Everyone knows this story, or a variant of it, even if it never hits the papers and no one wants to name names. It goes like this: Professor X simply won’t retire. It’s not that he/she (though it’s mostly he) is staying on for themselves, you understand. It’s for the department. If he/she (mostly he) left, there simply wouldn’t be any guarantee that a new tenure line would go back to the department. That position might go to another department – or another faculty entirely. And that would never do – think of the department!
So, let’s assume for a second here that the person saying this is on the up; that he/she (mostly he) really means this and is not using it as a rationalization for staying on for more years at a salary which is likely north of $150,000. Let’s not accuse anyone of any motive other than what to their minds is altruism on behalf of their discipline. It is still an act unconscionable selfishness, and goes to the heart of what is wrong with universities (from a management perspective, at least).
What’s important to recognize here is that most scholars have divided loyalties. On the one hand, they are all employed by a specific institution. On the other hand, they are each members of at least one global scholarly community (which, for the sake of convenience if not perfect accuracy, we will call “disciplines”). The institution gives you the paycheck, but the standards for hiring, promotion and (more importantly) professional standing and prestige are all effectively set by the discipline.
Now, these divided loyalties probably wouldn’t matter much were it not for one fateful decision that universities made over a century ago; namely, to permit discipline-based organizations – that is, “departments” – to be the fundamental organizing unit of the university. What that did was give these global communities significant say in how pretty much every university gets run. And to be blunt, those global communities are not overly sensitive to the local needs institutions need to serve and the local conditions under which institutions operate.
And so it is with Professor X’s motives. He/she (usually he) does not care about the health of his or her faculty or university. It may make eminent sense for the institution to transfer a faculty line from his department to another due to changes in student demand. Doesn’t matter: the discipline comes first!
But just think about the way the discipline comes first. It’s not about the need to make scholarly contributions to the discipline. A professor’s status at a university is immaterial here: plenty of retired profs continue to make scholarly contributions for years after getting their last paycheque. No, in this case the professor is supporting the discipline simply by being a body taking up space. Making numbers. Swelling the internal political heft of the unit. Denying this space to other disciplines who might need to make a hire. And why? To ensure that the discipline’s local base will retain as much political influence as possible. Period.
And this, recall, is the altruistic scenario, the one where the professor is being obstinate for “altruistic” reasons and not just to hang to the paycheck. It’s unconscionable, frankly. If you want an example of how difficult it is to manage universities along rationalist lines, look no further than this.
Quick note: I’ll be off the blog next week to recharge a bit. See you on October 30th.
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Hi Alex,
Surely, Professor X is teaching his/her (usually his) full load of courses, right? So, his/her (usually his) departure would leave a teaching hole, right? And with that hole not being filled, Department X’s curriculum / course offerings would have to change. And, in most cases that I see, Professor X is also attracting research money, supervising graduate students, and serving on grad committees, so Department X’s graduate program takes a hit. Indeed, if Professor X has a teaching reduction, that is likely due to research productivity in the form of funding and students.
But, yeah, maybe Area Y is more sexy right now, and the Senior Admin doesn’t mind hammering Department X so that it can hire in Area Y. That’s where we have to remember that the Senior Admin is transient, in for five years then off to the next appointment in many cases, crowing about their contributions to Y while X lies a mess. No, I think that faculty have to be the guardians and deciders of curriculum and programs, since, but for a few, and unlike almost every Senior Administrator, they have a career-long commitment to the institution.
Perhaps you meant that Professor X has no meaningful funding, few if any students, and has teaching limited to a few tiny-enrolment courses, so that the value of the contributions to the bottom line of the university is in question? Well, minimally, the Senior Admin has the ability to assign teaching of bigger courses, etc., so that X pull his/her (usually his) weight in this area.
“supervising graduate students”
Many universities forbid the taking of new graduate students by professors past the age of 60 as the professors can’t supervise to the end of the students’ program.
A wise decision.
And one might see the graphic atop Jim Woodgett’s twitter feed. https://twitter.com/jwoodgett
That is a ridiculous policy (not allowing faculty with ongoing appointments to supervise students once the faculty member turns 60) because we don’t have mandatory retirement (at 65 or any age) in Canadian Universities, and given that many faculty members nowadays don’t get a tenure track position until they are in their mid to late 30s, many would not be in a position to retire at 65 to start with.
Furthermore, MSc programs are supposed to last 2 years, and PhD 4 or 5, so I don’t even see the logic of this. Can you tell me where exactly this policy exists ? Certainly not at my institution.
Was looking for the “Like” button to press.
All I can say is “I wholeheartedly concur”!!! At the end of the day, however, one has to wonder how many of our 65+ years old colleagues choose to remain on board for those highly questionable “altruistic” reasons vs. those who stick on for the fat paycheck (and benefits package). Regardless of their rationale, the common consequence of their actions is to delay the much needed entry of young and dynamic women and men into academic careers.
And don’t even get me started on the topic of disciplinary silos and selfishness. As a still “green” dean at University B in the early 2000’s, I floated the idea of doing away with departments (5) in a professional faculty that counted less than 100 regular faculty members. No need to tell you that this “balloon” was quickly shut down and that I did not even dare raise the matter again when I became dean of a slightly larger faculty (3 departments, 1 school, more than 100 regular faculty members) at University C a few years after.
What are even worse than the status quo w/r to departments are exercises of “partial de-siloing” through the merger of a limited number of departments within a college or a faculty. This happened when I was a faculty member at University A where I was “conscripted” into becoming the first head of a newly merged department that proved to be (during the 3 highly frustrating years of my headship) utterly disfunctional, which prompted me to move to University B before my term was over! And the dean who succeeded me at University B imposed his own “partial de-siloing” by eliminating one department and dispersing its faculty members among the 4 remaining ones. This did not work so well either.
My advice: “De-siloing” makes plenty of sense in the inter-/multi-/trans-disciplinary world in which we live. “De-siloed” educational institutions would do a much better job at providing the kind of flexible and rapidly evolving education that our students need in order to succeed in the careers that exist now as well as in those that have yet to be created. But there are nos “shades of grey” in the process of “de-siloing”; either you do it or you don’t!
In times of resource centered management practices, this primarily becomes an issue for conversations between department chairs and their faculty members. If a faculty member still rightfully earns their full salary through their contributions to student training and tuition revenue, their scholarly productivity, and their participation in academic administration, then it is difficult to argue that they should leave simply because someone with authority considers another area of scholarly inquiry more valuable.
On the other hand, if their contributions to student education, scholarly productivity of the institution, and academic administration do not justify the paychecks any more, the faculty member becomes a drag on their home department and hurts their discipline by causing even larger cuts to the department in the future. In extreme cases, this could lead to closure of departments. Department chairs have to remain on top of this.
Mostly I would wish to concur with Dr. Kunze, above, and was tempted to leave it at that.
I think, however, that the blog post misses how much an intellectual life is long-term: careers (if we must use the term) are life-long. Northrop Frye continued to lecture into his eighties — would the students of Victoria College have been better off with someone young and dynamic? I doubt it. If anything, scholars in most humanities disciplines become better as they grow older.
To continue the example, I doubt that the University of Toronto has been strengthened by abandoning Frye’s field of comparative literature. Where an intellectual life is literally life-long, the life of a discipline of thought is centuries long, and will never achieve its contributions to civilization if it keeps being kneecapped in favour of some shiny new field that’s in temporary demand.
Abandoning (say) Chinese language and literature (as Oxford did in the 1950s) means embracing a sort of ignorance. Following trends, aiming at renewal, and so forth, are precisely what we shouldn’t aim for. Instead, we should build secular traditions.