Assessing Collegiality in the Workplace: Holy Grail or Red Herring?

Universities can be notoriously un-collegial places to work. This is especially true for women in academe. Earlier, I wrote about mommies in academia. Today's post builds on that post and examines how discussions and initiatives about collegiality in educational settings impact females in academia. Today's post mirrors and extnds my December 2013 Women's Caucus column for the NAEA (National Art Education Association) NAEA News. The image below expresses my own thoughts about women's work in the ivory stable; the detail is a little pun for my art ed friends. 

Milking the Red Herring. (2013) From Peasant Woman Milking a Cow. (13th century England)

Detail: The Holy Pail

The term collegial is derived from the root word college, and from the Latin word collega, meaning “colleague”. Rightly so, an expressed desire for respectful, supportive, engaged colleagues permeates schools' and universities' mission statements and evaluation policies. By all accounts, collegiality amongst faculty members is seen as essential for the productivity and well-being of an educational institution and the people who work there. But the fact is, toxic co-workers and incivility pollute academic departments across the US. Noncollegial co-workers bully their fellow faculty members and students, gossip, complain incessantly, resort to threats and personal attacks to get their way, refuse to share equitably in menial departmental tasks, and execute a host of other destructive behaviors in pursuit of their own needs. Universities are legally empowered (and some would argue morally obliged) to evaluate and hold faculty members accountable for their collegiality (or lack of). Apparently, the jerk-problem in academia has gotten so bad that there is currently an initiative afoot (and for sale) to assess an individual faculty member's collegiality in university settings as a criterion for promotion.

The goals of promoting collegiality and holding faculty members accountable for their behaviors toward one another are both laudable and much needed. But many challenge the idea that collegiality can be objectively assessed via standardized matrices and direct attention instead to ways that institutions militate against collegiality. It is important to note that in choosing this profession aspiring scholars/educators have envisioned as the core of university life the rigorous pursuit and advancement of knowledge in a creative, intellectually challenging environment. They aspire to make a difference in the world. What disillusioned academics have found instead are grueling workloads, job insecurity, inadequate compensation, a capricious and opaque system of institutional rewards and punishments, a worksite mired in conflict, and administrative bloat and ineptness. The problems resulting from entrenched institutional policies and practices that at best can be described as deeply flawed are now compounded by strained resources, diminishing public support, and a relatively new competing paradigm that positions the enterprise of public education as a business venture rather than a common public asset. Budget cuts, institutional red tape, inequitable work loads, demands to publish, and mind-numbing committee work are now commonly shared sources of stress for faculty members across types of institutions. Intensified public attacks on the work university faculty is an additional stressor. In such an environment, collegiality, which is fundamentally about how faculty members treat one another, is significantly compromised. 

Bad faculty behaviors in academic institutions are exacerbated by the fact that the lynchpin for attempts to maintain a civil, collegial atmosphere in the university worksite is the departmental chair, someone who is oft times a former faculty member who is given tremendous responsibility and power but who possesses minimal administrative skills, receives very little training for the job, and holds limited power within the larger institution. Worst, yet, in dealing with departmental faculty bullies and even exhibiting bullying behaviors themselves, mid-level administrators may in fact be part of the problem, not part of the solution. University Human Resources departments (often stated in university policies and procedures manuals as the best place for faculty members to report bullying and seek redress) may also be perceived by faculty members as ineffective and more interested in protecting the institution than the well-being of victims of bullying. 

Conducting an evaluation of individuals' social interactions in absence of full consideration of the institutional and administrative policies, procedures, and contexts in which the performance of their responsibilities occurs is inherently hypocritical, conceptually unsound, and bad social science. Usage of standardized collegiality metrics for promotion or merit considerations further erodes one of the purported strengths of the academy: academic freedom, discourse, and dissent.

Understanding and promoting collegiality in the Ivory Tower is an important but complex matter. Assessments of collegiality pose particular issues of concern to female educators. Any institutional evaluation of a female faculty member's collegiality must include consideration of workplace-embedded gender inequities, gender stereotypes, women's professional communication styles,  and the institutional contexts in which women conduct their business. The facts clearly warrant such consideration: women educators earn less across academic disciplines and at every level of teaching, they hold lower ranks and fewer positions of power within their educational institutions, they are bullied more and supported less than their male counterparts, they endure longstanding institutional policies that are inherently anti-family, and gender stereotypes, discrimination and evaluation bias continue to impede women's advancement in the workplace. 

