As a coach I spend a great deal of time supporting clients in finding ways to establish and maintain balance and boundaries between their work and personal lives with varying degrees of success.  For some, it’s pretty simple:  Make appointments with yourself or your family and keep them just as you would with a client or a colleague.  For others, its harder:  Appointments get overridden all the time as things come up at work, there is that “one more email” that has to be answered, or a decision to work on a presentation blots out “me” time.  What’s the difference between these people?  Well, my own experience and my work as a coach has distilled it to one word:  GUILT. 

Somehow our society had grown to value work time and professional achievement  over personal time and recreation to the point that taking time to create balance between the seemingly-endless stream of work and our families creates immense internal turmoil for many folks.  We’ve internalized society’s bias that more work=better work (a flawed premise for many reasons) such that for some people, great time relaxing, hiking, reading, or playing with our friends and families is overshadowed by a cloud of guilt that “I *should* be working.”  How sad.

Of course, as is true of most of this blog, I’m writing about this because I’ve allowed myself to fall into this trap numerous times.  I distinctly remember a while back when I’d promised my daughter that we’d play Uno (she always beats me), “as soon as Mommy is done with this email.”  Well, the emails dragged on, and finally, she asked me if I was ever going to be done.  My initial reaction was a welling-up of frustration and anger with her impatience, but as I looked up at her, I saw that she had been waiting over an hour and also, that she was still waiting patiently.  As I looked at her, I also saw how grown up she’s becoming (even though she’s only 6) and suddenly I felt guilty for a different reason.  I shut down my email, closed my laptop, and she beat me.  Twice. 

What was the guilt?  Before I know it, she and her brother will be grown and out of the house and I’ll be left with all the time in the world to do my email on the weekends.  Thankfully, I’m paying enough attention to re-focus my weekend energy into these wonderful kids and my best friend, my husband, to honor the balance that we all need between the stress of the week (work, school, homework, driving, etc.) and “us” time.  Too soon, we’ll be sending them off to college and wishing for a game of Uno.

The appointments I make with my family and myself are non-negotiable, and have to be.  I am proud of the work I do, and I enjoy it, but it’s the relationships in our lives that really matter.  It makes more sense to feel guilt for not making time to be with the people we love than for not working through the weekend; the good news is that guilt usually tells us that something needs to change, and perhaps keeping those appointments with yourself, your family, and your freinds is the solution.

Inside Higher Ed this week had a piece about Faculty grievance processes, how they work, how they fail, and the controversy that often surrounds the role of administration in such processes.  As a former Faculty governance leader and now an administrator dealing with such processes from the “Dark Side”, I found myself thinking about the points in the piece form several perspectives, but at the core of my reflection is sadness that the overarching faculty view of administrators is so negative.

I appreciate that at the core of effective faculty grievance policies is faculty review of a grievant’s case and the opportunity to discuss and deliberate the case freely.  An important aspect of faculty governance at non-unionized school however, is “shared” governance in which administration and the faculty partner to make decisions and policy for the good of the University.  Among the faculty’s most important role in this partnership is addressing personnel issues including the award of tenure, promotion, and post-tenure review.  Even in these roles, however, the faculty and administration work together to create processes that are consistent, defensible, rigorous, and that assure that tenured faculty are productive, engaged, and committed to the work of higher education.  In this partnership, of course, the faculty are the ones who set the standards, make the judgments regarding the academic and scholarly achievement of other faculty, and determine expectations for collegiality, productivity, and scholarship.  The administration provides support in the form of policy, budget, and legal and fiscal compliance to implement and uphold the standards of the faculty.  Tenure and promotion committees, for example, although populated with faculty, are run and overseen by administrators, and when those processes result in a grievance from a faculty member, who goes to court?  Not the faculty members-  it’s the administrators who carried the water on the decision of the faculty committee and had the responsibility of conveying the decision-  we are where the rubber meets the road.  Faculty get to make the decisions, but administrators have to take responsibility for those decisions and defend them.  It’s a pretty good deal for the faculty, but given this arrangement, it’s sad that faculty governance tends to view university administration with such mistrust. 

