Alternative Models of Professorial Roles: New Languages to Reimagine Faculty Work

How should faculty members think about their work? I believe that language is the key to thinking about faculty roles, because language shapes images of faculty, limits what we can think about them, and creates legitimacy for the chosen images. My purpose here is to consider various roles for faculty members, not to prescribe them. I hope to provide alternate languages that faculty members and others can use to imagine new roles, new ways for faculty members to work. By "roles" I mean the expectations that faculty members have for themselves and the expectations that others have for them. This is not an article about historical or sociological contexts and assumptions about faculty roles. I make the assertion that the language currently used at research universities to describe faculty work is constraining regardless of its source. It emphasizes quantity as opposed to quality, extrinsic as opposed to intrinsic characteristics of work, a lack of trust of faculty members, and an emphasis on the procurement of resources. The purpose of the article is to propose different languages to think about work. This scholarship involved finding examples of these languages on the premise that if faculty members can talk of their work in a new way, they can work in a new way. It is often the unseen changes, changes that come upon us slowly, without even our knowing, that are most important. It is not the number of articles we have published, nor the complaints in the newspapers, nor the question of who is in charge, nor our changes in status, nor the number of budget lines in our departments. Each may be important, may draw attention to itself, make us angry or happy; but these are changes on the surface only. More powerful changes take place when we talk about our lives at work in a different language. When a new language becomes pervasive, it reifies a new world. Our naming and identifying elements in that world make us imagine that no other world is possible. When I think about alternative models of the professorial role, I am thinking we need a new language to think about work. Only then can we reimagine what it is to be a faculty member. The language of the academy, by which I mean research university, has changed. I don't know when the change occurred; in fact, I may have only a romantic notion that the language I want to use to describe university work ever existed. But I am sure that the language we now use is poison. Once, the undergraduate curriculum held the faculty together: we taught and students learned, and that was our main engagement. After the success of the Manhattan Project and other uses of science in World War II, the research hegemony arose. Undergraduates, once the chief focus of faculty attention, became fodder for the graduate research enterprise; universities became not just big business, but big businesses. How do we talk about higher education now? This is the language I hear: efficiency, productivity, technology, credit hours generated, grants with overhead received, accountability, assessment, competition, costs, total quality management. This is not the language of education or morality or scholarship or learning or community; it is the language of counting, accountants, accountability and, to a greater or lesser extent, it is how we imagine our enterprise. For example, in responsibility centered budgeting, centralized monies are allocated back to subunits that are productive in two ways: in generating credit hours and receiving research grants with overhead. There is pressure to increase the size of classes, whether learning is improved for students or not, and pressure to increase the scale of funded research, whether the research is driven by need for knowledge or not. In both cases, resources for the institution are increased. The institution becomes easier to manage, but whether student learning and disciplinary knowledge are improved by such activities is less certain. …