have been quite popular. I'm trying to process the reason given, which more or less had to do with perceived overlap with other groups that already exist (even though they weren't interested in the specific topic). Also cited was a move away from "fragmentation" in SBL groups.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this decision. I know that decisions by leadership are often complex and involve a bigger picture than an individual decision. It's difficult to see the whole picture from the receiving end. I was really on the edge of this group anyway so I didn't have much invested in it.

But here are the thoughts going through my mind?

1. Did this group and topic appear too "evangelical" and thus not "diverse" enough or too "fragmented"? It would be interesting if the SBL program committee thought so. Was there a bias against confessional scholarship involved?

The line up included prominent individuals from Duke and even had Tom Wright scheduled this Fall. By contrast, the SBL program committee, as far as I can tell, is made up overwhelmingly of individuals from secular schools. There is interestingly some strong bias against Wright as a scholar in the academy. Some of his work drives me nuts but there's no denying that he is one of the most influential scholars of the last twenty years. Who has heard of Ken Schenck (or the author of the linked protest letter)? Wright, him I've heard of.

2. Some steering I've seen at SBL to me has been about as boring as a dead fish. I personally think this phenomenon is something that plagues academia in general, where professors and leaders think they get to decide what people are interested in. And they drive their institutions into the ground with declining enrollment until their departments or colleges close.

I attended a group for about a decade at SBL that started with the seats packed. The topic was brimming with interest. Then it seemed to me that the leadership packed the agenda with just the right balance of "non-fragmented" speakers, including interdisciplinary talks by people from other areas of expertise who frankly looked silly to me speaking on topics about which they weren't experts.

Before long, the leadership seemed to muse at all the papers on the topic being presented in other groups. Attendance didn't seem to be as strong as it started. When interest found other ways to express itself, there seemed to be an urge to find ways to keep power over the topic centralized with the enlightened group. To me, it looked similar to my perception that struggling Methodist seminaries try to use power at their HQ to force ministerial candidates to go to schools they just don't want to go to.

3. What I'm talking about here is "price fixing" in academia, using power to squelch voices you don't agree with. This phenomenon is not conservative or liberal. It's human. Conservatives do it. Liberals do it. Personalities do it against other personalities. It has only to do with who is in power, not what their ideology is.

There is a temptation even within an institution like IWU to try to squelch a program in one part of the university because it might grow over the territory of another program. There are some valid concerns here. But what doesn't make sense is to hamstring a program that looks to be wildly successful just because you don't want a struggling program somewhere else to suffer or die.

4. Oh well. Stuff happens. I suspect the proposed group would have been pretty popular at least its first year. Who knows? It might have been the hot thing this Fall at SBL.

My question is this. What will the "Dead Fish Quotient" (DFQ) be this Fall at SBL? Will there be some topics where the rooms are brimming with interest? Or will most of the sessions be a mirror of many struggling religion departments today, where the professors can't get anyone to sign up for their classes?

Academy Cultures 2: The Managerial Culture

1. Yesterday I did some exploration of the first chapter Bergquist and Pawlak's, Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy. I am building my own synthesis off their book's content. Three theses that emerged yesterday were 1) that strikingly different assumptions are present within a university like IWU about what the goals and mission of a university are, 2) that these assumptions are usually held unreflectively--people just assume them in conflict with each other without realizing they are not actually self-evident or beyond critique, and 3) that universities are, when all is said and done, businesses.

The last point is the rock bottom truth. A university can have all the wrong goals from some point of view; it can be of horrible academic quality from some point of view; but if it is financially sustainable, it eats your "quality" institution for lunch. You close. You die. No one remembers you. But the sustainable business lives and continues to reproduce.

2. I believe yesterday's chapter on what they call a "collegial culture" is really better divided into two distinct perspectives on higher education that are themselves potentially two different sets of cultural assumptions:

• I'm going to call one a formational model. This is the in loco parentis model ("in place of the parent"). This tends to be the liberal arts model and is often the model for the small Christian college. It derives from British and Scottish educational influences. It's target audience is youth in its formative adulthood.
• The second model might be called the research model. It tends to be faculty research focused and can almost ignore the student in the process. The individual faculty is pursuing truth with complete academic freedom and the lucky student gets to watch. It derives from German influences and puts a high premium on publication.

3. Today's chapter addresses what it calls a "managerial" culture. It's cultural sources, according to these authors, are Catholic education and the community college.

So Catholic education arose to serve immigrants who were coming in the mid-1800s and were somewhat scorned by the broader society. It had a bureaucratic character to it, focused on teaching and had a goal of preparing the student for advancement in society.

