I did a series of posts years ago with this name. The gist of them, in simplistic terms, was that faculty need to be more direct about asking management to answer this question with regard to policy/structural changes, rather than letting them off the hook with platitudes. Push for specificity about why ideas are good and who benefits from them.
I’m revisiting the question today catalyzed by a conversation I had with a friend (who I won’t identify) about what’s happening on the campuses of the newly consolidated State System universities here in PA, along with trickles of information I’m getting from Facebook posts. Pardon the PG-13 language, but it’s taken only three business days to hear both “shitshow” and “clusterfuck” from friends on some of those campuses, and those are just the ones I noticed.
Ever since the consolidation “plan” (which was never a plan so much as a dream, at best, or a fever-dream at worst) came out last summer, I’ve expected this: nothing was going to work well because how could it. Faculty would bend over backwards to soak up the damage caused by trying to do something this complex too quickly and wrong-headedly. And then faculty would take the blame when it doesn’t work, with the architect of the plan deflecting blame from the bad planning onto the people who had to try execute a disaster.
It’s crystal clear that the first two of those are happening already. In today’s conversation, I pointed out that solving all those problems for students in the moment feels right, but it also absolves management of the responsibility for having caused them if we’re not very mindful of how we handle it. So here’s the thing I want to put on people’s heads.
If you work on a consolidated campus and students are coming to you for help with problems that are management problems to solve, I won’t tell you not to help. That’s cruel. But I’ll suggest that you stop for a minute before you do, and think about the extent to which you’re letting management off the hook for fixing their own mistakes, for minding their own house, when you do it. If you were here in 2016 (or any earlier contract negotiation cycle), you already know the principle that when students start asking questions that are management’s problem to answer, we make sure students know who to ask. The same principle is true here. If you can do that without leaving students (for example) stuck standing outside a building in a thunderstorm because their class got moved and nobody told them, do it.
Because the answer to the question “Who does it help when we fix management’s mistakes for them?” is “Management.” Full stop. Don’t let the fact that we also care about the people we learn and teach with be a reason to absorb utterly unreasonable levels of responsibilities for what should be (and is) other people’s jobs, and blame for implementing the plan that got us all here. Help is great, but don’t help the people who broke this more than you have to.
Let me be clear: I AM NOT saying that we should make anyone’s lives or jobs harder. I’m not advocating that we send students on wild goose chases around our unsettled campuses trying to figure out where to get their lost ID cards replaced so they can eat in the cafeterias. Some problems are easily solvable and important to handle right this second. But I am saying that when an unresolved issue isn’t dangerous, and when there’s obviously somebody else who should be handling it, let them. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask.