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IF I might paraphrase a popular bumper sticker, conflict happens , even in departments lucky enough to combine a fine faculty with strong leadership and plentiful resources; no one is immune, no single approach guarantees success. And when all is said and done, who would doubt that the management and resolution of departmental conflicts are less a question of technique than a matter of imponderables—the luck of the draw, timing, chemistry, the right word at the right moment, and, even more significant, that elusive fit between the cultural norms of a particular department and institution and a chair's own temperament and administrative style. This fit is quite crucial. If the fit is wrong, the energies and plans misaligned, no chair can press much of an advantage from a knowledge of a department's recent history or of how people and past events have shaped a collective character. Yet just as fortune, fate's sister, favors those who keep their nerve, 1 any chair must know not only how to manage conflict but also how to keep it from arising. When conflict does arise, as it must in any diverse professional group of people who work under changing expectations and circumstances, one must decide whether to circumvent a confrontation or take conflict head on. Like white-water rafters approaching rapids, chairs have to know when to skirt those frothing whorls and when to shoot them straight.
After eighteen years of teaching at a small private liberal arts college, I came to the University of Nebraska (UNL) to chair modern languages—a large diverse department of some one hundred people teaching ten languages to over three thousand students a semester. Restless and in receivership after a long history of instability and change, the department looked forward to better times. Any visitor could see the uncertainty, the white water, up ahead; at the same time, an impressive range of talents and temperaments was surely evident. Not only did faculty members show an enthusiasm for teaching and expertise in scholarly work, they also had the will to start over and trust in new leadership. Even more, as people strenuously disabused of clichés, they knew the difference between words and ideologies, rhetoric and hard work. Most members were clear and in agreement about general expectations, and they shared a basic aim: to build a department in which they would be proud to work.
As incoming chair I started with another major advantage: a new set of departmental by-laws, drawn up by consensus over the past year under the leadership of a respected, experienced interim chair. The revised by-laws established a more democratic governance and clarified the responsibilities and authority of the chair. As a public document it not only addressed the routine procedures for reappointment, tenure, promotion, and merit review but also articulated the ways a chair assigned members to various committees. At UNL, as in most academic institutions, service receives significantly less weight than teaching or scholarship does in the annual assessment of faculty performance; yet the by-laws reflected the recognition that little of enduring value is accomplished without participation by the entire faculty. Thus all members, according to rank and terms of employment, are expected to perform service tasks as professionally as any other academic endeavor. The point is central to the management of conflict; teaching and scholarly work of quality cannot be sustained if, in the absence of effective by-laws, a chair gives way to pressures that favor individual preferences and caters to personal entitlements, instead of using delegated authority to maintain a common commitment to departmental goals.
In effect, most conflicts arise in that complicated, illdefined area of professional obligations called service, particularly when an institution hardly pays attention to service and when little authority or respect is vested in the chair. Accordingly, in the name of academic freedom, some academic environments tacitly enjoin chairs not to provide leadership or even effective management. These institutions, in deference to a diffusely felt paranoia, appear to cultivate chairs as simply “conveners” of “facilitators.” Conveners not only run the risk of being manipulated by strong-willed or temperamental faculty members but actually base their style of management on the political objectives of coalitions and cabal groups. For this reason, while the ability to assign service work in productive ways is a feature of character, depending on an individual chair's capacity for leadership, much is accomplished when departmental by-laws affirm leadership by defining basic procedures and expectations, professionalizing service and the means to evaluate it effectively.
At UNL, in accordance with official faculty guidelines , the revised by-laws of modern languages stated departmental objectives, defined voting rights, and outlined unequivocally what constituted the chair's responsibilities in making recommendations for reappointments, promotion, and tenure. They by-laws also served to protect the probational status of untenured members, articulated the procedures for establishing committees, and emphasized a fair distribution of the work load, thereby ensuring the right of part-time temporary personnel to participate in curricular decisions. Having gained from the past a hardwon knowledge about what works and what is real, the faculty in modern languages had expressed their commitment to self-governance and had voiced their willingness, which they publicly acknowledged, to conduct business according to their own established rules and expectations.