The community college had some similar focus in that it aimed to train a local individual to get a job. It was thus focused on training the student to do something that could be a vocation.

4. As with the last chapter, I would like to re-present this chapter with what I see as two additional models that are often in play within a single educational institution:

• I'm calling the first the vocational model. This model sees the college or university as a place of training and preparation to get a job. It flows naturally from the community college strand.
• The second I'd like to call the pedagogical model. This view of the university sees it primarily as a place where good teaching and learning takes place. This flows naturally from the Catholic strand of American education.

5. The vocational model is almost diametrically opposite to the liberal arts model, and the social origins of these two are quite different. The vocational model emerged from the lower end of the social system, where individuals were looking to move up the social chain. By contrast, the liberal arts college was often the stomping grounds of the upper class, whose eventual financial security was more or less guaranteed and, thus, whose education could focus more on luxury, namely, the arts and cultural formation.

There is, I think, a prevailing assumption by those outside the academy that the primary purpose of college is to prepare students to get a job. This is, after all, what sells a college the most to parents. Parents aren't interested in funding the research of an expert on monarch butterflies unless it will help their daughter get a job somehow. And parents aren't always interested in their son learning Shakespeare.

Since college is a business, these are realities that have to factor into how a college presents itself, like it or not. It doesn't matter that a faculty member thinks he or she knows what they should be interested in. I know that Latin can change a student for the better. But few parents are going to pay for their son or daughter to go to college to learn Latin. Like it or not, reality doesn't care. The wise man builds his house upon the rock.

6. The pedagogical model sees the primary function of the college as teaching and thus of student learning. This was an important corrective to the academy, the rise of the educrats. In the old days:

• In the old days, professors may or may not have given a student a syllabus for a class. Perhaps the professor would give a reading assignment at the end of class or announce a writing assignment due in a week. You more or less found out what came next as you went along.
• You might only have one test at the end of the class or one paper. Your grade might show up and you have no idea how you got it. Grading was more or less up to the whim of the professor.
• Curriculum was more or less a set of required courses. There was no real accountability for what a professor taught in those courses. There was no way of knowing whether the students actually learned anything other than their grades.

It's important to me to say that those days weren't a waste. In fact, wouldn't we normally say that the level of learning was higher in the past than today? Just because you don't have any evidence doesn't mean that learning didn't take place. Anecdotal evidence is only hearsay, but that doesn't mean it is necessarily wrong.

There have been a lot of improvements in the last two decades:

• All courses now are expected to have syllabi, a kind of binding arrangement between faculty and student.
• Courses ideally list the "outcomes" of the course on the syllabus. These are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions you should be able to demonstrate at the end of the class.
• Degree programs should be accessed by way of artifacts in key courses. Data is collected and evaluated.

There is no doubt that these changes are positive. The danger is when this "managerial culture" lets a certain educrat personality go too far. Systems of measurement become an end in themselves. Assessment might try to reach its hands down into every single course every single time in an obtrusive way. Endless data is generated and analyzed. Welcome to the culture of obsessive, pedagogical navel gazing.

At present, most universities recognize that they need to be able to demonstrate that their programs generally do what they say they do. So we hire an Assessment Officer or give load release to that odd faculty person who really loves this sort of thing. Perfectly appropriate.

The danger is when this personality gets too much control and tries to force every professor to become an educrat just like them. Faculty become administrators. Suddenly all the fun is sucked out of teaching for all but those with that particular personality--and it isn't necessarily the personality that students most enjoy or come to university to study with. Students find themselves doing a lot of busy-work that, in the end, doesn't serve their learning but serves the machine wanting artifacts to assess.

Syllabi get longer and longer, like a book, and the likelihood that a student will read it gets less and less. This subculture of the university is especially prevalent among professors of primary and secondary education, who are used to the paperwork of the public school. Instructional designers, if they are tasked to create preformed online classes, also have a tendency to be of this personality and background.

Education becomes one incredibly complex bureaucracy full of complex systems and processes of assessment. Again, I completely affirm the right of certain faculty and disciplines to do things this way. The problem is the unexamined assumption that those who do not do it this way are somehow deficient and need to be fixed.

7. Here are some of the just plain wrong assumptions here:

• Not all personalities want endless details. In fact, many shut down when confronted with too many. Many personalities need to see the big picture and then fill in the details later.
• Responsibility is not the same as learning. Educrats tend to reward the responsible, those who jump through pre-set hoops on time, perhaps even more than those who actually learn. There is a tendency to give full credit for doing what is asked rather than for excellence in thinking.
• There is a latent positivist hangover, as if a tree doesn't make a sound unless someone is there to hear it. Assessment is good practice, and it is preferable that outcomes be accessible. But just because we don't or can't assess something, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
• Intuitive assessment takes place all the time among quality professors. Most of the time, this kind of self- and peer assessment is far more valuable than numbers on a spreadsheet.

