setting limits

Faculty work is open-ended, and difficult to quantify. This creates a number of tensions in labor relations between faculty and administration, and where there are labor relations tensions, you can bet there are ethical issues as well.

The work faculty do is mostly invisible to most people, because it is outside the classroom. Scholarly work happens in any place that it makes sense: the field of study determines that it might be a library, or one's living room chair, or a literal field. The work can arise in odd hours, and some faculty also choose to work in odd hours, and most of us work on weekends during the academic year.

We could measure faculty work by simply counting up all the hours, but I believe that would miss an important feature of the kind of work faculty do. Because much of it is intellectual work, and because we have our brains with us most of the time, faculty work can happen when faculty are not expressly working. When I'm riding my bike, my mind wanders all over the place, but often splurts out stuff I need to do with classes or something scholarly I'm writing.

Faculty also usually do committee work in their departments, colleges, and the university at large, and work in professional or community organizations. Faculty are often assigned work that is atypical of what we think is faculty work, e.g., directing a program, designing a course, or facilitating an internship. These tasks seem to generate more than their share of conflicts between faculty and administration over the limits of faculty work. I want to argue that a key reason for this is because of a faculty ethic of caring or of donation.

If faculty are expected to work during the academic year, but not required to work during the summer, it might seem obvious that they cannot be called on to perform a task for their university employer during the summer. They are "off contract." Yet frequently enough, faculty give their time and energy to the university even then, or during the academic year, add to their workload by assuming additional tasks, committee responsibilities, etc. Faculty tend to identify very strongly with and care a great deal for their disciplines, their departments, their colleagues, and their universities. They give a lot of themselves, even within the minimum required work of teaching, research, and service. When the call comes to do even more, we tend to do it, if sometimes begrudgingly, because of that identity and caring.

When a faculty member says "no" to the administration, or to fellow faculty, this is a claim to setting a limit to work. It's difficult to understand the claim, though, because of the open-endedness of faculty work in general and because of the faculty ethic of caring and donation. In fact, "no" seems to require justification, even "off contract."

At their worst, the tensions this provokes become serious conflicts. For instance, someone with an academic-year "director" position may be called upon by the administration to do that work during the summer, under the presumption that the "director" gig implies being on-call--even if the job description explicitly says it is an academic-year only position.

Some administrators may take cynical advantage of the faculty ethic of caring and donation, and manipulate faculty into volunteering work without pay. Some fellow faculty may do this as well. But when it isn't cynical, the problem can still arise, which tells me that the ethic itself is part of the problem.

Faculty are not generally very good at saying "no," and not very good at understanding the limits of what they can do. The faculty who have arrived in their positions by way of being successful undergraduate and graduate students have developed capacities to work tremendous amounts under high levels of stress. Some of us may be hooked on it. Some of us use it as an escape. Some of us may take it as a point of pride. Saying "no" seems to be an admission that one is not superhuman after all.

What I think is called for is articulating the ethic of caring and donation, trying to distinguish it from some of the behaviors that lead to the attitude that saying "no" is somehow wrong, and using this articulated ethic to consider the problem of limits. So, more on this to come, I guess.