Given that faculty grievances involve unhappy people who believe they have been wronged, lawyers and litigation are common endpoints.  The folks who have to deal with that part of the “faculty grievance process” are usually not the faculty members who want to be free to “make a decision” about the grievance without the administration present, but the administrators themselves.  Many faculty would express concern that having administrators who may end up in court be part of discussions of grievances may create problems in that nobody want to go to court, and as such, administrators may try to keep the committee from reaching a negative conclusion to avoid litigation.  In fact, I recall serving on a tenure and promotion committee once as a faculty member in which the Associate Dean advised us not to turn down a very weak faculty member because it would result in the Dean’s office going to court.  That was totally inappropriate, but I know that happens (I’ll be the first to admit that there are plenty of weak Associate Deans out there), but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

One possible solution is to have administrators serve as ex officio on grievance committees, so that person can listen and understand the position of the committee, provide resources, and reflect policy and legal concerns to the committee from time to time.  Moreover, it’s worth noting that many administrators, especially mid-level folks who are frequently the ones who deal on a daily basis with faculty and personnel issues, especially grievances, are still people with faculty appointments who engage in “faculty” activities.  Having said that, many of us move into administration because we care deeply about the University and its faculty, and realize that we can have a positive impact as mid-level administrators (Associate Deans).  We are faculty through and through, and can provide a bridge between the “faculty” and the upper administration, many of whom are, truly and my necessity, very detached form the work of the faculty and the issues faced in the trenches.  My hope is that my faculty colleagues can appreciate that many of us who are “administrators”  are faculty first and foremost, and can add something valuable to grievance and other processes to assure that the collective decisions we make are sound, fair, defensible, and consistent with our (the faculty’s) priorities for our profession and our institutions.  

TV head

It started out as punishment.  My husband and I removed all “technology” from my 10-year-old son’s life last week (save what’s needed for school) in response to a bad attack of “spoiledsmartmouthbrattykiditis” he had been suffering recently.  The initial reaction was impressive-  moaning and gnashing of teeth ensued, accompanied by a great deal of moping and verbal self-flagellation.  The removal of access to laptop games, web surfing, Nintendo Wii and DS, and the television seemed to be an insurmountable punishment from which he would never recover.

To make matters worse,   his little sister was not punished, and was able to engage in technology activities.  This clearly added insult to injury, and he watched enviously over her shoulder as she romped through Webkinz World with Paris, her pink poodle.  Without him being able to watch, interestingly, she had not interest in the television, so it remained off.  Even the Wii was not enticing for her without him, and was dark as well.

His angst, happily, gave way quite quickly to something pretty wonderful.  My son, for whom reading has never been a preferred activity, spent yesterday actually reading books.  Our Saturday progressed quickly as we collectively hung out, played games, read, and just talked.  Mom and Dad also observed the TV-free rule, and no one really seemed to miss it. 

Sunday dawned with my kids getting up before us and heading downstairs to play “The Dinosaur Game”.  We moseyed downstairs and drank coffee and read the paper, enjoying the laughing (and of course bickering) of our kids, which is highly preferable to the blaring garbage on the TV. 

We realized that over time, our AAP-standards driven rules about computer, game, and TV time had loosened and loosened to the point that the TV was on way too much at our house.  We know what they watch, and even though the channels and content are, according to the TV rating system, age-appropriate for our kiddos, I am stunned by the portrayal of kids and the smart-mouth sassiness that’s modeled on even these shows.  The moratorium on non-academic technology continues for my son, but interestingly, as a group, we’ve all agreed that it’s nice not to have the TV on.  The degree of disconnection that television, and games (especially DS games) add to our already busy lives is unacceptable to us all-  even the grounded kid and even the little sister. 

The TV can come back on after this week, but for no more than 1-2 hours a day during the week and for an extra hour on the weekends.  We’re reinstating “technology-free time” for all of us, even Mom and Dad, after dinner every night; the emails can wait until the next morning.  Happily, the guilt I’ve been feeling about letting “the great intoxicator”- TV- get the better of my family has been replaced by a renewed sense of the value of silence and low-tech pursuits. 

Now if I can just get my Dinosaur to survive long enough to finish the Extinction game just once….

There’s a lot of discussion at my university these days about “changing the faculty reward system” to better reflect modern faculty work. Our institution, like many around the country, is developing definitions of faculty work and tenure and promotion criteria which move away from the typical “Big Three” of research, teaching, and service toward integrated models of faculty activity. We all know that faculty don’t work in the solitary way they used to- they connect with each other, the community, corporate entities, and others to apply the knowledge and training they have to both address problems and expose students to that process. Gone are the days of the solitary biologist in the lab with the bacterial cultures, working alone to determine and manipulate growth curves. Today’s biologist is in the field with the environmental scientist, the chemist, and the public health researcher figuring out how the bacterium got there, why it’s growing where and how it is, and estimating its impact on the water supply. It’s interdisciplinary research, of course, but there more to it than that. It’s the service-learning class in which students are supposed to apply what they learn in their Sociology lectures to work they do in a shelter for battered women and children. These integrated activities are hard to quantify in the traditional Big Three frame, so clearly, we need to find a way to quantify and evaluate these “new” types of faculty work. As the Associate Dean who runs my college’s tenure and promotion process, and an interdisciplinary scholar in my own rite, I’m on board with this, but I have a deep, dark secret- I’m a Stanley Fish fan.

