|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ALLAN Tucker, in his book Chairing the Academic Department , begins a chapter on faculty development in this way:
The case can be made that the department chairperson's most important function is to foster the growth and development of faculty and staff members within the department. Experts in staff and personnel development contend that an organization's effectiveness depends heavily on an on-going, self-renewing program of human resources development. In the same way, an academic department's effectiveness depends largely on faculty development , a term coined to denote self-renewing activities for faculty members. (121)
There my subject is defined and its importance asserted by citation of expertise from the larger world of organization, a world to which the academic institution seems destined to have an ever stronger bond. But I do not quote Tucker to provide myself with the scholar's delight, the straw dog to pick apart. In fact I support certain aspects of the statement, and I hope to build on them in what follows. Please note, then, the following points:
We succeed in this area, then, not just as individuals, but as individuals who form a part of an internally interdependent group and, by extension, of a larger discipline and profession that improves as we do.
Let me begin by outlining briefly some of the obvious, and some perhaps not so obvious, elements of faculty development under three headings: what, by whom, and when? Later I move on to a fourth aspect—how?
First, what ? The three canonical areas of faculty development are teaching and course preparation, research and publication, and service within and without the academic community. Much that we as faculty members do and much that we as chairpersons can do in assisting others fall rather directly into these categories. That the functions are strongly interconnected we constantly proclaim; that the interconnection exists in faculty development we may not stress to such a degree. But if we believe that the process is one of self-development and that the individual's advancement is an enhancement of department, institution, and profession, then as each part grows so also does the whole. Let me add three other areas that may be less often thought of as faculty development but that are of surpassing importance. First is building an understanding of the academic environment, its expectations along with its limitations, the extent to which it is a system agreed upon by those who elect to participate in it, and the role it plays in the society it serves, a society that nurtures, depends on, and tolerates it. Second is instilling a comprehension of the incredible responsibility we faculty members assume as purveyors of information and attitudes, as observers and stimulators of intellectual growth and imagination, as role models, often unwitting and unwilling, to our students, and as inheritors of a mysterious, hard-won, poorly understood, and all but unique commodity called academic freedom. Third is creating a recognition and support of the self-image necessary to each of us as we enter this environment and begin to comprehend these responsibilities, most of which are not part of the doctoral program and many of which do not lend themselves to neat packaging or immediate grasp. To self-image one might add another self , the ability to be a self-starter, since faculty development must often depend on that capacity within the individual to initiate, respond to suggestion, organize, and seek out advice, aid, and criticism.
Next, faculty development by whom ? At the top of my responses is, obviously, oneself. But since we live in a community, the list must include peers, the chairperson of the academic unit, and in many situations deans and academic vice presidents. Mentoring, while one of the most useful tools in peer assistance, is not always a comfortable choice and as a technique is often not very well thought out, so at times it may seem counterproductive. My institution is now studying the forms of mentoring—informal and structured—that exist within our various units with the hope of finding ways of enhancing the personal and professional development of faculty members, both beginning and advanced. Another and perhaps surprising source of such development is our students themselves. We often forget that in a way they form the matrix within which our ideas, our skills, and our commitment to discipline and profession take shape and become efficiently operative. Individually and in class settings they can reflect what we are and what we are doing, and they may often make clear (if we read them well and in proper perspective) our effectiveness, our mistakes, and the directions in which we may need to grow. As much as we may tell them how important their evaluations are to us, they tend not always to believe us, and certainly they do not often understand the degree to which as intellectual companions, as reactive and participative audience, and as testing grounds for ideas and even our skills they play an active role in how we grow professionally. And then there is development brought about from outside the institution through stimulation and support of teaching projects, scholarship, research, and the presentation of our ideas orally or in print to our peers and to wider audiences. The sources for this support, which usually comes with considerable cooperation from within the institution as well, can range from reaction to a paper orally or as a referee; editorial advice, rejection, or acceptance; collaboration with others in research; grants from foundations, agencies, or even individuals; and, I suppose we should add, occasional royalties from the rare publication that achieves some commercial success.
