Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education

4. Disciplines, Departments, and Chairs

81 Chapter 4 Disciplines, Departments, and Chairs Well, you’re conducting a symphony orchestra where it’s not like a symphony orchestra at all. It’s a bunch of tribes. The string section doesn’t want to play with the percussion section, which doesn’t want to play with the wind section. They have nothing to say to each other, and if they did play together it’s only because they’re being forced to by the administration or conductor. —David, provost at Urban Branch If colleges and universities are like a conglomeration of tribal communities organized into villages and hamlets, then the disciplines serve as the tribes into which individual scholars are organized. It is the discipline in which faculty find others engaged with their specialized intellectual interests: the community of scholars. It is this tribe—the discipline —with which most faculty members are primarily identified, and for good reason. Faculty members are schooled in an academic discipline with a specific and narrow subspecialty. Graduate school experiences and the reward systems for both attaining and succeeding in an academic position are deeply tied to the disciplines. Peer reviews of grant applications and publications—key to academic success—are conducted by the discipline, not the faculty members’ home institution. Recognition in the discipline is crucial to faculty members’ success at their institution and shapes their ability to move to another, more prestigious, or more desirable institution. Even more primary, however, the discipline represents the faculty members’ overarching professional identity; many faculty members develop a stronger identification with their discipline than with their department or university (Henkel 2005). Yet this disciplinary identity can 82 Divided Conversations be at odds with faculty members’ commitment to and engagement with their home institutions and their roles as teachers and members of a university community (Leik and Goulding 2000). Campuses therefore contain competing and contradictory loyalties. Chairs look to faculty to identify with their departments, deans seek to create identification with their colleges, and provosts urge faculty to think about the campus as a whole. These collective identities are at odds with the forces that create and reinforce faculty identity, posing problems for those who seek transformative change. It may not take a village, but organizing for community change requires some sense of what is held in common. As tribal identifications, academic disciplines are remarkably tenacious and, along with academic departments, structure the identities and working conditions of both faculty and students. Academic departments are local, rooted in particular universities and colleges (Mills et al. 2005). But disciplines are national, and in many cases international. It is this dual structure that makes the disciplines so powerful. As Andrew Abbott writes, universities “delegate all hiring decisions to departments. As long as departmental (and hence disciplinary) academics act as the primary hiring agents for universities, they perpetuate the disciplinary system by seeking faculty for their own departments largely from within their own disciplines” (Abbot 2002, 209). If departments are local, disciplines are global, represented in departments and individuals all over the academic world. Disciplines have professional organizations. They have standards. They create ties. They school—they discipline—students into scholars (Winberg 2008). As Marilyn Boxer writes, disciplines are also “instruments for distributing status” (2000, 123). In graduate school, disciplines—through the embodiment of the local department—create people with characteristic ways of thinking about the world. The graduate experience socializes students into the discipline and structures the way in which would-be professors identify with their chosen fields. At the undergraduate level, the college major is the embodiment of the discipline. Students are engineering majors, nursing majors, English majors . And it is this we teach in the introductory classroom: what it means to “think sociologically,” or to understand the world as a physicist or historian or biologist would. The ubiquitous introductory course has been the bane and sometimes the delight of millions of undergraduates. It is regarded by the faculty as a necessary evil that defines and reinforces dis- Disciplines, Departments, and Chairs 83 ciplinary identification—primarily for the teacher and, one hopes, for the undergraduate. Although as higher education becomes increasingly a mass enterprise and students gravitate toward occupational and professional majors (Brint 2002), the predominant organization of universities and colleges is still around traditional majors—even if they have an occupational analog. So students choose to become political science majors (prelaw) or economics majors (prebusiness) or biology majors (premed). Some students still become...