After three years as Chair of the RIT Faculty Senate, I have come away with a treasure trove of insights, realizations and strategic understanding. Leadership, as experienced and viewed close-up from this role has taught me so much, I have spent the past 6 months simply processing everything, trying to find the words to make sense of everything.
The first thing to discuss is how aptly the term “drinking from a fire hose” fits when describing a high-pressure, high information role like this one. As a relatively junior faculty member (in my brain, I’m still a teenager), I went from an abstract understanding of how a university functions to… feeling the need to understand and speak knowledgeably about everything! Or, I could risk being considered a wishy-washy inept leader who coasts along without making waves.
I have my first Vice Chair to thank for teaching me it wasn’t enough to trust my colleagues to help me when I need it. Or to expect them to be fully honest if it didn’t serve their interests. I was pushed to learn “the rules” for myself, and I found that knowledge really does come with power. After an awkward start, I started to piece together the structure of everything around me, and place the complaints, the grumbles and the snark into the context from which it is born. I started to figure out that people (faculty are people) rarely complain about the root of the problem. Very often the focus ends up on the minor inconveniences created by problem.
The circular discussions of the Senate started to make sense. The underlying issues came from structural inconsistencies across the many academic silos that exist in any institution.
The One Payroll Drama
Every great story needs a Call to Adventure to get the ball rolling, and this was ours. At a point when the world was still recovering from a pandemic, financial insecurity was rife and everyone was burned out on compassion and resources, the Faculty Senate found itself at the center of a disturbing decision to “improve efficiency” in our payroll systems.
The story itself is involved and ultimately meaningless in the long-run, but it bears scrutiny in how it reveals the shortcomings in standard (corporate?) decision-making systems that forget that mere numbers do not accurately reflect reality… or the will of the people. In a short 6-odd weeks, through the actions of a few mathematically inclined members and faculty members who understand how actions lead to consequences, the matter came to a head, resulting in a large forum ready to tar and feather our university leaders. The fallout resonated across all corners of the university, and suddenly, everyone was listening.
Shared Governance and the Structure of Decision-making. “What’s the point?”
A common refrain among faculty and staff is that leaders do what they want and nobody cares what “the little guy” thinks. This kind of thinking leads to nodding heads and no good solutions. Every time a problem came up, I realized I was uniquely positioned to hear two sides of the discussion. Just as quickly, I discovered that neither side was being forthcoming about their perspective. By implementing an anonymity clause, I began to bring forth ideas and suggestions that contradicted the standing narrative.
Complaints became points of discussion, disagreement became debate. People who claimed to not care began to test the waters and bring forward bigger problems, and with a little nudging, better solutions.
Collective Brainpower and “True Believers”
Change does not happen through the actions of a single person, and everything that the Faculty Senate accomplished was the collective effort of a number of active members. Most notably, the Executive Committee, reformed in the first year after three officers had to relinquish their roles for various reasons came together with a new Vice Chair, Sam Malachowsky the devil’s advocate, Communications Officer Stephen Aldersley joining us with decades of leadership and governance savvy, Operations Officer Hamad Ghazle the mediator, Treasurer Keri Barone the Observer, and our secret weapon, Senate Coordinator Tamaira Brown. This group came together with a zeal for change and a willingness to roll up their sleeves and do the work.
Before we knew it, we were strategizing a new path forward, exploring how to bring the disparate players together and align efforts to unify the scattered processes across this academic engine. Each member had a role to play and a cause to champion. And we all worked for each others’ success, because we were functioning purely in service of the betterment of RIT.
Leaders and Allies.
This new energy and awareness started to extend beyond the confines of the Senate. Before we knew it, we were engaged in discussions with directors and leaders of different units. Everyone was interested in solving “the problem”. Our Provost was an ally and various officers were interested in pulling back the curtains to explain how things work and where our expectations fall short. It turns out, many corners of the university evolved in response to localized issues, seemingly designed to solve one problem, only to find themselves restricted by systems or resources that prevented them from doing more. Even stranger are the number of offices and units that have been taking on duplicative work because they had to respond to a need. It made me think of a small fishing village that had to become a metropolis overnight. Everything works, but solutions grown organically are not always “efficient”, and overextended units are not always given the recognition they deserve or the resources they need to flourish.
Compared to many universities, RIT is still young, and it shows most in the systems that are not yet in place. Our managers (not leaders) are our biggest weakness, because they do not operate from a place of visionary brilliance, but from a place of fear and compliance. The scarcity mindset that is deathly afraid of failure stifles independent thinkers and rewards only the blind followers. “Training” is a joke, led by Legal and HR, who’s only goal is to avoid litigation and scandal. The failure of mediocre managers is then covered up to “protect reputations” and no one is held accountable.
Is Accountability Ruin?
This becomes the final question for me in this rambling post. Accountability is necessary for any healthy institution. The truth can be manipulated, but ultimately, it comes to light where it cannot be ignored. But how should accountability work? A devil’s advocate once suggested public announcements of abject failures, with a requirement of creating a plan to correct or rectify resulting issues. A less fraught suggestion is to temper compassion with objective clarity. To collect feedback on administrators on an annual basis and not settle for “good enough”.
Where is the Renaissance When You Need it?
Higher Education in the US is at an inflection point. Education is politics, and healthy debate is endangered. In a time where institutions are being held at gunpoint from multiple sides, it can be easy to hide behind corporatized legal-doublespeak. I can’t help but think that the only winners in the long run will be the institutions that hold themselves to the standards nobody cares about today. Real academic inquiry and exploration must come from a place of courage, not fear. This cannot be an exercise in capitalism, it has to be an exercise in enlightenment.