The third heading is when ? Let me begin with one of the answers that may often be overlooked. I refer to the period when a graduate student is trying to piece out the potential, requirements, taboos, and public perceptions of this profession and begins to look for guidance from those with whom he or she has chosen to obtain the professional degrees. If we can now say that the principal characteristics that shape our personalities are mostly formed in the first years of life, so perhaps we ought to suggest that what we are to become as members of the professoriat is far more likely to be influenced by our graduate student years than we have heretofore at least consciously understood. It is in these years that our students look closely at how we as their professors choose and prepare our material, how we present it to them, how we share it with the profession, and how we relate to them, to our colleagues, to the institution, and sometimes to society and the outside world. They see our successes, our stresses, our human and intellectual wisdom, our pettiness or great-heartedness, and above all our advice to them as a generation looking to join us and ultimately to succeed us in our life's work. If that advice is not direct, it may be a result of a cumulative relationship. We must as faculty members keep in mind the degree to which our decisions and our performance in all aspects of that relationship shape our students as they pass through their graduate programs with us.
To this less conventional concept let me briefly add those times better recognized as faculty development. The need of the beginning colleague is, of course, pressing, though the person may be a bit touchy if the pressure is too obvious. The pretenure but experienced colleague has anxieties that often force overcommitment on the one hand and oversimplification in setting priorities on the other. Guidance here requires subtlety, sure-handedness, and a rapport that must come from an earlier relationship in order to ensure needed trust. Two final times for faculty development that have been much discussed recently occur during the middle-year blahs and the difficult “senior faculty” years. Phrases like “burn-out,” “frustration with the system,” “boredom with repetitiousness,” and “no sense of movement or inspiration” come to mind. The chairperson can often assist such colleagues by reassigning duties, offering challenges that play to the individual's strength, arranging extradepartmental contacts or responsibilities, giving some free time (although it may not seem to have been conventionally earned) with appropriate strings of expectation attached, or even by refusing to acknowledge the sometimes self-inflected ailments that seem so obvious to the individual. Most important is the recognition that faculty development is not restricted to younger faculty members and that creative response to the needs of more senior colleagues is both needed and surprisingly capable of useful results.
The fourth category how contains a list of options open to all of us as faculty members and certainly not limited to chairpersons. Instead of enumerating those choices, I propose to recall some of the ways we may assist one another—not always as senior to junior or tenured to untenured but sometimes as more equal partners—in what was earlier described as a program of “self-renewing activities” for the individual. I stress the self-renewing rubric again because much of our potential as enablers in faculty development falls into that category of collegial interaction that is one of the principal joys of the academic environment and one of the principal springboards to productivity. Although there may be something here of cracker-barrel philosophy, it comes from what I am and the experiences I have shared.
As the product of Iowa grandparents who brought me up in southern California and released me at the end of their lives to the somewhat questionable environment of the University of California at Berkeley, I can be expected to combine the pragmatism and mores of the rural Midwest with the tinsel and temporariness of depression-era Los Angeles and the educational and cultural excitement of the bay area. As a classicist I have had to look at two complex civilizations in all their aspects, sort out what I best loved and could best relate to in them, and interpret their accomplishments and their limitations to recent generations who have been hell-bent to see these societies mainly by analogy-hence my cautious, sometimes cynical, but usually practical response to most questions and relationships. Finally, as twice a dean and twice a chairperson, I have learned that the “art of the possible” defines not politics but, rather, academic administration and that the overused term interpersonal relations roughly defines the operative area in which we get most things done in academe, not the least being the assistance of our colleagues in their development.
