Building Trust between Faculty and Administrators

An Intercultural Perspective

Lisa B. Fiore, Catherine Koverola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367709655
• eBook ISBN: 9781000520989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

In this unique and timely book, Dr. Lisa B. Fiore and Dr. Catherine Koverola explore and illuminate the tensions between faculty and administrators that have become ubiquitous in higher education and which cause conflicts that may adversely affect students and the institution. The authors harness their extensive professional expertise in cross-cultural communication and education, their years of personal experience working through conflicts in higher education, and their collaborative research to provide a guide for building trust and productive relationships.

With an approach anchored in intercultural theory and practice, the authors lay a foundation upon which readers can build new understanding about the "other" constituents with whom they work. Practical tools such as case studies, sample scripts, discussion points, and resources will resonate with faculty and administrators at colleges and universities, as well as aspiring higher education practitioners.

Readers will immediately recognize universal themes and scenarios and will appreciate the authors' straightforward approach that will translate into tangible, meaningful changes in their professional relationships. This book moves discussions forward, from argumentation and resentment to positive behavior change that grows from a place of trust and mutual respect.

Part One Two Cultures at Odds

Chapter One The Situation: We Don’t Understand Each Other

DOI: 10.4324/9781003148739-2

“Huh?”

For years, we used this one word as the working title for this book. One reason for this is that the simple question reveals a significant dissatisfaction among faculty members and administrators working in institutions of higher education. The other reason is that the playful working title mitigated many tensions that emerged as we grappled with scenarios throughout years of research and professional experience as – and with – faculty and administrators. These two groups are so often at odds, it’s almost as if they represent different cultures that have no method of effective communication. Rampant conflict and misunderstandings impede much-needed institutional change, adversely affect students’ experiences, and threaten the very viability of many institutions that are already under scrutiny due to myriad factors (Horn, 2018; Whitford, 2021; Zahneis, 2021). While the topic of interpersonal dynamics is validated in numerous research articles that may be read by members of their respective professional organizations, such work tends to focus on discrete “problems,” such as budget, governance, and enrollment challenges (e.g., Kiley, 2013; Shinn, 2014), rather than collaboration and the hard work of sustaining authentic relationships that make navigating such problems more successful, in spite of outcomes that appease constituents.

This book takes the unusual approach of acknowledging multiple perspectives and intentionally articulating and using them to advance mutual goals. While writing this book, we recognized that in our respective roles of professor and university president, we thereby simultaneously serve as guides on a journey, cultural ambassadors and/or brokers, and participant researchers inviting readers to consider complicated professional cultures, offer translations, and share common frustrations and confusions about the other.

Why? Because institutions of higher education were struggling financially and in the public perception before the COVID-19 crisis exacerbated perennial tensions (e.g., Ehrenberg, 2012; Shinn, 2014). If faculty members and administrators remain entrenched at an impasse rather than team up to harness their collective resources and build a thriving future together, their institutions and employment will suffer. The stakes are high. People are tired of feeling misunderstood, tired of being accused of nefarious intent, tired of not being trusted. But people are also tired of being so suspicious, and yearn for trusting relationships that allow them to relax and focus on their work (Hoppes & Holley, 2014). The lack of understanding is exhausting, and impedes a shared mission: to provide high-quality education that contributes to a compassionate and productive society.

Navigating Conflict

Conflict between higher education faculty and administrators is not a new phenomenon, but it is deeply unfortunate. All too often, such conflict and misunderstanding impedes innovation and institutional change that will significantly benefit students and society. While the value of establishing mutual understanding between these two key constituent groups is self-evident, a sustainable practice of listening without judgment as a component of broader understanding and institutional change remains perplexingly elusive.

To illustrate clear differences in perceptions and interpretations, what follows below are snippets from focus group conversations held among faculty members and administrators, respectively, following a simulated academic meeting. An announcement had been made that a program was going to be terminated and “taught out” for students currently in the pipeline.

Faculty members’ comments included:

• “You’d think they would work with us to try to improve the program, to build up numbers.”
• “They just thought, ‘Here’s a way to save some money and let’s go on.’”
• “This is a college, a university – there’s a reason for these four years. How do you decide to cut a core component of a liberal arts education? That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
• “My concern is [cutting a program] makes it look [to the board] like you’re doing something. Instead of actually accomplishing anything, it’s making it look like we’re being proactive, whether it solves it or not.”
• “[T]he communication isn’t there. So, we come to the conversation with suspicion, and it doesn’t always feel like it’s above-board shared decision-making, like we’ve been asking for.”
• “I feel like faculty look at it from a curriculum-based, long-term perspective – what’s good for the school ten years from now – and that administration is constantly trying to put band-aids on gashes and do immediate change to cover up that hole. ‘Let’s cover up that hole, let’s cover up that hole.’”

Administrators’ comments included:

• “We’ve been trying for a year to talk about this. I thought we included faculty [in those discussions]. We had meetings, they were welcome, they were invited, but they didn’t always show up. But we would post the minutes. It’s not like this was some secret thing, but that’s how they acted, like I had pulled something on them and blindsided them. They were shocked and critical.”
• “I’m actually puzzled. I mean I could’ve sent more emails reminding them that this was going to happen, but then it sounds kind of threatening. It’s almost like after a communication went out, it fell into a hole – like they never processed it.”
• “They would’ve been happy to keep on talking for another year, but I got the feeling that they weren’t getting that there’s dollars and cents attached to it; there’s a monetary factor. It’s like the business end of education – the fiscal end of education – it’s like they don’t believe it.”
• “Historically, [this program niche] is important knowledge, but can we as a school afford to have such a specialized course that has six or eight students? We can’t afford it.”
• “There’s no recognition that it was a difficult decision that somebody had to make. It would be nice, once in a while, to get someone to say, ‘I know that was really hard, and I don’t agree with you, but I know it was hard.’”
• “I get the feeling they’d be completely happy talking about this for years, and acting as if there’s no monetary hit. It’s almost like I betrayed them by making a decision. But that’s growing up, right? There comes a time when you have to make a decision.”

