Collegiality and Service for Tenure and Beyond: Acquiring a Reputation as a Team Player (review)

How should one conduct oneself in the academy? This question may be the fundamental concern in the lives of faculty, and yet how often is it made explicit? Silverman's Collegiality and Service does make particular forms of faculty conduct explicit, so much so that he even offers advice on how one should begin a conversation with a student who shows up in one's office for advisement. Unfortunately, however, he reduces the fundamental concern of faculty conduct to a matter of simple agency, failing to attend to how any notion of "collegiality" makes sense only within particular configurations of power and control that will dictate such conduct in advance of agency. I think Silverman is correct that this is the first book to have collegiality as its primary focus, but what this book inadvertently does is raise more questions about how the academy forecloses serious critique of its practices.

The first two chapters explain the concept of collegiality, its importance for, say, promotion and merit pay, and what criteria one might use to evaluate it. The other chapters elaborate on the criteria and offer advice on how collegiality might be exhibited in student advising, committee work, administrative responsibilities, and professional service. In the later chapters, we are told that collegiality also involves enhancing the department's reputation, securing external funding, helping the institution meet its community responsibilities, and having good relationships with colleagues and administrators.

All the advice Silverman offers is premised on his more than 35 years experience as a college professor and seems like common sense. But I think that a half-hour conversation with a caring senior faculty member is all one needs to get what this books explains in 150 pages or so. Indeed, that conversation may be more useful than this book, which at times contains meaningless jargon, such as that one should lead as a facilitator rather than dictator, be open and enthusiastic about learning new things, and be willing to "think outside the box."

For Silverman, collegiality has to do with being a "team player" and relates to conduct associated with shared governance and interactions with others. In addition to accepting one's fair share of responsibility for committee work, his examples of collegiality include being respectful of colleagues, not being a chronic complainer, not becoming enmeshed in departmental politics, conducting oneself in a professional manner, being sensitive to the feelings of colleagues, being willing to negotiate and compromise, and so on. Such individualistic language is problematic, as I explain below.

Silverman also argues against conflating collegiality with "congeniality"—i.e., "behaving in a manner conducive to friendliness or pleasant social relations" (p. 7); but the language he uses makes it seem to me that he indeed conflates the two concepts. He might heed the warning of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) that such conflation is central to the problem of collegiality. The AAUP's statement, On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation, discourages collegiality as a criterion in faculty evaluation because it is "exceedingly difficult to distinguish the constructive engagement that characterizes true collegiality from an obstructiveness or truculence that inhibits collegiality." Collegiality may be used as a proxy for the suppression of dissent, and hence become a threat to academic freedom.

The AAUP's warning seems correct to me; but at a more fundamental level, it too misses what is really at stake in the concern over collegiality. Like Silverman, the AAUP is concerned with individual actions and behavior rather than the power and control that collegiality implies. One should recognize that the term is a derivative of collegium, and, according to the 1984 edition of Webster's New World Dictionary, collegiality is alternatively defined as "the sharing of authority among colleagues." Collegiality in academe, therefore, refers to the sharing of authority on behalf of the collegium—that is, the academy. Understood this way, collegiality...