That personal prelude will perhaps gain justification from the thematic developments in my composition. I have read a good deal about faculty development and have tried to develop myself (when I had time to remember that I was a faculty member) and assist others in so doing. From that experience I have tried to assemble some important attitudes, actions, and intentions that both help in the offering of that assistance and at the same time demonstrate to colleagues collegiality, availability, and the suggestion that dependence on help from others must be carefully used, carefully controlled, and carefully assessed. The result is a list, prepared to some extent by a chairperson, but more by a colleague who interacts with colleagues and has watched and in some ways assisted the development of their careers. Let me present it simply:
This list does not include such items as “assist in obtaining funding,” although that is clearly an important service in the process we are discussing. Rather, it is a behavioral list little suited to quantification, open to choice and amendment by any of us, and descriptive instead of prescriptive since each of us will choose how best to use our own potential most comfortably and most efficaciously. Let me comment on a few of these points.
Building self-confidence, which is affected by many other items on the list, is a valuable offering indeed if one can bring it off. The new assistant professor, fresh from a specialty in which he or she has been assured there is no other with comparable control, will generally have little opportunity to apply that specialty to teaching responsibilities. Rather, there will be assignments across the spectrum—some for which there has been real preparation, some for which there has been none. Chances for making poor choices, inadequate response to stressful situations or to difficult students, rejection of the first several manuscripts, and the observation that others seem to be sailing smoothly on a glasslike sea of success—all these contingencies are likely to converge on the young person, who can only be left wondering if shoe selling or bar-tending should have been so blithely abandoned. Following the suggestions on our list, not the least being listening and evoking from the individual the answers being sought, we can help build a self-confidence temporarily smothered by a concatenation of self-defined awkwardnesses. A little fruitful instruction by anecdote may be in order—but this antidote must be increasingly suppressed as you add to the number of your birthdays. Complementary to providing these accounts is the sharing of excitements or disappointments, being sure that it is his or her focus that is maintained, not yours. Praise can be a shallow help, but modest dollops can be incredibly useful. As an assistant professor at Penn I was also an assistant dean. When the time came to think of the next rank, the dean rather gruffly reminded me that I needed some more publications. I wrote three articles and got them published in relatively quick time. The dean, who was supportive of me in other ways, had made few positive comments about me as a scholar. When I handed him the three articles, he sat down and read them right through, returning promptly to my office to report that one of them—the dullest (I thought) of the three—delighted him and that he was now convinced that I had the makings of a good scholar. A slim tale, but one that still means much to me. A scholar of great accomplishment had taken the care to touch an appropriate nerve end for me at a very important time. Often our support does not have to involve a lot, but timing and manner can do much. Even advice on how or what to write to an editor can be of great aid to one who is sure that the letter already composed will damn the questioned manuscript eternally.
A final point: many of us in large universities or even small institutions forget how hard it may be for a younger faculty member to make contacts within the profession or outside the department. A few well considered introductions, the arranging of a reasonable external committee assignment, modest advice on where to send a paper proposal or what kind of topic is most likely to be looked on with favor—these are the services that build a relationship while a career is being launched. They are seldom resented, and they demonstrate a confidence in the newer member of the department that allows him or her quickly to feel a part of the profession and a part of the home unit. Surface security, intellectual combativeness, a bit of bravado often conceal real doubts about how the individual is being perceived by his or her colleagues and about what personal initiatives are possible or advisable at this stage of an academic career.
My discussion of faculty development has stressed the often overlooked value of personal relationships. Institutional and systematic development opportunities are there, of course, and the individual must be advised and aided in selecting and working through them. But the key to development in the academy is, I suggest, in that more subtle area of give-and-take wherein the community opens ranks to make room for the new individual who we all hope will be able to advance the boundaries of our field.
The author is Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University and a former president of ADFL. This article is based on a paper presented at the ADFL Seminar East, 2–4 June 1988, in Newton, Massachusetts.
Tucker, Allan. Chairing the Academic Department: Leadership among Peers . 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1984.
© 1989 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
