Thoughts on Faculty-Administrators

While attending a certain academic conference as a graduate student, one of our faculty members met a professor from a certain collegiate system and asked him how he liked his position. He said, “I love my colleagues; I like my students; I have an administration.” Even the most positive interpretations of this statement must acknowledge the speaker’s assumption that all collegiate administrators are at least in some sense or to some degree necessarily bad. Had the professor been a corporate executive in a comparable setting and the graduate student asked him something like, “How’s life?,” the same basic disposition might have been revealed in an answer such as, “I have a beautiful wife, and a seven-figure salary, but I also have an incurable disease.” Some incurable diseases are worse than others, some terminal and others mostly benign, but no one wants an incurable disease, and no one things an incurable disease is (in and of itself) good in any way–though one might “make the most of it” and even be motivated by it to focus one’s energies in positive ways, et cetera.

There are many things one could say about the seemingly incurable dis-ease between faculty and administrators that plagues modern colleges and universities nigh universally, but when all is said and done the only sure way to eliminate this disease is to eliminate the disjunct between faculty and administrators. In other words, only when faculty are administrators and administrators are faculty will there be no division between faculty and administration. Of course, there could be disagreements between and among faculty-administrators, but such people could not divide themselves along administrative lines of power and pay as seemingly inevitably happens wherever the administration is distinct from the faculty.

Similarly, though typically in a less contentious way, divisions between faculty and staff undermine the traditional unity of a university or college. Issues of power and pay are less problematic along these lines, but ignorance of who knows or should know something, or who can or should do something, who should or should not be consulted about something, seemingly inevitably leads to various failures of communication and consequent missteps that often prove costly and difficult to correct.

One might argue that myriad technical and procedural developments have necessitated administrative and bureaucratic systems, that faculty are not capable of or do not have time for accomplishing the work currently performed by administrators and support staff, but if anything these technological and procedural developments have made administrative and secretarial tasks easier over time. For instance, typing (and even writing by hand!) used to be a form of skilled labor, and executives (even theologians and poets) would sometimes employ multiple secretaries (or scribes) to handle their correspondence, but today we assume that anyone can type a letter, and even CEOs do such work themselves. Similarly, various computer programs allow for users with relatively minimal knowledge of things like statistics to analyze complex datasets. Tasks currently performed by entry-level employees could clearly be managed by faculty (or even students), and an institution could easily contract with consultants to complete certain tasks or to train faculty (and/or students) to complete such tasks.

Admittedly, in very large modern universities the faculty themselves would comprise too large a number of people to interact meaningfully and efficiently, so in such institutions the divisions between administration, faculty, and staff may actually be necessary and even beneficial, but in a college or university small enough that the faculty can more or less sit around a table together such divisions of labor would be inefficient and inequitable. Indeed, the value of sitting around a table together is one of the reasons St. Isidore’s College seeks to be and remain a small community of faculty.