All Unhappy Departments Are Unhappy in the Same Ways

“I now understand that we are not special when it comes to difficulties in academic units. We all have a shared experience, and we can collaborate to find answers.”

The above quote comes from one of the participants in the Transforming Challenged Units conferences we conduct with representatives from troubled departments at universities from all over the country as part of our work at the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics. In these workshops, we’ve found that one of the key steps in helping colleagues acknowledge their challenges and start working toward a constructive strategy is to help them recognize that while there are always some unique features of their situation, the same basic issues arise in countless other troubled departments—that they are not the first to confront these challenges and try to find a way to move beyond them.

As we recount in our workshop case studies or examples (always anonymized) from other situations, participants frequently say things like, “How do you know so much about my unit?” Based on dozens of cases we have worked with, we see 10 recurring themes across troubled departments. As we will discuss, these rarely occur in isolation. Most often they appear in clusters, interacting with and exacerbating one another. It would be an extremely unlucky department that had all 10 of them—but a department that has one of the features likely will have others.

The 10 recurring features we’ve identified are:

1. Drift, or lack of shared mission. Troubled departments are most often characterized by visible shortcomings in the typical metrics of academic work: research productivity, student numbers or service outreach and impact. As with all the difficulties discussed here, it is hard to draw simple lines of cause and effect—such units often have poor morale, which is often the product of low status and achievement and a contributing cause to them. Additionally, there is often an underlying lack of agreement or commitment about what the mission of the unit ought to be—individuals might be productive and even thriving, on their own, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Success in some areas, like publishing, may come at the expense of a commitment to good teaching—and if students perceive this and choose other pathways, low enrollments can lead to other problems.

Sometimes this lack of shared mission is due to a paradigm shift in the field, which becomes visible in factions whose members have very different conceptions—theoretically or methodologically—about what the disciplinary focus of the unit even ought to be. Whatever the root cause, in nearly all cases there is an inability or unwillingness to come together to reconcile different conceptions of the unit’s mission and how each member can contribute to it.

2. Factions. Troubled units are invariably divided: by seniority, by gender, by racial or ethnic identities, by disciplinary or methodological disagreements, by commitments to more theoretical versus more applied and practical conceptions of the field, or by other differences. At a preliminary level, these factions can interfere with collective discussions about shared mission or other challenges facing the unit; in more serious cases, these factions might be in severe conflict with each other, leading to bitter arguments, shouting matches and personal insults. Sometimes these factions reflect an in-group/out-group dynamic, as a faction with power and status stands in tension with another group that feels excluded or disrespected.

3. Bullying, difficult individuals. Academia attracts (and protects) persons with strong egos and deeply held views about the subject matter of their field. Judgment and peer evaluations occur from the moment of hiring to every stage of promotion. For some, this takes the form of blunt and frankly stated assessments of what they consider to be inadequate work by others—to the critic this is the “tough love” of brutally honest criticism; to the recipient it is bullying, undermining and disrespectful.

Bullying can also take other forms, such as individuals who have learned that aggressive bluster is the way to get what they want from peers, staff or administrators. We want to emphasize that this is a learned behavior that persists in part because it gets rewarded. There are also what we call “victim bullies”—people who always seem to have a grievance, who feel perpetually put-upon, who have learned to put others on the defensive through their complaints and accusations. (And yes, of course, there are people who are actual victims, whose grievances are justified but not heard or properly addressed.)

4. Unproductive faculty meetings. In troubled units, members often dread (or even avoid) meetings with their colleagues. Occasions that should be about lifting up questions and issues for honest discussion and collective problem-solving become instead just one more venue for the underlying problems to be on display: factions, dominating individuals and poor communication. It is a particular challenge for unit leaders to try to organize and run such meetings in a way that helps them be more productive—and their inability or unwillingness to take the lead in doing so can be one of the contributing factors to a wider dysfunction.

5. Overly directive or indecisive leadership. As representatives of an organization that studies and advocates for principled leadership, we are always looking for the ways that unit leaders can help reform or redirect a troubled unit—or in other cases, how they might be a contributing factor to its troubles. Leaders can be indecisive, reactive or unwilling to take on the challenges of calling out the unit’s problems. Maybe they recognize the issues but feel unable to do anything about them. Maybe they have the opposite problem: they are overly directive and demanding; they might be seen by their faculty as autocratic and unresponsive. Maybe they are the bully that others fear.

Finding the right balance between taking charge and allowing for democratic and participatory collective control is a challenge for any leader. The worst scenario for a troubled unit is one where the behaviors and choices of the unit leader reinforce or exacerbate the underlying issues the unit already has.

6. Financial mismanagement and financial illiteracy. One of the most, if not the most, important roles for a unit leader is marshaling and managing financial resources that allow the unit to do its work. Usually, budget factors are not wholly within their control. However, whatever the state of the unit’s financial health, being aware of the sources of revenues and expenses, exercising fiscal prudence and due diligence, and being transparent where possible are all parts of helping a unit direct its own destiny.

