Yesterday’s listening session started with a lot of talk from President Gold and Interim Chancellor Ankerson. So much so, that I turned to a friend and said, should I stand up behind this student so they get the message that they need to listen to us? As soon as I did, a line of faculty formed behind me. Ankerson said we would have to stand there for a while. The student, bless her heart, was having absolutely none of it.
People Want Clear Communication, We Got Word Salad
I asked how Ankerson was going to protect faculty from decisions made using faulty metrics and how she would take feedback on the numerous errors, such as judging a graduate-only department by undergraduate credit hours produced and Academic Analytics own statements about how the data cannot be used within institutions to compare departments. What I got back was word salad about process.
Anyone who has been paying attention since mid-September knows that the process used railroaded faculty voice at every turn. Departments had a mere 45 minutes with APC to make their case. The policy says all faculty, staff, and students may speak. The APC report made clear that no departments should be eliminated and more time was needed. Clearly, the process was not followed.
But what really got me is that Ankerson equated this process to promotion and tenure. Ya know, there are standards and processes.
Except none of us knew what was in the metrics until they were handed to us. None of us knew that goals had changed because, unlike promotion and tenure documents, not a single one of us was consulted about what should go in a comprehensive accounting of each and every diverse unit on campus. That was very much changing the rules after the game had already been played. Or as someone described yesterday, it’s like driving the speed limit down I-80 and getting pulled over because someone changed the sign to 55 behind you.
Very different from the promotion and tenure standards in my college, CEHS, which I have been studying and working towards since they came out in 2018. Every year since, I have crafted an annual review to demonstrate my progress towards first the standards for associate professors and now the standards for full professors. In 2021, I submitted my tenure and promotion materials that demonstrated not only that I had I met, but also exceeded those standards, including statements from senior faculty in my department about how my leadership of curriculum revision in our Ed.D. program met the criteria for promotion to full professor. My department letter included several quotations from external reviewers about the quality and contributions of my research. In 2022, I was awarded tenure and promotion.
But had I not been successful any stage of that process, there are processes for faculty to correct and add things, to appeal a decision. There were no processes at any stage to correct anything, including the packets given to the BOR that included so many errors; if I had taken my favorite pink marking pen to it, it would just be pink.
And as I stated to Chris Marks and Rich Bischoff, had I not received tenure and promotion, I would have been given a full academic year to find a new position. Not six months. I would also like to point out, as the CEHS promotion and tenure committee did, that members of both TMFD and EDAD have been successful in meeting those standards with a high level of consistency.
As Ankerson was spewing word salad at me, I was looking at her like she was nuts. Sometimes, I find it to be useful to not control my facial expression. She seemed aghast that I would look at her like she was nuts. And yet, you want to lecture me about the administrative process? Literally, that is what I teach in EDAD.
Rebuilding Trust
I also heard a lot about how we need time to rebuild trust. That is a pair of people who need some remedial coursework in educational administration. Excuse me while I pull my favorite text on the subject, Trust in Schools, from 2002. While this work comes out of the K-12 world, I think it provides a clear eyed understanding of what actually contributes to relational trust required in educational organizations (and really, any organization). Below are some excerpts from an article from the same authors, Anthony Bryk and Barbara Scheider.
Respect
Relational trust is grounded in the social respect that comes from the kinds of social discourse that take place across the school community. Respectful exchanges are marked by genuinely listening to what each person has to say and by taking these views into account in subsequent actions. Even when people disagree, individuals can still feel valued if others respect their opinions.
We heard from Gold and Ankerson yesterday that faculty need to be respectful. And Regent Kenney lectured everyone at BOR about the same earlier in the day. You cannot boo the BOR, but the BOR can absolutely disregard what you have to say and then blame you for getting eliminated all while painting themselves as victims.
