Power, Politics, and Adult Educational Administration

The Case of a Liberal Arts Institution

John Kokolus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367151942
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429619113
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación de adultos

This book seeks to draw out the impacts of power, politics, and critical theory on the growth of adult learning in a small liberal arts college setting. Using critical theory as an analytical tool to investigate questions around budgeting, academic quality, and student access, this volume shows how these issues are inextricably bound up with those of hegemony, ideology, and bureaucratic rationality. The author demonstrates, too, how acknowledging these influences at the outset leads to a sustainable and equitable adult learning environment. Through an emphasis on both organizational context and individual learning experiences, this volume contributes new substance to the understanding of politics and power relationships in educational leadership.

1 Introduction

Between 2000 and 2015, Elizabethtown College (EC), a small, non-profit, ­liberal arts institution of higher education (IHE), developed a robust adult learner degree-completion program that ran parallel to its traditional residential student program; this traditional program was stabilized around 1,800 full-time, residential students. Located in rural south-central Pennsylvania, equidistant between Lancaster, York, and Harrisburg, EC was an unlikely candidate for success with adult learners, offering associates, bachelors, and masters degrees. But over the course of 15 years, the number of adult learners grew from less than 98 to more than 800, the vast majority of whom were part-time; and graduate programs (a little over 100 graduate students) were added to a healthy number of undergraduate programs. Undergraduate majors included: accounting, business administration, human services, human services-behavioral counseling, criminal justice, corporate communications, health care administration, and information systems. Business administration, criminal justice, health care administration, human services, and human services-behavioral counseling were also available online as well as on campus. Graduate programs included: the MBA (available online or blended or on campus) and the MSL, Master of Strategic Leadership (available blended or on campus). The number of locations where programs were offered tripled from two to six, thereby “saturating” the potential regional market. Gross revenues from adult programming grew from approximately $500,000 per annum to approximately $7,000,000 per annum, the latter figure comprising 8% to 10% of EC’s total revenues. Annual net revenue grew from $5,000 to approximately $4,000,000 and online delivery of courses grew to 67% of total courses offered.

What happened at this small, independent, liberal arts college affiliated with the Church of the Brethren that made such growth possible? How did power, politics, and critical theory configure themselves to encourage the growth of adult learning? How did they configure themselves to suppress it? Why are these questions important? What do their answers tell us about adult learning? What do they tell us about higher education in general?

Change is sometimes simple; in this case it was not. A multiplicity of actors, motivations, structures, and visions vied for attention and resources. Valuing analysis more highly than narrative or description, I have borrowed two tools to impose a simple analytic order upon events at EC from 2000 to 2015. The first tool comes from the analytical framework developed by Bolman and Deal (2013) .This provides sets of perspectives called frames, through which to approach and view the events of the decade and a half under consideration – perspectives that lend coherence to the jumble of events that took place over this time period. The second tool is critical theory as understood and as articulated by Brookfield (2005), which I have used to analyze important events at a deeper level than Bolman and Deal’s (2013) larger framework allows.

Relying on these two analytical tools, I analyze selected topics about what happened and why during the decade and a half of change in adult learning at EC. I ask the reader to keep in mind that I have interpreted and applied these tools liberally, knowing that they might be applied differently than the way I have chosen to apply them. The resulting analysis helps to clarify the roles and relationships of power, politics, critical theory, and the growth of adult learning. From this clarification, I draw some conclusions, lessons, and recommendations from what went on during this decade and a half. I emphasize that these conclusions, lessons, and recommendations are not the only ones that can be reasonably drawn based on this chosen analysis, just the most compelling ones in my judgment.

Bolman and Deal’s (2013) very useful analytical framework based on different frames of reference through which to understand and guide organizational behavior is a major contribution to our understanding of how organizations develop and behave. The four frames helped me organize and analyze events at EC when the college developed a robust adult learner degree completion program from 2000 to 2015. Taken together, these frames constitute a holistic, broadly interpretive framework which includes:

• The Structural Frame (Basic and Dense)

• Organizations exist to accomplish established goals.

• For any organization, an appropriate structure can be designed and implemented.

• Structure ensures that people focus on getting the specific job done.

• Structural specialization permits higher levels of individual expertise and performance.

• Coordination, control, and their appropriate configuration are essential to effectiveness.

• Organizational problems originate from inappropriate structures and/or their configuration and can be resolved through reorganization, restructuring, and/or reconfiguration.

• The Human Resource Frame (Human Needs)

• Organizations exist to serve human needs. (Can easily be lost as human resource instruments institutionalize.)

• Organizations and people need each other.

• When the fit between the individual and the organization is poor, one or both will suffer.

• When the fit between the individual and the organization is good, both benefit.

• The Political Frame (Priorities and Allocation of Resources)

• Important decisions involve allocation of scarce resources. (These decision makers may be decentralized or centralized; they may operate openly or operate in a more hidden fashion.)

• Organizations are composed of coalitions and interest groups who vie with each other for scarce resources.

• Goals and decisions emerge from bargaining, negotiating, and jockeying for power that can leave residues of bad feelings.

• Power and conflict are central features of organizational life.