When we consider two disparate groups, they may have significant differences in their values, beliefs, customs, language, and communication patterns, to name a few. The result of these differences and a lack of understanding can lead to a process of “othering,” where one group views the “other” as different, perhaps as threatening and dangerous, or simply as bad. The other is rarely viewed as good or as a group that one should approach. The human tendency with othering is to demonize and cast aspersions, thereby securing the safety and security of one’s own comfortable, familiar group.

In fact, those who venture into a space of dialogue with the other can be viewed as traitors by members of their respective group. We have seen faculty be accused by other faculty members of “kissing-up” when they engage in honest dialogue with administrators in an effort to build bridges. Similarly, administrators who manage to develop strong relationships with faculty are often cast by their administrative colleagues as “too faculty-friendly.”

Framing these differences between faculty and administrators as cultural differences provides a neutral scaffolding from which to facilitate discussion and develop shared understanding. Further, an examination of perceived or actual cultural differences inevitably elucidates areas of common values and beliefs. We have come to learn that differences will often reveal themselves in the interpretation and living out of these values, which are essentially cultural customs, language, and communication patterns.

Defining Concepts

So we pose the question: is an intercultural perspective useful in building trust between faculty and administrators in higher education? In order to begin to investigate this question, we must first establish definitions of key terms that appear throughout this book.

Culture

The term “culture” is one that can be used in many ways, for many purposes, across academic disciplines and common parlance at any given time. Depending on the moment and the intention, people consider culture to be:

…something that people live inside of like a country or a region or a building – they speak, for example, of people leaving their cultures and going to live in other people’s cultures. Some consider culture something people think, a set of beliefs or values or mental patterns that people in a particular group share. Still others regard culture more like a set of rules that people follow…and others think of it as a set of largely unconscious habits that govern people’s behavior without them fully realizing it.

(Scollon, Scollon, & Jones, 2012, p. 3)

We recognize the potentially confusing lived experience of being part of a culture that is defined from within and from without, and perhaps differently by individuals based on their own personal and professional being. We are therefore grateful to the field of academia, broadly, for providing a culture in which “culture” may be explored through different lenses. We are grateful to Scollon, Scollon, and Jones (2012), specifically, for their definition of culture that captures the spirit of this book: culture is “a way of dividing people up into groups according to some feature of these people which helps us to understand something about them and how they are different from or similar to other people” (p. 3).

Cross-cultural

Simply put, “cross-cultural” refers to a comparison between two or more cultures. Though admittedly simplistic, in order to understand cross-cultural approaches to research, scholars posit that context is important, since “one query may present different findings in different places” (Akpovo, Moran, & Brookshire, 2018, p. xxi). Thus, comparison provides an opportunity for researchers to examine differences and similarities that exist between or among groups. Since collaborative cross-cultural research invites negotiation and co-construction of understanding, experts in the field of cross-cultural research acknowledge that there is sometimes a “blurring of the lines” between cross-cultural and intercultural relationships (Liamputtong, 2010). Researchers who engage in cross-cultural studies often find themselves challenged, and ultimately transformed, as a result of culturally sensitive practice.

Intercultural

As noted above, “intercultural” implies a relationship in which the research process transforms the knowledge and behaviors of participants by virtue of the exchanges, investigations, and connections formed. People “are prompted to scrutinize the different underlying assumptions and schemas in both cultures” (Lu et al., 2017, p. 1093). Whereas cross-cultural research investigates cultural systems as discrete entities, intercultural research explores “‘people doing things’ using systems of culture” (Scollon, Scollon, & Jones, 2012, p. 5). Researchers have noted that it is a mistake to focus research on culture as a key to “understanding” when many “misunderstandings” are actually “linguistic” in nature or “based on inequality” and therefore reflect “global inequality and injustice” that can be obscured in pursuit of cultural understanding (Piller, 2012, p. 9). The focus of intercultural communication “must shift from reified and inescapable notions of cultural difference to…discourses where ‘culture’ is actually made relevant and used as a communicative resource” (p. 14).

Diversity

As a term, “diversity” can be used to encompass everything and therefore nothing. “Without a precise definition of categories…diversity as such is absolutely meaningless and risks being used for the purpose of everybody undermining any idea of equity” (Klein, 2016, p. 151). In our research into faculty and administrator relationships and experiences, it is precisely because we cannot (and do not seek to) isolate inextricably linked identities and experiences that comprise an individual’s understanding and participation within a group that we choose an intercultural lens with which to examine faculty and administrator relationships. “Race, ethnicity, social class, language use, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and other social and human differences” (Nieto & Bode, 2018, p. 4) contribute to the range of diversity evident in institutions of higher education. It is critically important to acknowledge that diversity and diversity in high education settings are nestled in a socio-political context that has influenced the writing of this book. While not necessarily at the forefront of every chapter, we have attempted to be cognizant of diversity in its broa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Two Cultures at Odds
• Part Two Two Cultures Building Bridges
• Part Three Two Cultures, One Community
• Index