Thus the department, despite frequent changes in leadership, had maintained a sense of integrity. People had not fallen prey to that corrosive sense, still alive in many academic cultures, that the smart thing to do, the admired behavior, is to act negatively, that is, to marshall the energies of one's wit and intelligence not to do work not to participate, thus to finesse obligations in a seemingly sophisticated, “brilliant” way. Too often this cultural norm for stardom prevails in academic life, tending to privilege flippancy at the expense of accountability. At UNL, whatever had been the troubles of the past, this sort of legerdemain had not occurred, and in response to a full-dress academic review, the department of modern languages had called precisely for a revision of policies to make members and the chair more responsive and more accountable to one another.
With revised by-laws in place as the basis for the resolution of conflict, a new chair, coming from the outside, could move to manage the white water—those sources of frustration, misunderstanding, and strife that do so much to undermine the morale of a department. Although morale is hard to define, it permeates all aspects of the academic enterprise, and is crucial to the health of a department. A report from Smith College that surveys current attitudes among faculty members lists morale as a priority for drawing and keeping teachers; it is more important than salary and benefits, teaching load, sabbatical policy, job opportunities for spouses or partners, quality of students, and child care. While the interplay of all these factors creates a climate conductive to morale, in the end morale is more than the sum of those parts and constitutes the basis for quality in academic life (Gingrich).
With respect to the departmental management of conflict and resolution, the role of the chair in creating and maintaining morale is critical. As C.S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters —which ought to be required reading for any chair—morale, which depends on trust, is what in the end wins or loses souls. In a mismanaged department, where a weak chair makes certain there is little or no trust, faculty members soon sense a vague uneasiness that keeps increasing; and as their reluctance to face it cuts off the possibility of any real joy, their own chair, indifferent to or in denial about a deteriorating morale, starts doing the devil's worK: “You can,” an infernal old Screwtape tells a junior demon, make a person
waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return. … Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why. … Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. (35–36)
Rather than let a department drift in this way, effective chairs can post the milestones, addressing directly the main issues and areas of conflict; after all, these conflictive areas give rise to what defines our mission in higher education. They are the reason we do what we do; even more, every area of conflict points to those conditions that, when set aright, make it possible to do what we want to do—improve teaching, motivate the alienated tenured faculty member, increase the scholarly productivity of the faculty, delegate work, develop commitment to departmental goals, give encouragement to poor teachers or the burnedout faculty member, conduct honest evaluations of faculty performance, deal with difficult people, and get faculty members to serve on committees, to do advising, to be in their offices during posted office hours, to spend time with students. 2
The courage to confront and resolve conflict calls for the concept of stewardship in chairing, which is more than management and certainly more than simple maintenance—acting as caretaker, complying with procedures, pushing paper. The desire for harmony and amiability cannot be indulged at the expense of the basic obligation to foster productivity, accomplish common objectives, and build quality within a department. In this complex endeavor, effective chairs often resist seeking close friends among their immediate colleagues and admit to a certain loneliness on the job. At the same time, support from one's chief academic officer is indispensable, as is that of friends outside the department, particularly the counsel of other chairs in foreign languages.
In advocating closer ties among chairs, a main purpose of the ADFL Summer Seminars, I am mindful of the advice about friendship and professional work that Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson gave her son Andrew Jackson in 1781, when he was fourteen years of age. That letter, now deemed apocryphal, is still pertinent to the experience of a beleaguered chair, who knows more than most that no one person, however talented, can ever hope to accomplish what a handful of people, motivated by a chair's example, can do on their own. The advice in this letter of Elizabeth Jackson's reads as follows:
Andrew, if I should not see you again, I wish you to remember and treasure up some things I have already said to you: in the world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or to be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime—not merely a fault or a sin but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. 3
On his forty-eighth birthday, 15 March 1815, General Jackson was said to have repeated his mother's words, which he declared “had been the law of life.” I recall them here because they express an important principle of reciprocity and respect that must inform the ways a chair approaches conflict. In effect, reciprocity and respect form the basis of three useful concepts: merit, openness, and “going local.”