There should be a basic trust extended to professors, a presumption of the benefit of the doubt until something prompts more detailed investigation. The presumption of a university should be that if a professor teaches in a classroom, learning takes place. Otherwise, we have failed in our hiring, and it is our fault, not the faculty person's.

Bottom line: No one personality in the academy should have the gall to think everyone else should be like it, especially if the students are happy. ESTJs are not better educators than INFPs.

Six Cultures of the Academy 1: Collegial Culture

1. I'm intrigued by this 2008 book, which is an expansion of an earlier 1992 book.

I think the nature of the academy is in flux, and there is something about this book that is helping me delineate what you might call clashes of culture within the current university and seminary landscape.

2. When you dig into the first chapter of this book, it quickly becomes apparent that "traditional" education models in the United States themselves are not monolithic and involve a diverse set of influences. But Bergquist and Pawlak largely summarize a "collegial culture" as discipline and faculty research oriented. It conceives "of the institution's enterprise as the generation, interpretation, and dissemination of knowledge" (15).

There are different strands of traditional academia. The British and Scottish strands tend to live on in smaller liberal arts colleges, where the student environment was carefully controlled (in loco parentis) and there was an emphasis on the liberal arts. Contrast this with the German model that became very influential in the 1800s, focusing on a powerful faculty whose job is to generate knowledge in their areas of focus. The research institution has inherited the heightened German sense of academic freedom and faculty autonomy.

3. My sense is that many if not most of the players in my college context have unexamined assumptions about what it is that a university is about. As a Dean I have heard repeatedly the rallying cry for "shared governance," but there is no timeless dictate from God on what that necessarily should look like. For those who come to the university setting from outside academia, the power that faculty as employees have within the typical university is shocking. Indeed, it often seems inappropriate to outsiders.

The current climate in American education has made one thing overwhelmingly clear. More than anything else, a college, university, or seminary is a business. This is fundamental because it relates to the bottom-line existence of these institutions. You can have a great mission, but if you cannot pay your bills, you will cease to exist. But you can have a bad mission and continue to exist. This suggests that whatever mission or purpose one may ascribe to an institution of higher learning, it is a less essential component than solid business practices.

4. So a research institution can choose to exist to generate and perpetuate knowledge for its own sake. But it can only exist for this purpose if it can generate enough revenue to cover its expenses. A liberal arts or Christian college can choose to exist to inculcate a certain set of values in young people. But it can only exist for this purpose if it can generate enough revenue to cover its expenses.

But there is no single, obvious raison d'etre for all colleges. Each institution must decide what it exists for and, if it can sustain itself in some way financially, no one can say its purpose is illegitimate. A college could exist to help its students gain the kinds of skills that will get them a job. I suspect this type of purpose is most likely to make an institution financially viable.

But of course it would be unreflective to insist that this is the only legitimate purpose for a college. The generation of knowledge is a legitimate purpose for a university. The making of better human beings is a legitimate purpose. It is narrow-minded to think that we must choose one of these. Pish-posh ignorance. If a college can generate enough revenue to continue to exist for a particular purpose, so be it.

5. The role of the faculty in an institution of higher learning therefore cannot be reduced to a "one size fits all" either. This relates to a fundamental blind spot both of some faculty and administration. It is not obvious that the purpose of a faculty member is to generate research and scholarship. That is the German cultural model but it is not an absolute model. It is ignorance to think that is obviously what a faculty person is supposed to be or do.

The same of course goes to teaching. I know a seminary that has no students. Its faculty only do research. It would be just as ignorant to say that this sort of institution is illegitimate as it would be to say that an institution where the faculty do not publish but only teach is illegitimate. As long as the institution is breaking-even financially, it is a legitimate business.

6. Accreditation and the standards by which the government dispenses loans are clearly a factor in the viability of academic institutions because they affect the bottom line of an institution. But if students wanted to pay to go to a place that had no recognition of quality from these normal means, what could we ultimately say?

Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary is the largest seminary in the United States. It has chosen not to be accredited by the Association of Theological Schools, although it is regionally accredited through Liberty University. Yet what are other seminaries to say? The students have voted with their feet.

7. My point is that the traditional, "collegial" model, while completely legitimate, is not absolute in any way, shape, or form. The contours of the college of the future are up for grabs. There is no absolute standard for the role or expectations of faculty. The ultimate reality that trumps all other realities is the fact that education is a business. Period.