• Power and conflict among stakeholders may remain hidden behind facades that cover them.

• The Symbolic Frame (Organization Members Impart Meaning to Organizational Characteristics and Behavior)

• What matters in an organization is not what happens but what it means to participants; this can cover a diversity of meanings.

• Faced with uncertainty and ambiguity, people create symbols to resolve confusion, increase predictability, and provide direction; people seek stability and psychological certainty.

• Organizations have distinct cultures that may be positive or negative, strong or weak.

• Myths, rituals, and ceremonies help people find meaning in their organizational experience (Bolman & Deal, 2013).

My analysis relies on the fluidity and flexibility of inter-frame boundaries; I try to avoid rigidity in these boundaries and I try to encourage the flow of knowledge and intellectual goods between frames.

Each of the four frames generates its own unique leadership style. Thus:

• Structural Leadership (Associated with Gross Structures)

• Clarifies organizational goals.

• Develops clear rules and effective procedures.

• Defines roles and clarifies responsibilities.

• Clarity of structure and function are valued by these leaders.

• Human Resource Leadership (Associated with Human Need)

• Identifies peoples’ needs.

• Offers personal support.

• Recognizes participants’ strengths.

• Provides opportunities for growth.

• Encourages the transformation of general human nature into specific human personality.

• Political Leadership (Associated with Priorities and Allocation of Resources)

• Understands distribution of resources.

• Identifies major constituencies.

• Builds coalitions.

• Assesses risks and opportunities.

• Negotiates differences and reaches compromises.

• Values conflict resolution skills.

• Symbolic Leadership (Associated with Imparted Meaning)

• Interprets meanings.

• Seeks ways to transcend organizational meanings and symbols.

• Articulates vision or purpose.

• Strengthens norms.

• Reinforces culture with traditions or rituals (Johnson, 2014).

Among all these frames and leadership styles the symbolic and political rank most highly in their ability to reveal what was going on during the period of 2000 to 2015. There are reasons for the preeminence of these two frames. Two stand out: (1) critical theory, which we will discuss more fully later, relies heavily upon Marxist analysis which itself is highly politicized, having to do with the organization of pathways over which power flows within a society or an organization; however, Brookfield points out the reluctance of scholars to accept and utilize Marxist tools of analysis as if the collapse of Marxist-based political systems exhausted Marxism’s analytical power. He uses the phrase Marxophobia to describe this reluctance. In fact:

If critical theory can be understood as a critical engagement with Marx, then a critical theory of adult learning must begin by acknowledging the centrality of Marxist concepts.

(Brookfield, 2005, pp. 9, 19, 359)

Also:

Critical theory has as a priority the critique of capitalism, an ideology viewed by many as coterminous with the best America stands for. Its intellectual genesis is in Marxism, a fact that is hardly likely to endear it to the vast majority who view Marx as fundamentally un-American …. it is sometimes stigmatized as a kind of authoritarian, Stalinist creed.

(Brookfield, 2005, p. x)

And: (2) the special place for the symbolic within IHEs; from the structure of the academic departments which mimics that of the medieval guild system, complete with status, prestige, and rank, to commencement, the central liturgy of an IHE, which mirrors the medieval sovereign’s court.

Symbolic messages are laden with emotional reactions which carry a deep symbolic resonance. They speak to both the mind and the heart; they focus on how human beings make sense of the chaotic, ambiguous world in which they live (Bolman & Deal, 2013, pp. 243–244).

A unique configuration of power, politics, and critical theory grew adult learning at EC from 2000 to 2015. This configuration most clearly yields its lessons when viewed through the political and symbolic frames; this is not to say the remaining frames are unimportant in the effort to understand this.

Many have had difficulty grasping the full nature of critical theory. What is theory? A theory is a set of understandings that help us make sense of some aspect of the world. Theories may be informal or formal, wider or deeper in scope, and may be expressed in a range of ways, but their basic thrust stays constant – to make sense of the world and to communicate that understanding to others enabling them to take informed action (Brookfield, 2005, pp. 2–3).

How is theory useful? Specifically, how can we judge the utility of a critical theory of adult learning? It is useful to the extent that it provides us with understandings that illuminate what we observe and experience. It helps us name or rename aspects of our experience that elude or puzzle us. It can be an engine that drives our thought beyond an uneasy stasis. Finally, the proper use of critical theory can save us from an energy-sapping, radical pessimism by offering forms of radical hope (Brookfield, 2005, pp. 4–10).

But why critical theory?

Criticality is a contested idea, one with a variety of meanings, each claimed by different groups for very different purposes.

(Brookfield, 2005, pp. 10–12)

The concept of criticality is essential to understanding the usefulness of critical theory. It is necessary to unpack this concept to disentangle five constitutional intellectual traditions. These are:

1 Ideology critique like that seen in neo-Marxism.

2 The work of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Continuing Education Timeline at Elizabethtown College: 1899–2014
• PART ONE Beginnings
• PART TWO Accreditation and the Continuing Education Plan
• PART THREE Faculty
• PART FOUR Locations
• PART FIVE Class Conflict
• PART SIX Staff
• PART SEVEN The Rhetoric of Academic Quality
• Conclusion
• References
• Index