By merit I mean values, priorities, goals: as the chair and as members of the department, we need to ask among ourselves what it is that we really want to do. What are the criteria, and how can we accomplish our goals most effectively? What could this department do if everyone wanted to do it, and how, as chair, can I get them to do it? What are the ways to bring a faculty to recognize as a group what, as individuals, they have declared meritorious, a principal value, an essential task? Posing the question of merit among colleagues, individually and in public forum, reaffirms what needs to be done and begins to develop a kind of collective conviction about the departmental mission. In the long run, developing convictions is more motivating than making money, since the question of merit, values, and goals addresses what we, as a department, can accomplish and instills the self-confidence that says, in effect, that we can do what we want to do, what we have acknowledged is the reason we chose the profession. Asking these questions helps strip away old assumptions, old habits, as Toni Morrison does when writing of Pilate in Song of Solomon:
When she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair. That was one thing she didn't want to think about anymore. Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.
(149)
Bruno Bettelheim construes this kind of keen-edged questioning as an exercise in freedom—in his words, “freedom from ghetto thinking”—from compliance, resignation, and the inability to take action from denial and from the acceptance of things as they are, when these things are unspoken, injurious, disabling (262). Freedom from ghetto thinking calls for the second concept, openness—the ability to sit down with ourselves, with colleagues, and state our convictions, our feelings, to ask ourselves as chairs, as department members, how we, as a department, want to live. What is most valuable to us? What do I, as chair, need to know to accomplish my goals? If I were in a member's position, what would I want to know? If the members were in mine, how would they feel? Of what are they, am I, afraid? Reciprocity is the key: the chair's responsibility is to create the conditions and opportunities that enable faculty members to do their best work, and the faculty members' responsibility is to behave in a way that enables a chair to do just that. They need to know what I believe, I need to know what they believe; we both need to know what is possible, realistic, effective. Merit is not possible without openness, since we have to feel free, unthreatened, to ask the questions that define our objectives. Communication based on openness and merit is critical to cooperative problem solving, in contrast to other systems on management that rely on political strategies and bureaucratic approaches, that substitute jargon for direct speech, enthrallment for clear thinking, gestures for effective action.
“Going local,” the third concept simply means taking decisions down to the lowest possible level. Chairs need to seek out the people who know how to get things done, to recognize that the hierarchy of academia has little relevance. Part-time temporary help, secretaries, and bookkeepers often know more, have more enlightened views, and have more common sense than most deans or tenured professors. A bit of folklore recently passed anonymously around our office reverses the academic hierarchy: the powers and prerogatives of deans and department heads rest entirely on the capable shoulders of secretaries. Going local looks like this:
DEANS
Leap tall buildings in a single bound
Are more powerful than a locomotive
Are faster than a speeding bullet
Walk on water
Give policy to God
DEPARTMENT HEADS
Leap short buildings in a single bound
Are more powerful than a switch engine
Are just as fast as a speeding bullet
Walk just below the surface of the water
Talk to God
DEPARTMENTAL SECRETARIES
Lift tall buildings and walk under them
Kick locomotives off the tracks
Catch speeding bullets in their teeth and eat them
Freeze water with a single glance
Are God
In an ingenious essay entitled “Managing a Zoo: The Total Foreign Language Department,” Jean-Pierre Barricelli writes of “how rich the academy is in providing experiences,” of how “the job of managing a foreign language department, like that of coaching an athletic team, involves the building of character— your own character,” and he is so right. As yet I have not enjoyed what he terms a king of “epiphany”—that sudden sensation of having become a wiser person because, as he says, “there are no psychological problems or personality quirks that I have not faced” (8). Quirks keep coming, so, on the desk, up front, and in full view are three totemic devices that have proved useful when, under the duress of conflictive exchanges, one must brace to stay focused on merit, openness, and going local. The three items are these:
1. A tantrum mat. A tantrum mat is a piece of paper that bears the imprint of two shoes, outlined in black ink. The instructions read, “When the need for throwing a tantrum is felt, place both feet on the space provided and jump rapidly up and down. Incoherent screaming is also permissible. If symptoms persist, see your nearest departmental chair.” A tantrum mat, posted between a chair and a contentious colleague, indicates that feelings, however outrageous, have a place to go and that a dash of humor enhances a modest therapeutic insight—once called on the mat, unspoken, unrecognized feelings find a name; they stand acknowledged. A kind of transformational magic occurs; standing as a concrete image, a feeling or idea often appears to the eye as an object; it turns into something tangible, into an identified problem that has heft, substance and thereby becomes substantial, imbued with importance. Now we can grasp, get a handle on the problem; we can talk about obstacles, objects, objectives and not about ourselves. Tantrum mats also convey a sense of confidentiality, since what is stomped out on the mat stays put, between my colleague and me, while the immediacy of being posted in-between says, in effect, that we each have the right to say what we really thing—tantrum mats are reciprocal and fair.
