Abstract
This article is the story of the simultaneous feminization and corporatization of universities, themes that emerged in a test of a collective biography, a qualitative research method. Organizers brought together 12 macro social work academic women across generations and, through sampling, attempted to avoid the intergenerational splitting that seems to be leaving junior faculty to be socialized by administrators while simultaneously isolating senior faculty from their generative role. Our analysis identified several trends developed from our collective experiences including changes in faculty governance, formalized mentoring, intergenerational faculty relationships, and shifting expectations. With these changes, we sense a reduction in what we used to think of as a collegium, now in danger of becoming an historical artifact.
A Collective Biography
In an introduction to her new text, Yvonna Lincoln (Lincoln & Guba, 2013) touches on important themes of current academic life in research universities. She forcefully speaks of her personal experiences as an educator: the tyranny of accountability, the managerial focus on the assessment of minutiae and measurable outcomes (ignoring the unmeasurable and far more important work of the university), the despotic and ruthless emphasis on external funding (in the wake of declining state expenditures on higher education, as well as public education), the glowering disinterest in genuinely creative thought in the aftermath of the ‘counting culture’ surrounding promotion and tenure, the shrinking frames of academic freedom as part time, adjunct, and contingent faculty replace tenure-bearing lines, and the mistrustful, panopticonic surveillance of faculty worklife as the cult of efficiency and profit overtake the production of knowledge and education for responsible citizenship. (p. 35)
Others have studied the corporatization of the academy (e.g., Tuchman, 2009), identifying trends occurring throughout U.S. (Ginsberg, 2011) and Canadian (Hanke & Hearn, 2012) universities. Scholars from sociology, political science, education, and other disciplines tell us that the university is rife with change, in fact redefining the very purpose of higher education. Having conducted a case study of a de-identified “wanna-be” U.S. university, Tuchman (2009) eloquently asserts: Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp truth; to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music, and other forms of culture; and to work toward both enlightened politics and public service. Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs. They are not to educate, but to train. (p. 41)
It was within this changing academic context that on Memorial Day Weekend in May 2012, a group of 12 social work educators who taught macro courses in five universities gathered at an historical inn in Ashland, Virginia. The two organizers were interested in engaging in a research method called a collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006) where, together with the other 10 participants, we could share our memories about how we chose social work as a profession (Leisey et al., 2013); moved on to advanced degrees; how we entered our respective academic contexts; and how we perceived the changing environment in which we found ourselves. In the process, we shared past and current memories of challenges as women in academe and as women macro faculty practicing and working within a feminist tradition.
All of us knew we were encountering many changes in university life. We also knew that the fit of professional schools dedicated to preparing practitioners for “the real world” was fraught with trials. As the new editor of the Journal of Social Work Education, Robbins (2013) listed well-documented changes in social work education, such as the move to competency-based education, changes in the accreditation process, and stepped-up emphasis on scholarship, funding, and online education (p. 1). Changes were abundant, whether we focused on teaching, scholarship, or service in social work education.
Realizing schools of social work are contextualized within larger university settings, all participants were rapidly becoming acquainted with how the very nature of the university was also changing throughout North America. In the course of this corporate transformation, others were seriously writing about the shifting roles of faculty members who were seen as defenders of both intellectual rigor and the dated core mission of higher education in a time when pragmatism and economics were driving higher education (Ginsberg, 2011). Corporatization, commodification, and capitalism were being referred to throughout the literature (see, e.g., Lincoln & Guba, 2013; Tuchman, 2009) and across disciplines and fields with bold statements such as the existence of “a fundamental shift in the mandate and purpose of universities away from the pursuit of knowledge for public good and toward a market-oriented framework” (Cottrell, 2012, p. 312).
