Summary Notes by J. T. P. Yao, 11/15/98

"… the language currently used at research universities to describe faculty work is constraining regardless of its source. It emphasizes quantity as opposed to quality, extrinsic as opposed to intrinsic characteristics of work, a lack of trust of faculty members, and an emphasis on the procurement of resources. … Once, the undergraduate curriculum held the faculty together: we taught and students learned, and that was our main engagement. After the success of the Manhattan Project and other uses of science in World War II, the research hegemony arose. Undergraduates, once the chief focus of faculty attention, became fodder for the graduate research enterprise; universities became not just big business, but big businesses.

How do we talk about higher education now? This the language I hear: efficiency, productivity, technology, credit hours generated, grants with overhead received, accountability, assessment, competition, costs, total quality management. This is not the language of education or morality or scholarship or learning or community; it is the language of counting, accountants, accountability and, to a greater or lesser extent, it is how we imagine our enterprise. … There is pressure to increase the size of classes, whether learning is improved for students or not, and pressure to increase the scale of funded research, whether the research is driven by need for knowledge or not. … There are pressures to forego research that might take several years to complete in favor of scholarship that becomes trivial as faculty search for the smallest publishable unit on the shortest possible timeline."

"… defining administrators as those whose primary role is to support the academic enterprise (coordinating efforts and procuring and allocating resources) and faculty as those people whose primary role is to engage in academic endeavors (creating, distributing, and applying knowledge). … Administrators play an important part in shaping faculty roles; however, they are not the only actors. … We should not ignore efficiency and productivity, but neither should we become cogs in the grand machine. Leadership, much touted in the academy today, may be no solution. The image of administrative leadership assumes that faculty cannot lead themselves. … In fact, if administrators feel some need to motivate the faculty to work in a certain way, they make the assumption that faculty do not find that work meaningful. … Especially if a faculty member ultimately must be accountable to his or her self."

" … We are role models for students not only as professionals but also as human beings. It is unlikely that any new definition of faculty work can ignore students. … One should work for the development of one’s discipline, or one’s self, or of knowledge and expression. …"

"When our extrinsic rewards are high, we have won the game of evaluation, but we may or may not have served ourselves, our disciplines, or our students. The primary extrinsic rewards for faculty are salary and promotion. … To endorse materialism, to teach our students this value through our example, to export this value through international students around the world, raises the specter of sustainability. …"

"Perhaps the greatest danger to faculty members is that the definition of their roles will endorse workaholism as a virtue. … First and foremost, workaholism is a pathology, not a virtue, even if it is rewarded and even if it is a norm. A person addicted to the process of work is out of control. … Addiction relies on processes such as the promise, which takes a person out of the present time into the future. … Another process is external referencing, in which one’s sense of self is developed outside oneself. Faculty members often depend on external references, like the editors of refereed journals, to assess their worth as scholars. A third process is invalidation. Here the addict defines into nonexistence ideas that she or he doesn’t like or can’t control. … Hard work is to be admired; workaholism is not. …"

"Three desirable things to consider in a new definition of faculty roles are to be true to ourselves, to value students, and work for intrinsic reasons. Simultaneously, we should avoid externally defined roles, the primacy of extrinsic rewards, and workaholism. … It is time to move beyond the language of counting and accountability and consider describing faculty work in new languages. …"

The languages that could describe faculty work include:

• "PLAY: transformation, creativity, risk taking, suspending, judgement, avoiding rigidity, testing new roles and ideas in safety, and building trust and community."
• "MYSTICISM: wonder, surprise, simplicity, meditation, the meaning of being human, amazement, limitation of analytical systems."
• "SOULFULNESS: not heroic or muscular, giving attention, devotion, and husbandry, adorning the body, healing, being anxious for; connected with depth, value, relatedness, heart, personal substance, invisible psychological, spiritual, relational, and emotional integrity."
• "ACHETYPICAL IMAGES: mother, fool, lover, healer, great mother, warrior, visionary, trickster."
• "MYTHOLOGY: transforming consciousness, guiding behavior, finding parallels, contemplation, experiencing the rapture of being alive."
• "PASSION: passion, eros, attachment, love, identification."
• "MADNESS: being outrageous, making blatant mistakes, trespassing boundaries, upsetting norms, challenging everything, creating a world of transformed reality, out-of-the-ordinary, passing all rational bounds, extravagant in gaiety, wild, carried away by enthusiasm or desire, wildly excited, infatuated, creating new frames."
• "EMOTIONS: joy, fear, greed, grief, anger, pain, shame, guilt, happiness, empathy, caring, emotional intelligence."
• "ART: beauty, harmony, balance, composition, rhythm, perspective, proportion, space, form, volume, color, and movement in work."
• "COMMUNITY: relationship, mutual obligations, making and sharing meaning, avoiding loneliness and isolation, transformation, rights, responsibilities."

"The administration is not likely to abandon the system it controls, an extrinsic model based on hierarchy, materialism, and status, for a more human and humane model based on sustainability, self knowledge, the new possibilities for work provided in the language used here. It becomes each faculty member’s responsibility to recreated faculty’s role. It is interesting to speculate for a moment what an institution in which faculty defined their work in these languages might be like. The answer seems clear but a little daunting: utopian. A place where the lines between work and play are blurred, because each student and faculty member is fully invested in learning and discovering, creating, taking risks; where wonder and surprise are valued; where each person is connected to the depth of their being, has emotional, spiritual and relational integrity; where myth and archetype are observed and enacted in such a way as to provide depth to the experience of life and understanding of what that life is; where scholars are passionate about their love of knowledge; where turning the world upside down is not terrifying but edifying; where the irrational is not feared and the limits of rationality are recognized; where emotions are acknowledged to be part of academic life and not repressed; where beauty and harmony and artistic expression are valued; where each member of the community makes and shares meaning and responsibilities consistent with these ideals."

"Utopian societies fail, but utopian ideals can be guides, reminders of our potential. It is not realistic in this society to ignore what accountants say, else your account becomes empty. … When one’s work is more influenced by the potential to increase income than by disciplinary needs, something is amiss. … There is little doubt in my mind that if such a university existed, the best faculty and the best students would flock to it. As a result, it would become one of the wealthiest and most productive institutions."

"It is time that we take responsibility for our own work, define our role broadly, and contribute to the society that supports us. Although we are not likely to escape public scrutiny, only if we are accountable to ourselves can we accountable to the public. Only if we reimagine our work, can we serve the soul of the world."

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