Dealing with Administrators at One’s Home Institution

Dealing with Administrators at One’s Home Institution

Discussion Group Notes
Women in Cognitive Sciences meeting
Orlando, FL
November 16, 2001.

1. Discussion group participants:

Harriett Amster, University of Texas at Austin; Suzette Astley, Cornell College; Iris Berent, Florida Atlantic University; Laurie Feldman, SUNY Albany; Jill Folk, Kent State University; Morton Ann Gernsbacher, University of Wisconsin at Madison; Catherine Harris, Boston University; Molly Potter, MIT; Kathy Spoehr, Brown University (Moderator and Secretary); Stephanie Travers, SUNY StonyBrook

2. Issues that bring one into the company of administrators:

• Parental/family leave policies

• Performance evaluation and promotion/tenure policies and practices including stoppage of tenure clock for pregnancy and/or childbirth

• Teaching loads and hidden work (e.g., advising, onerous committee work, multiple new class preparations each year)

• Compensation issues such as salary increase policies, general practices (e.g., gender disparities in the aggregate), individual issues (equal pay for equal performance)

• Research support, including direct funding, support for graduate students, space/equipment

• Affirmative action/EEO strategies and performance

3. Impediments to getting action:

• Not knowing which administrator to approach for each issue (i.e., the department chairperson, the dean, the provost, the president/chancellor?)

• Interim appointees in key administrative offices who lack long-term commitment to the job and are unable/unwilling to tackle controversial and difficult topics

• Difficulty in getting accurate and meaningful data

• Administrative fear and inertia – identifying inequities can be embarrassing to influential administrators; actually doing something about inequities is hard work. Both require lots of time and effort.

• Covert and overt sexism on the part of colleagues and administrators

• Perceived and real vulnerability of those who are most affected by inattention and inequities

4. Getting the data:

What data to get (get all data types broken down by field, gender, race, and disability with information on years since Ph.D. or years at current rank*)

• Salaries Teaching load, including advising and "hidden work" (see #2 above)
• Promotion/tenure rates; number of years spent in rank (i.e., are women taking longer to reach full professor?)
• Space allocations and other forms of research support
• Committee and administrative assignments for faculty
• Demographic data – how many women are there at various ranks and job titles? How much attrition is there and what are the reasons for it?
• What are the trends for each of the above statistics over the past 5-10 years in your college or university

Where to get it:
• The Dean of your school/college or the Provost of your institution
• The Office of Institutional Research (almost every school has one and it is often a good source of internal data as well as comparative data from similar institutions)
• The faculty union or the Faculty Senate (they may have the data you want or be able to get it for you)
• Your institution’s EEO/AA officer (all employers are required by federal law to have one and to submit EEO/AA reports and plans yearly. This office can often be a fountain of information.)
• National higher education organizations like the AAU, AAHE, etc.
• Requests under "sunshine" laws for state employee information

5. Guerilla Strategies:

• Co-opt influential male colleagues to join in highlighting the importance of identifying and eliminating inequities, and in making requests for data.

• Form strategic alliances with under-represented minority groups in requesting data and reviews of potential inequities.

• If you are in a large institution with many schools or colleges, use the MIT strategy of finding the one dean among them who is open-minded and willing to study the data and correct potential inequities. Generate lots of publicity complimentary to that dean about the results of the effort in that school, and try to get the Provost/President/Chancellor to get the other deans to follow suit in their own schools. Very often the most recalcitrant deans can be forced to face issues of inequity if they find themselves in a row of dominoes that must follow suit once other deans have taken steps.

• Deans and other administrators with interim appointments are unlikely agents of change. Your best potential allies are new administrators who have not yet articulated or gotten involved with their own agendas yet – and they can move ahead with a data-gathering effort without having to worry about being embarrassed by the result because a new dean can always blame inequities on her/his predecessor!

• Identify one or a small number of senior, tenured faculty "champions" for your effort who are willing to invest a good deal of time and effort in making sure that the right data get collected and appropriate responses are made. They need not all be women.

• If a study committee is formed:
(a) Try to make sure that its chairperson is someone who does not have a vested interest in slowing down the process or in suppressing data. If your committee has to work around the dean’s personal calendar of appointments in order to schedule a meeting, the process will take ten times longer and may never come to fruition.

(b) It is best if the committee is chaired by a trusted senior faculty member.

(d) Identify a "regular" meeting time (e.g., the first and third Tuesdays of the month from 3-5) that does not conflict with anyone’s teaching schedule. Make everyone program in that time on their calendars. The committee should expect to meet at those times unless there is an explicit vote not to meet.