Focusing on Canadian universities, Hanke and Hearn (2012) described “a new kind of enterprise infused by the spirit of networking and entrepreneurialism…[where] the rhetoric of ‘excellence’ rings as hollow as a marketing catchphrase…” (p. 12). Newson (2012) observed that there was something of a paradox in the corporatization of the university and the parallel process of feminization that had occurred within the academy. She suggested that feminist principles did not seem congruent with the way in which universities were moving, particularly when it came to decreasing faculty governance and collegialism. Yet, paradoxically, she was encouraged by “the acquired significant leverage” that women had obtained within the university and that “they—along with male colleagues who shared their concerns—could use this leverage to ensure that the university remains a public-serving institution to which it is worth gaining access” (p. 57). Similarly, within social work, there has been a call for reigniting “a discourse about feminist principles and their applications to leadership in the social work profession…[and] the challenges of social change in both processes and outcomes across multiple contexts by diverse women and men” (Lazzari, Colarossi, & Collins, 2009, p. 348). This call for discourse reinforced previous calls for dialogue raised by multiple feminist social work scholars over the role and status of women in social work education (Bent-Goodley & Sarnoff, 2008; Figueira-McDonough, Netting, & Nichols-Casebolt, 2001) and the role of qualitative methods in this discourse (Brown, Western, & Pascal, 2013; Lorenzetti, 2013).
The Inquiry Method
This rapidly changing, often paradoxical, contextual milieu, in which project organizers saw an urgent need to reignite discourse formed the backdrop on which the participants in our collective biography were recruited. The aim of the inquiry was to test the collective biography method to determine whether we could construct a narrative of selected women macro social work academics. What resulted was a story of women social workers in what continues to be male-dominated contexts in the university and in macro social work practice. Macro social work educators were particularly selected because the organizers had experienced firsthand the contentiousness surrounding the role of macro practice in social work education and were struggling with how to maintain a curricular balance between micro and macro. Sensing a groundswell of concern over the future of macro practice curriculum in schools of social work (Rothman, 2012), they were curious about the degree that their micro/macro curricular challenges were shared by others and wished to create a conversation on the topic. Following the method, the organizers became part of the “we,” and as participants we covered the range of professorial ranks, from first-year assistant professors to associates, to senior faculty with long-term tenure, to recent professor emeriti. We represented major East coast schools of social work. We were selected by the organizers because we had characteristics in common—we were women who defined ourselves as social work macro educators and who had been hired into tenured lines at our respective universities. We were women who were committed to the concept of education as a means to teach critical thinking and social justice. Regardless of our rank within the academy, we were known to be experiencing the tensions between what Newson (2012) referred to as feminization and feminist principles juxtaposed with the increasing corporate nature of our working environments and wished to interrogate this in the tradition of other feminist methodologies (Brown et al., 2013; Lorenzetti, 2013).
Our process was designed to follow the collective biography methodology developed by Davies and Gannon (2006) in which we followed a semistructured agenda, beginning with memories of what influenced the choice of the social work field to our most recent experiences of being a macro social work educator. Day 1 was designed to go deep into the past, revealing how participants had been influenced and motivated to be where we were today. Day 2 was to focus on educational experiences that led to current choices about and experiences in the academy. Day 3 was to move us to the practicalities of where we could go from there in the writing of our collective biography. The organizers prepared a loosely constructed list of areas of focus and questions for each day (much like a semistructured interview tool) to serve as a guide for moving chronologically—from pre-professional memories to our most recent experiences as social work academics. The first focus was preprofessional memories guided by the questions: What individual, family, friendship, social movement influences were important to moving in a macro or large system direction and what people and experiences were important to each of you? The second focus was stage setting, where participants were asked to identify what educational processes were significantly important to them, those that affected their later educational and professional choices, including both undergraduate and graduate education. The third area was motivation including macro practice influences once participants completed master’s level education. Questions were about socio/political/power influences, broad scale social issues, issues of actual political power, and additional important turning points in the direction of macro practice including specific individual, family, friendship, educators, groups, organizational, or societal pivot points. Academic life and scholarship related to macro issues was last, with some thought to the importance of politics internal to our respective institutions, as well as external influences. The focus was intended to include mentoring and collaboration as well as service, research, teaching, and macro social work curriculum.
We engaged in a discursive process in which we dialogued as a group (all of which was recorded and then transcribed) and then separated to write about the feelings around memories that had emerged in the interactive process, returning to share those written memories with one another. These written memories also served as data sources for the project (Leisey et al., 2013). The iterative process became an ebbing and flowing of dialogue and reflection as we moved from long-ago memories to more short-term memories over the course of 3 days. For details of the strengths and challenges of the method, see Authors (O’Connor et al., 2013). We found ourselves particularly energized, as we came closer to the current time where sometimes raw emotions emerged relating to how we coped with change or faced redefinitions of ourselves within academies that were not perceived to be the same as they had been even a few years ago. For the purposes of this article, we share the collective story not of what was written by the participants but of what emerged from thematic analysis (Riessman, 1994) of the transcription of our last day together that includes the focus on current academic life and scholarship. The narrative that follows is a product of our collective collaboration and has been validated through a grand member check (Rodwell, 1998) involving all participants where all results were vetted by all participants to assure that all voices were accurately represented.