Although I agree that we need to modernize the way we see and reward faculty work, I have a deepening concern about our approach. Finally, I’ve named my unease, and it is akin to a theme laid out in Stanley Fish’s new book, “Save the World on Your Own Time.” When I utter Dr. Fish’s name in the halls of my university, it’s almost as if I’ve made a disparaging remark about someones mother, but there are fundamental aspects of his view that must be integrated into our discussions of faculty work. 

Dr. Fish says many things in his new book, many of them provocative and controversial (BTW, I highly recommend the book to the thinking academic-  it is one of the most invigorating and sometimes maddening reads I’ve had in a long time).  The particularly germane kernel from the book is that faculty work must still be scholarly “faculty” work, not social work, political work, or personal work without clear and definite connections to real, rigorous scholarship.  Faculty work, done on behalf of the university, as innovative and interdisciplinary as it might be, must still be rigorous, scholarly, and deeply grounded in the discipline(s) in which we teach and do research, even as we cross boundaries and venture beyond the walls of our labs and classrooms.  The focus of the conversation regarding “valuing modern faculty work” has shifted from this fundamental tenet of making faculty scholarship, clearly and broadly defined in terms of rigor and quality, accessible and meaningful in the larger context of society, to essentially finding ways to accept any activity faculty decide to undertake and name as “scholarship” as a valued activity in the tenure and promotion process.  We are on the brink of becoming overly-inclusive in what we accept as valued faculty work; unless we are deliberate and careful, we will find ourselves utterly unable to objectively measure the scholarly performance of faculty members, or to meaningfully discriminate among them for tenure and promotion.  If we’re not gutsy enough to insist on rigor and objective measures of scholarship in these new definitions, we will become the stewards of institutions in which it is difficult to delineate tenured faculty members from community activists, social workers, clergy, politicians and journalists.

In our enthusiasm to value diverse and innovative faculty activities, we must not lose sight of the fact that all activities are simply not created equal.  There must be a measuring stick, a rigorous, empirical, scholarship-based measuring stick, that assesses the value and quality of the work faculty undertake. For the sake of illustration, I offer 2 examples of a “service-learning course”. The contrast here reflects the variability in implementation of approved courses that I’ve observed in the name of “diverse faculty work” in my own college:

CASE #1: Dr. Smith’s section of an approved Psychology service-learning course combines in-class work focused on generating research questions from peer-reviewed primary literature, with a service learning component in which the students volunteer in a battered women and children’s shelter while they are gathering observational data to test hypotheses generated in class. Students then examine the dataset, address the hypotheses they generated, and complete research papers and presentations based on their data and the literature.

CASE #2: Dr. Doe’s section of the same approved Psychology service-learning course takes a different approach. Students meet in class to talk about their expectations of what will happen and how they will feel when they go to the shelter to work. When they return to the classroom, they write “reaction papers” about their feelings and experiences and class discussions focus on what they think the causes of the Sociological challenges faced by the people in the shelter might be, and how they as citizens might help to solve them. They write a final paper based on these discussions and their reaction papers.

Case #1 demonstrates a scholarly approach to a service learning course, and Case #2 does not. As we expand or view of what faculty work is and should be, it’s critical that we learn the lesson illustrated by these cases; that not all “innovative, creative, and integrative” faculty activities are created equal. It’s great to find ways to value the great work faculty do that crosses and blurs the boundaries of the training I, for example, received 20 years ago, but there must still be a real, definable, scholarly anchor for valuing and evaluating these activities, and that is the part of the conversation that’s missing right now.

For tenure and promotion to retain their value, they cannot be entirely customizable, “one-size-fits-all” propositions, adaptable to the self-defined scholarship of each faculty member.  Tenure and promotion are not and cannot be a feel-good exercise.  We must tenure only active and highly competent scholars, innovative or not, and to assess their acheivements, including those that cross boundaries and mix things up a bit, using hallmarks of true scholarship that are accepted and defensible to our peers and society.  

For higher education to evolvein the way we dream it will, we must create a balance between creativity and quality in faculty work. The challenge is to be flexible enough to appreciate and value innovative and high quality work, but also to be bold enough to set a high bar for our faculty to make sure our students have the experience they deserve.

There- I’ve said it.