(e) Set an agenda for each meeting and assign "deliverables" to various members of the committee in advance of the meeting.

(f) The committee members should be prepared to do much of their own data analysis, and the membership should be chosen with this in mind to make sure that the right skill sets are represented.

(g) Make sure that most major school or campus political constituencies have representation on the committee. This will help ensure that no stones are left unturned and that most faculty on campus feel that the report applies to them.

• If you are looking to change personnel policies and procedures:

(a) Your aim should be getting the change written into your institution’s faculty or employee handbook so that there can be no forgetting, back-sliding, or fudging of practice a few years after the new policy is implemented.

(b) Find out what federal, state, and local laws govern working conditions in your location. Some states have laws regarding family and medical leaves that govern all employers in the state. If you work at a public institution, look for specific legislation governing state employees.

• If a Herculean data-gathering effort (or even the prospect of one) brings results (e.g., the salaries of some people get adjusted), find out whose salaries got adjusted, the reasons given for the adjustments, and publicize that information widely to make sure that no appropriate people were left out. Publicity is the best check and balance against administrative "ad hoc-ery" or an attempt to pay off a small set of trouble-makers without addressing the core problems.

• Make sure that progress becomes institutionalized. There should be a written agreement that whatever kinds of data and studies have identified problems that require correction, those same studies should be repeated on a regular schedule (every 2-3 years) with a promise of corrective action as needed. The data gathering effort gets easier and easier the more often it is done.

• Publicity and political maneuvering can be very good things if managed properly and should not be eschewed because they don’t seem "nice."

(a) Make sure that the local newspaper, and especially the campus newspaper, know the issues and cover the results of any studiesor reports that address equity issues on campus. This worked well at MIT.

(b) Keep your union and faculty governance organizations regularly up to date and enlist them in data gathering and publicity efforts.

(c) If you are gathering data, keep administrators whose lives and work may be affected by the results up to date on your activities and interim findings.

(d) Take the time to enlist allies and fellow-travelers from across campus. If you are trying to effect change, consult widely, disseminate information, and elicit comment through faculty senate meetings, meetings of department chairpersons, email to all faculty, or even departmental faculty meetings. If you can engineer a groundswell of interest and support, you will be hard to ignore.

• Don’t be afraid to take issues, concerns, data, and reports "over the head" of an administrator who isn’t being responsive. Likewise, don’t blind-side an administrator**.

(a) Make sure that an administrator who might be able to help is fully informed and has a chance to act on a request or a report before taking your cause one level above her or him. In other words, give an administrator ample opportunity to demonstrate unhelpfulness before publicly branding him or her as such by going to his or her boss.

(b) If you send an email, a letter, or a copy of a report higher up the chain of command, copy the administrator on the correspondence as a courtesy. This is particularly important if the administrator is an actual or potential ally.

(c) If you are going to discuss a concern or report with an administrator’s superior, let that administrator know that you have made an appointment with his or her boss. Better yet, ask if he or she would like to go with you when you visit the boss!

(d) If you give an interview or release a report to the press, let the relevant administrator(s) know. You could even refer the reporter to that administrator for comment.

The goal here is to make every administrator up the chain of command look as good as possible in the eyes of her/his boss at the same time that you manage to get your equity issues addressed. There is nothing more embarrassing and more likely to turn a sluggish administrator into an energetic enemy than to hear of a problem from a boss or to read about it in the morning newspaper without knowing in advance. In the long run, you are going to need some action on equity issues from even the most recalcitrant administrator in your school, and that action will be faster and better if the administrator feels fairly treated rather than forced into action by embarrassment or orders from the boss. And, an administrator-turned-energetic-enemy isn’t going to be very pleasant or easy to deal with in the future on other routine matters!

• Lawsuits should be a last resort. Bringing an individual or class-action suit will give you access to data (through the legal process of discovery) that might not be otherwise be available. On the other hand, lawsuits are disruptive to the institution as well as to the individual(s) who bring the suit, are costly, and always have substantial, unforeseen negative consequences to all parties involved.

*Longevity information is important because white, male faculty tend to be more senior, on average, than other groups. A regression analysis can determine whether there are residual group differences that cannot be explained by seniority.

**An administrator may be a department chairperson, a dean, a provost/academic vice-president, or even a president or chancellor. An administrator is anyone who appears on your institution’s organizational chart in a box that has a box above it (the president "reports" to the Regents, the Board, the Trustees, or some other similar corporate authority). If you’ve never seen your institution’s org-chart, you may find it on the web or you can get a copy from the dean’s office or the human resources/personnel office.

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