Our Collective Experience
The second day discussion seemed to ground to a halt, as we had become mired in memories about our master of social work (MSW) and PhD educational experiences touching only lightly on our lives as academics. What occurred seemed to fit with the natural ebb and flow of learning about and enacting a new approach to research while we engaged with colleagues in a relaxed, away-from-it-all retreat. After dinner, some of us had settled into our respective rooms for a quiet respite and others had marched along the now darkened streets of Ashland, Virginia, to the Dairy Queen.
The next morning was our last day together. Our focus was carried over from the previous day in which we had begun examining the internal and external politics of our respective experiences regarding mentoring and collaboration, service, research, and teaching. As we moved into our process of remembering and reflecting, we could feel a swell of energy and urgency rise among us. We talked rapidly and built on one another’s comments.
Having entered academe in different eras, some of our memories were more recent than others. In a way, the senior faculty members were able to normalize many of the involvements more junior participants were just beginning to explore. Collectively, our memory constructions represented an awareness in which the teller could still feel her visceral reactions as she voiced her own story. Just listening to everyone…this makes me very sad…because we’ve been talking a lot about community. And as I mentioned [earlier that] I found it interesting that when we talked about community work, it was all community town–gown stuff. It wasn’t community within our own house…So, I’ve been, in my own little bubble, working to figure out how to create that, even if I have to do it by myself. And even if it means some of it is long distance because I am still close to some of the members of my cohort. And I think it’s worth our thinking about, you know, because if we believe that all social work is relational and if we believe that change happens through relationships, then the lack of, or the difficulty in creating those kinds of communities where we are is a concern. Then it makes everything not only harder but feels impossible.
The reaction in the room was palpable as this participant spoke, heads nodded, and eyes sparked agreement as we realized the talk in our contexts was so often about engagement with external communities to gain access, to collaborate on research, to cosponsor a funded project, to place our students, and on and on. But where was the talk about community within the school and university itself? We began to discuss our relationships and the fact that we, as women, had been socialized to think relationally. If we did not tend to our internal relationships in order to create an environment in which to nurture the collegium, then how could we possibly hope to reach out to engage communities beyond our walls? Soon the dialogue turned to experiences with what was happening to the collegium of faculty members with whom we worked in our respective schools.
Governing and Decision Making in the Collegium
We pondered the changes we were seeing in faculty or shared faculty governance. One older faculty member recalled when she was “in a program that was small. And the Deans rotated, they were senior faculty. They had 2- or 3-year appointments. So it was always your colleagues who were the Deans.” Another offered, “And they weren’t that invested in being the Dean. They were not at all,” she replied.
Still another voice rose to speak about the concept of faculty governance and how it was changing in her school. We have had very strong faculty governance forever. And [our Dean] was very uncomfortable, from the very beginning. He made it very clear, ‘I don’t believe in this level of faculty governance.’ And other Deans on campus were saying to him, ‘Oh, the School of Social Work has way too much faculty governance.’ So that fueled his idea that, you know, he needed to shut this down somewhat. So he’s been trying for years to shut…this level of faculty governance down…he doesn’t have his way totally. But he has chipped and chipped and chipped away at faculty governance.
And how has that chipping occurred? “We do our faculty meetings in the auditorium now in stadium seating, which adds a whole, new dimension to that…And you don’t have a lot of eye contact with people because you are in rows.” Another participant talked about how the structure of their faculty meetings had also changed and how it had become hard to even know who was a faculty member anymore. “The term ‘faculty’ doesn’t mean anything anymore. We are hiring so many adjuncts to teach our courses.” And with the inflation of the numbers of people who are teaching and who have not developed the curriculum, the collegium was becoming diffuse. I felt very much a part of the community when I came to [the university]. That was one of the things I felt so good about and I was so excited about, there was this community. And I felt like all that community was on several levels. I mean, on a personal level, people were concerned about you. Around your scholarship, as colleagues, people were concerned, and genuinely concerned. So I hear you and I think you are right, that sense of community is so important. And that was the thing that I liked so much and felt so comfortable that I saw, that I see, that’s slowly going away.
