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THERE are times when I think that anyone who reads the Chronicle of Higher Education regularly is sure to go bonkers. While that fine publication does chronicle and celebrate the accomplishments and advances of higher education, it also presents a litany of doom, gloom, conflict, and criticism that surely must ruin the digestion of any professor foolish enough to read it over breakfast. The winds of change seem to be blowing into every aspect of our work, sometimes to cleanse, but just as often to threaten much of what we hold dear, and nowhere more pointedly than in the humanities.
Many of my colleagues are now concerned over new demands for accountability, diminished resources, revisions of our review and reward procedures, and new educational methodologies, including technology. A major result has been general discouragement, or at least grave trepidation on everyone's part, often accompanied by a troubling difference in the responses of the senior and junior faculties: while everyone is concerned about somehow keeping the best of our profession intact, junior faculty members seem more likely to find opportunities in change than their older colleagues are. Thus foreign language chairs are faced with leadership challenges that require them to mediate between new forces and old practices as well as between youthful enthusiasm and proven experience.
Part of the solution is for chairs to develop ways to translate external demands into palatable tasks to maintain faculty productivity and curricular development. And I choose my terms advisedly here. Unlike much administrative jargon we read every day, “maintain” acknowledges that the humanities are in a period in which avoiding substantial retrenchment constitutes great success. And “curricular development” may have to mean only acceptable change. Further, when chairs “mediate,” they must eschew partisanship, not for lack of conviction but because the role of mediator demands it.
The key elements in such mediation include framing each situation to encourage faculty members to see themselves as part of the solution rather than the problem and as having a desirable diversity of views rather than an inviolable tradition. Further, the vagueness and generality of most outside demands need to be seen as affording departments an opportunity to provide specific responses that are in their best interest.
The recent demands for increased assessment of student progress offer a familiar example. Chairs who accept the major role in developing their department's assessment procedures risk faculty disaffection with the result, while assessment programs designed by faculty members (assisted by chairs mediating between faculty goals and administrative requirements) are likely to engender a productive sense of professorial ownership. Faculty members who feel threatened by assessment must be included in the planning process so as to generate specific measures that may assuage their concerns. Fortunately, demands for assessment are usually general enough to allow departments considerable latitude in method. And while chairs are always tempted, often justifiably, to do things themselves for efficiency, it is worth spending the extra time and effort to mediate a situation like this one.
Assessment is rather easy to configure since it can clearly improve our work if we design it right. Other areas, however, are not so simple. Recently a language department I know well encountered a challenge when the institutional administration, responding to outside pressures for accountability, implemented an extensive merit-review process that required augmented description, documentation, and evaluation. Faculty members were concerned that their traditional emphasis on teaching would be diminished and their workload increased. Probationary faculty members worried that the requirements for tenure were indirectly being raised, and senior faculty members worried that the strengths they had developed would be devalued. The chair declined to champion either the administration's demands or the faculty's concerns but instead mediated a solution in which the faculty developed an elaborate point system that satisfied all parties. Alternative routes to high scores accommodated diverse faculty interests, reasonable requirements for total points responded to the workload concerns, and a detailed description of requirements addressed the administration's goals. Arguable though a point system might be, the chair mediated the process successfully by asking, How can the faculty organize the specifics to their advantage? rather than How can we persuade the administration it is wrong? or How can I persuade the faculty to give in?
In a similar case, probationary faculty members responded to increased requirements for tenure by requesting released time for research in a department that traditionally had not granted any and had concentrated on teaching. The senior faculty opposed any change, feeling threatened and jealous, and of course there was no money for such a program. The chair mediated the issue by establishing a committee that included members from both sides and led the members through the questions and possible solutions. The older members came to realize the necessity for the released time while the younger ones became better aware of how the program would affect their colleagues' teaching loads. One cannot hope to reach such rosy solutions always, but the approach I describe can improve the chances for success.
In yet another situation, a society enamored of computers demanded that the foreign language department climb on the bandwagon of technology. The enthusiasm of the computer-literate junior faculty was nicely balanced by the uneasiness and honest skepticism of the older generation. Money and space were problems, not to mention a technology that seemed to be changing every month. The “palatable task” was the involvement of several senior faculty members in planning a new multimedia learning center. They learned from an outside consultant and from their juniors, and by the time the design phase was over, most of them had decided that they could learn what they needed to know without being embarrassed. That the older faculty might have begun the planning process to stop it became irrelevant, and the chair functioned again as mediator and facilitator, never becoming identified with one solution or another. The department came to see the demands as generalities, the specifics of which it could formulate to its advantage.
Finally, the department addressed in much the same way the old problem of students voting with their feet in a time of declining resources. Professors of a less popular language wanted to continue offering a number of poorly enrolled sections to enhance opportunities for students to elect the language, and they wanted to fill a vacant line to maintain the quality of the major. The administration, however, demanded that the bucks follow the students to a more popular language. The chair forsook the traditional role of the administration's representative to serve as a mediator, and the department as a whole took up the problem. The members focused on working out a solution rather than standing in opposition to the administration. They recast the external demands as an opportunity for needed and desirable reallocation within the department, and the faculty members in the less popular language came to see that the change enhanced rather than threatened their program's security: larger enrollments in each of fewer sections would make the program seem stronger.
But my examples are not all of success. In another recent situation established professors of literature felt ill at ease with the department's efforts to hire a new person with strong skills in multimedia work and second language acquisition studies. Mediation by the chair seemed to be going well in the planning and screening stages. The arguments for an individual with these qualifications were well received, the presence of a new multimedia lab demonstrated the desirability of a technologically sophisticated new faculty member, and the search proceeded apace.
When the flesh-and-blood job candidate reached campus, however, things fell apart quickly. Faculty members interested primarily in teaching literature complained that the candidate's presentations were trivial or unintelligible, although the presentations were actually significant and clear. What also seemed clear was that what had appeared acceptable in theory was frightening, or at least off-putting, in practice. And unfortunately there was no time or opportunity for the chair to mediate. Both the literature-oriented faculty members and the candidate formed negative impressions, which precluded the making or acceptance of an offer.
The chair had failed to perceive the full scope of the differences. The early mediation in the planning stages went well because no one was prepared to describe adequately what such a new person would be interested in, what the candidate's research would be like, and what kind of foundation one would need to make an informed response to and evaluation of the presentations. Instead, there was somewhat of a “we really ought to buy ourselves one of those” mentality, which should have rung alarm bells in the chair's office. One can reach a short-term agreement when neither side is well prepared to articulate the truly important arguments, but to do so is a fool's errand.
One must similarly note that successful mediation of change requires preparation and usually takes more time than one would suppose or care to spend. Early in my experience as chair, I mediated briefly between the teachers of a very popular language and those of a much less popular one. The instructors of the more popular language wanted to alleviate their heavy teaching loads by using a vacant line from the less popular language. Obviously, the instructors of the less popular language were opposed.
The logic of the situation seemed to favor the more popular language, but I didn't consult thoroughly with faculty members in a third language, one somewhat popular but not particularly so. They worried that if we pirated a line from their neighbors, we would probably come sailing into their own harbor soon thereafter. I didn't find out their opinion until it came time to count votes: they strongly opposed the measure and it failed. Inadequate preparation—inadequate tilling of the ground to discover all the salient views—doomed the mediation from the start, and we formed no palatable task in response to outside pressure to make better use of our resources or lose them.
Of course some changes demanded by our current circumstances must be opposed, but we need to choose our battles carefully. A recent example involves the move toward greater articulation and transferability of credit among the various types of institutions of higher education in a state: community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities. The universities were under political pressure to sign off on the foreign language courses offered by the colleges and community colleges, so that students could transfer their credit to universities. Students and politicians supported increased enrollments at community colleges in particular because tuition and costs were lower there. On the surface, the arguments in favor of signing off seemed strong, although university faculties were concerned about potential declines in university enrollments.
The academic considerations, however, were far different. While students from some institutions did well in more-advanced university foreign language courses, students from other institutions routinely could not do so. If the academic integrity of the university was to he maintained, the institution could not sign a blanket agreement to accept all foreign language courses from all institutions in the state.
This was not a time for mediation, for seeking a solution in the specifics, or for constructing a palatable task out of an onerous requirement. It was a time for old-fashioned opposition, digging in one's heels, and saying no. That approach has been successful so far, and perhaps to no small extent because we rarely use it. The success certainly has not been for lack of vigorous initiatives from the opposition.
For most issues, however, I would argue that in the winds we feel today we must bend so as not to break. Chairs need to be mediators seeking to help their faculties find, in the specific details, the best responses to the need for change. But when outside demands are intolerable, we must stand firm.
The author is Professor and Chair of Foreign Languages at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. This article is based on her presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 27–29 June 1996, in Columbus, Ohio.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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