In troubled units there are often financial shortfalls, unexplained or unaccountable expenses, or a wider disconnect between policy decisions and priorities and the financial ramifications of different courses of action. Units find out after the fact what some choice has cost them, or they make commitments that they don’t have the resources to fulfill. For that reason, the twin issue of financial mismanagement (by the unit leader) is financial illiteracy among unit members. People who would never make certain bad decisions about their own bank balance or an investment to repair a leaky roof suddenly apply magical thinking when they think about academic unit finances—the unit leader will just find the resources, or they are hoarding a secret surplus. No difficult decisions or trade-offs are necessary. Troubled departments are usually rife with financial illiteracy.

7. Lack of clear policies and procedures. One of our slogans (which we did not invent) is “policies and procedures are your friend.” In troubled departments there is too much “ad hoc–ism.” People don’t understand how or why certain decisions are made—there isn’t consistency, and as a result even legitimate decisions can seem arbitrary or unfair.

Effective shared governance, which we think is a hallmark of a healthy department, depends on clear bylaws, procedures, committee structures and lines of consultation. These too can become bureaucratic and pro forma—but having them in place and making them work is often a crucial part of unit reform. We have worked with units where no one knows where the bylaws are, or they haven’t been reviewed or updated in years. In other cases, the university may have clear policies and procedures, but the unit (and its leaders) are ignorant of them or ignore them. Overly directive unit leaders sometimes see such procedures as a constraint on their powers, but they are also ways of building understanding, support and legitimacy for policy decisions.

8. Problems in hiring, retention and mentoring. In troubled departments, a frequent sign of dysfunction is failed searches, conflict-ridden search processes or hires who join the unit but are not successful. New hires are the most important decisions academic units make: They are literally the lifeblood of their future. New colleagues can invigorate a department and enable new initiatives. Colleagues who arrive and struggle, who are poorly mentored or who do not make tenure are prime symptoms of a troubled department. When a unit is divided into factions, searches are one place where those divisions can play out; new hires are often put into the impossible position of finding their place within unit factions, when all they want to do is get to work and start building their careers. A lack of mentoring (or even negative and counterproductive mentoring) is one of the ways that dysfunction gets reproduced across academic generations. We have seen units where even though the membership turns over across time, the underlying problems persist.
9. Poor communication. One factor that cuts across many of the others discussed here is bad patterns of communication: patterns in what doesn’t get said, or is said in unproductive and disrespectful ways; a lack of listening; recurring and unproductive arguments. A modern form of this problem manifests in email wars: the misuse of reply all, the extended rants that might be satisfying to write but that no one wants to read, the bitter back-and-forths between adversaries who impose their issues on the entire unit. One of the main tasks of unit leaders is to model and try to promote a better way of talking with one another. In many cases, if these problems of communication aren’t dealt with, the unit won’t be able to fix any of its other issues.
10. Morale. This is another of those cyclical cause-and-effect issues. Dysfunction leads to low morale; low morale makes people feel unwilling or unable to undertake change. In any troubled unit, many, perhaps most, of the unit members recognize the issues and really don’t want to be part of them. We often talk about “people of good will” in our workshops on unit reform—they are the core of any effort to initiate a different way of doing things. But the worst manifestation of perpetually troubled units is hopelessness; people become pessimistic or cynical about reform, and even though they do not like the status quo they become inured to it—they keep their heads down and just try to get on with their own work. This is an understandable reaction at the individual level, but it has the effect of perpetuating the underlying problems.

This essay is about symptoms, not proposed solutions. In responding to these common features of troubled departments, though, a few considerations need to be kept in mind. The first, as previously noted, is that these rarely exist in isolation: Their interaction effects make it even harder to focus on any one of them for separate treatment. Difficult individuals make department meetings miserable; people don’t attend, or they check out, and so real collective deliberation and problem-solving aren’t possible; as a result, bad policies are impossible to reform and opportunities for new initiatives get missed; squandered opportunities fuel bad morale and pessimism about the future; talented faculty leave for other jobs—and on and on.

Having said that, reforming a troubled department has to start somewhere, even if it is across a few interrelated areas at once. While the common features discussed here do recur again and again, part of working with any particular unit is understanding the distinctive way in which they interact in that context. As we have discussed in several previous essays for Inside Higher Ed, we do not approach working with units with a boilerplate diagnosis or a one-size-fits-all solution. So, for example, in a particular unit several vectors might all run through a particular individual who is disruptive, negative and embroils everyone in their issues; if you don’t find a way to deal with them, nothing else can be achieved. Financial issues, as we have mentioned, are frequently another cause-and-effect factor that cuts across many other problems; certainly if you can’t get the money issues sorted out, it becomes almost impossible to manage the others.

Finally, a major factor in working with troubled departments is creating positive momentum for change. Even people who are unhappy with the state of their unit may have made their peace with it; they don’t believe change is possible and so they just check out. Some are exhausted by the dysfunction and lack the will or the energy to work toward change. Others see conspiracies or abuses everywhere and so assume that change or reform isn’t possible, or they reflexively question the motives of leaders who are trying to change things.

At a deeper level, one might say, units get used to their dysfunction; members might even like some aspects of it without seeing how the things they like are inextricably linked to things they don’t like. All of these become impediments to reform, which is why we emphasize the importance of finding and empowering people of good will who are willing to work together for a better future.