This change in how we viewed the collegium was evident to us in many ways. One participant talked about how new faculty hires were being socialized differently and being released from being on certain committees that originally had served to engage/orient faculty in the life of the school. Older faculty talked about the days when they were overloaded with committee work; but later, as a protection, had advocated for junior faculty not to chair standing committees until they were tenured. That protection of junior faculty had its downsides in that these same young faculty were somewhat disempowered within their own systems. They were not introduced to the inner workings of the school and, thus, could not address changes that needed to occur. Certainly, they were protected to focus on their research/scholarship and teaching. As a consequence, more and more of the school’s oversight had been undertaken without their informed input. As we talked, the focus kept returning to mentoring as a way to socialize faculty. It was in this dialogue that insights developed about how the socialization process was also changing.
Mentoring Faculty
Everyone seemed to have a story about mentoring or the lack thereof. In the early days, older faculty remembered a more informal process that emerged, without the mentoring label. Sometimes this worked well and other times it didn’t. Those of us who had entered academe years ago were often mentored by men, simply because men taught the macro courses we were teaching. Most of us have had very positive experiences with male mentors who advocated for us when we encountered difficulties within the system. This seemed to be the case when those mentors had status within the system and felt confident in their own abilities. Typically, this was a full professor who was mentoring a very junior female colleague. But an abuse of power experience was shared by one participant who was assigned a male mentor by her funding source. Fortunately, she had strong female mentors in her doctoral program and beyond and knew what was reasonable in a mentoring relationship and was able to extricate herself from the forced relationship with the help and support of a sensitive female program officer.
This story precipitated more conversation in which two participants recounted their experiences upon entering academe. They had independently met with the Dean and had mentioned senior faculty they would like to have mentor them. In one situation, the Dean had encouraged the faculty member to wait and consider other possibilities, not to act too soon. In another situation, the Dean told the faculty member that the person she had chosen had been already assigned to someone else and was, thus, unavailable. These two participants understood mentoring as being no more than a bureaucratic assignment process without relational decision making. I think it’s interesting, this idea of assigning mentors…because the idea that it’s an organic kind of magnetism, the ideas that kind of bring people together. But we do know that for the sake of expedience, we sort of clump people together and say, will you match this person and that person.…. That’s not the idea about mentoring. It’s more like we were attracted to each other in dimensions and in ways that we don’t even know about at first. It’s something that connects.
The assigning of mentors by someone in an administrative position was viewed with concern and challenged our idea of a naturally occurring “organic” mentoring process. Though some of us were hesitant to approach what was viewed as a political process, others were quick to offer an alternative view. I find this conversation really interesting because I have never paid attention to whom I was assigned, even at my Master’s Program. Maybe it’s just the context.…but I had an advisor assigned for my MSW Program, and I never even talked to him. I mean, once, and he really pissed me off so I would go find somebody else. And I would go find somebody that seemed to be most appropriate to the issue or the question I had…I just figured, everybody’s here, I could pick and choose whom I wanted…It’s not that I didn’t need a mentor but I never thought there would be like one person because I had different needs at different times and looking for different areas of expertise.
Affirmative nods and smiles followed this statement in recognition that formalized mentoring programs could be limiting if we recognized the need to seek out persons who could address different needs at different times. Another participant added that she had gotten much of her mentoring by going “outside my office door…and being essentially mentored by osmosis, particularly thinking of [women colleagues] across the hall.”
This helped identify another change to informal mentoring that had been occurring within that same (and other’s) environment. Faculty engaged less and less, doors were closed more and more. There was a sense that norms had shifted from interactional relationship building to more and more isolationism for the sake of productivity. “I walk into the building and all I see are closed doors.”