In conclusion, attempts at capturing collegiality on a standardized matrix designed for efficient assessment of an individual's performance of their responsibilities and then using that measurement in faculty evaluations is an ill fated endeavor with little promise of improving the working conditions of female faculty members. As a largely female-dominated profession art educators need to conduct and disseminate research that focuses on how female educators’ experiences within varied institutional contexts, pre-k through post-secondary, impact their productivity and performance. The most relevant studies from the discipline of art education addressing this concern are either a quarter century old (Rush, 1989) or they just don't dig into workplace inequities impacting female academics (Milbrandt & Klein, 2010).  Most of all we need to understand how our own workplace conditions shape our social interactions and both facilitate and impede our success.

Endnotes: 

The Holy Grail - Red-Herring title for this post captures my thoughts about attempts to assess collegiality in terms of any faculty member's behaviors, male or female. But the image is deliberately of a female for obvious reasons. The close-up detail of the "You Gotta Have Art" button is a nod to and a bit of insider-humor for my colleagues in my profession, art education.

Blogs are awesome in that one can add to anything written, written even years ago as this blogpost was originally written by me in 2013. I'm adding to this post a reference to a recent (2019) news article that is particularly relevant to my former place of employment. The article, published in our local newspaper, recounted the efforts and ultimate success of a female working at my former university as she sought and received salary equity. In one of the articles I read in the local paper, professor McDonaugh recounted what she was told by the Director of the unit at the time (a female Director). When she requested a salary equity raise, her Director told her that she didn't need to be paid as much because she didn't have a family to support. That statement became part of professor McDonaugh's lawsuit. Salary equity is a peripheral issue to the problems of assessing the collegiality of females in the workplace, but they are all part of the same system that I described in this blogpost...a system that...well, you already know.

Ziterman, B. (June 27, 2019). UI professor who sued over gender-based wage discrimination gets back pay, raise. Champaign, Illinois: The News Gazette. https://www.news-gazette.com/news/ui-professor-who-sued-over-gender-based-wage-discrimination-gets/article_d14ebb61-2a83-5087-bf02-c7acac0626df.html

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K-12 Art Teaching and Magical Thinking

I've been getting works ready for the "Those who teach, can" exhibition at Indigo Artist Coop in Champaign, Illinois, May 10 - 18, 2013. Opening reception, Friday May 10, 6 - 9 p.m.

For one of my works, I selected 16 images from over 200 pictures that I took on my iPhone4 documenting some of my experiences teaching Art Survey 1 at Centennial High School during the 2012-2013 school year. My idea here is to convey a sense of a “year in the life of a high school art teacher”. As I took each of the pictures appearing in this series, I shared my favorite ones on Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and Instagram; and I even Tweeted some of them to my friends in Twitter. My iPhone camera roll (now totaling over 3000 images) is filled with these kinds of photographs, along with shots of family, friends, events, sunsets, my garden, favorite personal objects, and some creative explorations with various photography apps. I originally thought to exhibit these in a grid, similar to how I see them on my iPhone in my Instagram app.

But then, I decided to exhibit them on a timeline in order to better convey the "year in the life of an art teacher" idea. I took a quick snapshot yesterday as we finished the installation and posted it to Instagram.

There is something both ordinary and extraordinary about all of this…about visually capturing and sharing experiences so easily through digital and social media, about printing ones own photographs and presenting them for public viewing in an art gallery, about working with like-minded colleagues in our endeavors to make art with creative young people, and about being an art educator with a mission to make a difference in the lives of others. I have always thought K-12 art teachers to be people who engage in a bit of “magical thinking” when it comes to what exactly it is we do, and all I can say about that is “please let there be more magical people in the world!”

Anyone-an-artist, DIY culture, and Selfies

I put together a couple works for the "Those who can, teach" Champaign Unit 4 Art Teachers exhibition at Indigo artist coop. May 10-18, 2012, 9 East University, Champaign. The image below is one of the works I exhibited, a composited collection of my Facebook mini-collages (Selfies) that I created over the past 3 years. My other image was a collection of snapshots I took during my year of part-time teaching (2012-2013) at Centennial High School.