Across the board, up and down, our leaders have missed that respect is not just speaking in a polite tone of voice. Respect, according to Bryk and Scheider requires genuine listening. It requires ensuring that people have a voice and that voice is heard and used in future actions. Gold spent a lot of time talking about how he read a staff senate report and was putting recommendations into action. Good for him, but faculty members need to have a voice, and it needs to be heard and they need to see it in leadership actions. First and foremost, faculty need a voice in the process of hiring a new Chancellor. Not at the end and not just one of many committee members.
Personal Regard
Personal regard represents another important criterion in determining how individuals discern trust. Such regard springs from the willingness of participants to extend themselves beyond the formal requirements of a job definition or a union contract.
We have repeatedly asked that our leaders stick their necks out at least delay termination notices. Not a single one thinks they can walk over to Varner Hall and say, listen, you cannot do this to people who have given their lives to this institution, who have kids in school, elderly parents they care for, who are in their career prime. I have only felt a sense of disregard in the entire process. It has been demoralizing and dehumanizing. The thing I learned the most from being told I and my department are subpar is that we’re, I mean we were, a top department nationally in our field. That’s because, in addition to being superstars, everyone in EDAD is humble and has bought into the notion that we all do better when we share the load. If the admin wants to rebuild trust, they are going to need to bend over backwards to demonstrate their support of faculty. I would suggest they pick up Kevin McClure’s very excellent book, The Caring University to learn about all the meaningful ways they can demonstrate we are people and not cogs in a machine.
Competence
School community members also want their interactions with others to produce desired outcomes. This attainment depends, in large measure, on others’ role competence…Instances of negligence or incompetence, if allowed to persist, undermine trust.
Competency is my personal favorite component of relational trust. Because it is the one that really makes it clear that being nice is necessary but insufficient to generate the kind of trust that allows people to row together in the same direction. As a leader, you cannot be incompetent and hope to have anyone’s trust. Chancellor Bennett is a prime example of how incompetence causes people not to trust you. Similar to an open search with faculty input, we need competent leaders. We cannot be taking Southern Miss’s cast-offs. We cannot just elevate the UNMC Chancellor who doesn’t know what it is like to run a comprehensive university. Nor can we just bring in Top Guns with no actual experience of leading a comparable university or system. Given how much we pay administrators at UNL, this shouldn’t be that hard of a lift, as if they say that is how you attract quality leaders. I think quality leaders probably don’t want to touch UNL or NU with a 10-foot pole at this point. Because of all of the other aspects of relational trust that have been violated.
Personal Integrity
The first question that we ask is whether we can trust others to keep their word. Integrity also demands that a moral-ethical perspective guides one’s work. Although conflicts frequently arise among competing individual interests within a school community, a commitment to the education and welfare of children must remain the primary concern.
Have our leaders kept their word? Largely, I would say they have not. We were told initially that we could be retained. We were subsequently told there is no process to retain tenured professors, or professors of practice, except for a few who have received verbal or written offers so far. The Dean collected our CVs and sent them to the other chairs. I sent him the Cliffnotes version of the federal grant proposal I wrote with a colleague in special education to create an Ed.D. program for special education administrators. His response was that’s nice.
We were told they would listen. And then we were told that’s nice, but we are not going to fix the metrics so that actually we are not dividing by zero. From Grad Studies to the Registrar’s office, our requests for data for our APC report were denied, with emails stating they had been told not to share information with us. The complete and utter lack of teach-out plans also demonstrates a lack of commitment to the education and welfare of 500+ students who are currently paying tuition.
If UNL and NU leaders want to regain trust, I suggest they all get their ducks in a row, their poops in a scoop, to be on the same page with plans and communication. And I suggest they stop lying to our faces and in the press. Gold needs to stop saying the APC recommended these cuts. They did not. He needs to stop saying him putting flawed information in front of the BOR that said he recommended the elimination of departments was just process.
And they need to stop spewing word salad at us. If you think some of the smartest, hardest-working human beings on the planet are gonna go just allow nice words to wash peacefully over us without listening to the content… well, you are asking for what has happened, low morale, which turns into low-quality work and faculty turnover. And ultimately, the destruction of the university that Willa Cather described as rising up from the plains to serve farm kids with an “atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness.”