2. A piece of wood. The second symbol, a stick stripped of bark, has a dual significance that serves to protect chairs from complacency, from the grand general idea that they know it all. On the one hand, as chairs, we have the clout that goes with the responsibility to make decisions; on the other, we still have to stay stripped down, wary of power and alert to the fakery of administrative jargon—we cannot cannot risk becoming dead wood. Like the Toni Morrison character who cut her hair, chairs must persist in asking those basic questions, keeping close to essentials, doing, in the main, they ask of others—stay on the job, teach a language course as well as a graduate seminar, initiate a research project, give a courtesy lecture, keep office hours, return phone calls, talk to students. Vigilant chairs must also protect the probationary status of junior members, never expecting them to occupy positions that call for supervising directly the work of tenured faculty members. A stripped-down stick—or a carrot—helps when chairs need to remind senior faculty members that rank and privilege carry the obligation to serve as section heads, graduate advisers, or chairs of search committees.
3. An iguana. If chairs initiate dialogue, establishing a working trust among colleagues, they can bring out hidden special gifts. I visualize these gifts as “iguanas” that deserve “diamond collars”—opportunity, recognition, commitment. The figurine of an iguana, pacing among tiny plastic trees on my desktop, comes from a former student who translated Lorca's Libro de poemas and reminds me of those less visible talents colleagues can bright to their work. Like Lorca's diminutive creatures—lizards in “little white aprons” or tree frogs that “freckle the silence with little green dots,” iguanas, when recognized, infuse the most routine chore with an unexpected liveliness and beauty.
In the tropical forests of Panama, green iguanas have become a source of protein that sustains a whole people, and their curly spines, droll faces, and translucent scales are beautiful and unique. In his essay on managing a zoo, Jean-Pierre Barricelli speaks of stuffy intellectuals as camels, of departmental poets as swans, of talkers as cockatoos, and of activists as giant hamsters “who thrive on the martyred exhaustion of being on every committee on campus” (8), and we all know what it is like, in badly managed departments, to work with cobras and gangsters. The iguana is different. It stands for all the varieties of talent, insight, and energy that abound in the forest of foreign language departments. While we often cannot see them, finding them out, allowing them space, giving them diamond collars, is perhaps the greatest achievement, as well as the greatest pleasure, of any chair.
The author is Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 4–6 1992, in Berkeley, California.
1 Here I recall a phrase from Logue's account of books 16 to 19 of Homer's Iliad (20).
2 The list comes in part from a faculty workshop led by Ann Lucas on the topic Departmental Chairs as Change Agents, sponsored by the Teaching and Learning Center at UNL on 12 March 1992. I wish also to acknowledge the advice and views of Jack Adam, associated with seminars on business ethics and management
3 My thanks to Sharon Macpherson, resident historian at the Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson, for providing the letter and the caveat about its questionable origin.
Barricelli, Jean-Pierre. “Management a Zoo:” The Total Foreign Language Department.“ ADFL Seminar West, University of Southern California. Los Angeles: 16–19 June 1980. ADFL Bulletin 12.2 (1980): 8–13. [Show Article]
Bettelheim, Bruno. “Freedom from Ghetto Thinking.” Freud's Vienna and Other Essays. New York: Vintage-Random, 1991 243–71.
Gingrich, Judith. “Shaping the Faculty Profile.” Smith College Alumnae Quarterly Summer 1992: 14–17.
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. New York: Bantam-Doubleday, 1982.
Logue, Christopher. War Music. New York: Farrar, 1983.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977.
© 1993 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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