What are Selfies? 

Selfies are self-portraits taken with inexpensive digital or cellphone cameras (sometimes taken with mirrors, other times not) and posted on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Self-portraits are nothing new in the art world. What's new is the fact that the age of digital and social media facilitates a virtually infinite number of self-portraits to be created and shared with viewers online, and that the creators of these self-portraits are not traditional art-world or academy-trained artists, which is to also say that their self portraits have little economic value. My recent hashtag search in Instagram for the #selfie hashtag and its variants produced around 35 million photos, and a search for the #me hashtag in Instagram produced over 44 million photos. These are astonishing numbers by anyone's count.

Selfies are characterized by bloggers and social media commentators as annoying, narcissistic, insufferable, and ridiculous bordering on offensive. Selfies are also recognized as a resistant, transgressive, an empowering form of self exploration and personal creative expression, and a visual diary marking our existence in the world. There are apparently even rules for doing selfies. Although I doubt if very many of those folks who have posted over 35 million selfies to Instagram are paying attention to anyone's rules, some interesting trends suggest an the emergence of an online-world aesthetic when it comes to portraits, females' and males' selfies. Setting all these debates aside, what remains clear is that selfies are an unashamed way of saying it's #me, I'm here, please look and like!

My creative process for making selfie-collages

For my original self-portrait image I used my laptop camera, sat at my dining room table, positioned the laptop lens, and took a pic of myself.  I shared my self-portrait in color and in black and white with various folks at the NAEA who needed an image of me. With the original in hand, I started making these selfie-collages in 2009, which was about the same time I joined Facebook. My original profile pic on Facebook was a snapshot of a Christmas ornament that I modified in Photoshop. I just didn't feel comfortable in 2009 sharing a pic of me on the Internet. (LOL, I soon got over that feeling.) 

Each mini-collage selfie took anywhere from 2 - 3 hours to create and refine. The process (described below) was exacting, but lots of fun.

• In addition to the original self portrait image (mentioned above) I took pictures of subject matter that I wanted for the collage (computers, cornfields, airplanes), initially using my inexpensive digital camera, and later using my cell phone camera.
• I also searched online for other images of subject matter I needed (soccer ball, TV set, pic of the state of Florida, etc.)
• Using image editing software (Photoshop in my case) I isolated (cut and saved as a separate image file) the part of the image I wanted to use.
• I then modified each image to be collaged. I got rid of unwanted background content; cleaned up the edges of the remaining image; and played with size, positioning, saturation, color, contrast, sharpness, levels, etc. 
• I then pasted each modified image onto the self-portrait image (using Photoshop's layers tool).
• I further adjusted each of the layered images to create my desired effect.
• Once I had something I liked, I saved that file to my computer as a .psd image file (layers intact).
• I then flattened and saved the digital collage, paying attention to format (jpg, png, tiff), resolution (DPI), and dimensions (height/width) settings. I gave each version of the image its own file name.
• I usually made two or three variations of the collaged final image. Each version had its own file name.
• Because these were for Facebook, I kept the dimensions and resolution low, but now I keep larger versions of each collaged image as well.

A couple more tips

In 2011 I abandoned the use of a digital camera and Photoshop to create these selfie-collages. I now take pics with my cellphone and use Preview (an app on my Mac) and Pixlr (a free online photo editor) to create these collages. The process is the same as when I used Photoshop. I archived most of my Facebook mini-collages to a Flickr set. These are all small format images. I wish now that I had created them larger (dimensions and resolution), saved the larger files, and then reduced their dimensions for Facebook.

For the art exhibition, my interpretive wall text for this image talked about Facebook, DIY-culture, apps, and the popularity of "selfies" in social media sites.

Regarding the "Those who can, teach" show... (a smart title for this exhibition of Unit 4 art teachers put together by local high school art teacher, Stacey Gross) all I can say about recognizing the artistry, creativity, and excellence of our teachers (all of them, not just art teachers) is that if we want good folks to choose this profession, we better start supporting them, and on that standard, I give America a big fat "F".