A conversation about breaking the current impasse in my community

In my view, both faculty and administration need to dial it down a notch and find ways to work together for our students and for the institution.  

We need to move from the blame game to taking steps toward a real conversation where criticisms and disagreements are more in the form of helping a team-mate find betters way to help the team win.  

It seems to me that the burden is on the administration to demonstrate that they aren't anti-faculty. Until they work out what it takes to be a quality university, they aren't going to be able to get there.   

There is little doubt that upper administration has been deeply hostile to faculty for a long time and that this position results in decisions that only make sense based on their shared 'common sense' suspicion that faculty are lazy and trying to get away with something.  

It is true that suffering through year after year of this type of disrespect has create a chasm between faculty and administration.  This chasm takes the form of mutual distrust, and a tendency to assume the worst and respond with 'the nuclear option' when a more measured response would work just fine.

And in a situation where there is a power imbalance it does make more sense to expect those with more power to make the first move and the larger concessions, since their greater agency makes them both more responsible for creating the problem and more influential in remedying it.

At the same time, there is nearly always some truth to both sides in a dispute.  And finding an approach that brings both sides to the table (step one) and allows for some very clear early victories of collaboration (step two) is likely the only way to start to build the trust needed for serious ongoing cooperation.  And to take these two steps we need to frame the conflict in a way that does not assume all the blame is on only one side.  

That just will not work.  

Even if it was absolutely accurate--it will not work.  And as I just noted, it is rarely accurate.

If faculty make the first move, what might that look like, because it cannot be a unilateral concession?  How would faculty get the upper administration to make the first move, and what might that look like, since it similarly is not realistic to expect it will be a unilateral concession?

Good questions.  If I said I had answers, I would be lying to you.  But these are good questions because they focus on how to get the two sides into a conversation that is structured to make it likely that they can come to a few simple agreements...and then build on that.

The president says the miscommunication was 'by design.'  If the summer long list of errors in the roll out of their plan was intentional, this suggests they do not want to improve communication with faculty because they like the 'design' of the current communication where they go around faculty.  

Also a thoughtful observation. If we pull out the productive part of this observation and leave aside the counterproductive part we have this:  the mistakes they made and admitted to focus on communication, and this can be fixed more readily if we assume that these were not intentional efforts to deceive or avoid faculty, but rather the decision to release the information in the summer was by design (for the reasons the president noted) and this does not require us to then assume a larger pattern of intentional deception.

Instead, we accept the hand they extended when they admitted to a need to improve communication.  We take 'yes' for an answer.  We agree to the importance of restructuring the conversations between administration and faculty (particularly those that constitute the strategic planning process) to ensure that the next set of decisions have been fully vetted.

Fully vetting ideas improve the quality of the ideas (and would have likely prevented the ill-informed decision to fire all employed by UA press and other mistakes made this summer).  Further, even those who disagree are less likely to see fully vetted ideas as a reason to deepen distrust and undermine the ongoing conversation.

So, how do we get to steps one and two?

There are multiple pathways.  A coalition of clergy in town or conflict management experts in the area, or both might call for an open forum structured to accomplish step one.  Cooler heads among the administration and faculty leadership groups might do the same.  The local media might either initiate the idea or publicize a call.

What might 'structured to accomplish step one' look like?

Faculty will not come to the table if it is clear that it is likely to be just another spectacle that the administration will later use to imply to larger publics that they had faculty support and a transparent process.

Administration will not come to the table if it clear that it is likely to be just an anger venting festival or if there is an expectation that they will forfeit their managerial authority to make decisions for the university.

There are multiple pathways again here.  But imagine if both sides agreed to these conditions:

We recognize that, following meaningful consultation with faculty and staff, the authority to make managerial decisions at UA is in Buchtel Hall.

We agree that this is an effort to repair the structure and processes for ongoing communication between faculty and administration and that the most productive way to focus on that objective is to put previous decisions off the agenda and focus on how to move forward.

We agree that the administration will not unveil or implement any new program, process, or policy or alter employment beyond the usual annual patterns for the coming academic year that they did not explain in detail during this open forum, providing faculty and staff with the time and information needed to fully vet the idea and respond thoughtfully.

These three principles might be enough to get the parties to the table.  Each gives up a little and the following structure is one way to enact these:

Day One in All Day September Meeting:  Administration presents detailed information on all their plans for the coming year.  

Day Two in All Day October Meeting: Under the leadership of the AAUP and Faculty Senate the faculty and staff will present a detailed response to each idea.

That's it?  We get to respond to their ideas?  Can we inject new ideas?  Can we reject ideas?  Are we done at that point?

Yes.  In responding to the ideas put on the table we do cede the power of framing the conversation, but a powerful and data-driven response that persuasively demonstrates an idea will not work (or will work better if done this way) is one way to reframe the conversation within these constraints.  

No, we would not be done.  This would become an annual institutionalized forum. Remember this is just step one and two.  If these work, and we see we actually can work together, then we might expand it to include a Spring meeting to discuss mid-course adjustments.  We might come to agreements on what data IR should collect and use this one set of data to measure the success of this or that proposed change.  We might grow into a community be enacting the life of a community together.

Lots of ways this could fall apart.  More ways to fall apart than to succeed it seems.

Agreed.  It is not easy to transform conflict and it is a lot more difficult with decades of ever-deepening distrust corroding the relationships needed to achieve agreements.  But it is worth the effort.  It is always worth the effort.

Let me remind readers (that is funny, because I am pretty certain I have no readers, but write this blog anyway as a place to clear my head that does not create a gap between my private and my public self), so let me remind readers that my blog is about making connections, it is about raw ideas and drafts and works-in-progress.  I do not review or copy edit beyond looking back as I am going to avoid embarrassing errors.  So, this is just my thinking on a topic I care about, today, unfiltered and open to criticism.