Overall, the intent of mentoring, to provide guidance for the next generation, was thought to be positive. The following dialogue opened a window of insights, as we recognized that it was in the “how” of mentoring that we found a number of changes occurring, amid academic politics and power. Junior Faculty Member:…coming in I was very excited to have a mentor, but I do think it takes me a while to make up my mind. I do a little bit of observing and that’s where I’m most comfortable. I think that as my only faculty experience so far, I felt pressure to pick somebody, not just from the Dean, but faculty who will ask me, ‘who’s your mentor? Have you found a mentor?’ And, when you are new there’s this feeling of “will I hurt his feelings if I am choosing the wrong way, is there some political aspect to this that I’m not getting?” Junior Faculty Member:…it’s really validating to be in a group where I’m hearing that my process and my own owning of my process which is, ‘I’m going to take my damn time picking my mentor’ is actually not radical, like that’s actually sort of [normal]. I really appreciate hearing that because I struggled with that this year. Senior Faculty Member: That really is a question about how the system is operating now with [our] Dean. And it doesn’t have much to do with what folks are feeling; it’s the unwritten new rules about mentoring. We are trying to figure out what the rules are too. Junior Faculty Member: Sure, and I think I’ve been attuned to know that; that’s also instinctive. But that’s not about me. But that’s hard because it’s also my inclination to be very relational. And I don’t like that feeling of consciousness all the time, and I know it’s just par for the course in this line of work.
In the unfolding of this interaction, it became clear that mentoring as a formalized process had become a cultural clue for faculty to assess how things were changing. In the ensuing dialogue, we compared experiences of the relationship of junior and senior faculty who went beyond simply talking about establishing mentoring relationships.
Splitting Junior and Senior Faculty Relationships
We had talked a great deal about an academic community and our desire to build relationships among colleagues. Thus, it was revealing to recognize a similar long-term strategy used by persons in leadership positions that appeared to be aimed at discouraging relationship building between junior and senior faculty. One person talked about a cohort of faculty coming into the school the same time that a Dean was hired. [The Dean] immediately identified with the group of new faculty coming in and created allies with them. He started taking them out to lunch and he started taking them out to dinner. And so he was sort of setting up like it’s us against you. And then he told them, ‘I think it’s a good idea to choose mentors outside of the school because I don’t know that the senior faculty is really going to be able to help you.’ And so, he was just creating this division from the very beginning. And they were getting resources that the rest of the people were initially not getting. And so they started feeling very much ingratiated to him. It’s classic and just watching it was classic. But some of us senior faculty were actually forging very good friendships with the junior faculty so they were telling us what he was telling them. But at the same time they were feeling very beholden to him…They were totally split. And so it was just a very interesting power play to watch happening. You know, I came into a program that was taught totally by men. And, I think in working my way into teaching courses in the area, there was some hazing that probably went on, for want of a better word. And part of it later I realized was perpetuated by the Dean. But, I found this out later. He would bring in the senior faculty and he would throw up to them the junior faculty who were publishing. ‘You know, you need to publish more and what’s wrong with you guys because we’ve got these younger people who are coming in doing this.’ Now, of course, we junior faculty didn’t know this. So, what would happen is like a drive-by shooting. I would go down the hall, and someone would yell down the hall, ‘students seem to like you. That’s the kiss of death’ or something like that. And I’d think, ‘Where did that outburst come from?’ So, there would be times like that when you would go, ‘okay, there’s something more to this than just somebody deciding to scream at me down the hall.’ I just couldn’t figure out why this anger would erupt. And it was typically a senior faculty member. It just happened that it was a male faculty member, because most of our senior faculty members were male they would say things like ‘you’ll never get tenure. After all, look at what you’re publishing!’ So I think this divide and conquer has been happening a very long time.
The parallel between 30 years ago when PhD-educated faculty were being hired with the directive to publish, as scholars seemed remarkably similar to today’s new faculty being hired to conduct funded research as scholars. The first wave was replacing MSW-level faculty who had taught in professional schools for years and who likely felt unappreciated and discarded within the changing academy. Now these hires of 25–30 years ago were feeling somewhat displaced as they retired (or were encouraged to retire) to make space for the next generation of research faculty. In this process, one senior faculty member commented that she felt like she was in a greyhound race “like one of those old dogs who can’t run anymore but the gate goes up and you feel like you ought to. And I’m thinking, no, no, don’t, don’t. But I need to find out a way to do it so I don’t sell my soul. And that’s what I’m sort of working with.”
Shifting Expectations
The ongoing conversation revealed that the older generations of faculty may be feeling uncertain and displaced, but junior faculty were encountering uncertainties within their new academic homes as well. At this point, one participant spoke up, sharing her feelings about being a junior faculty member hired with evolving expectations and also revealing some trepidation about even participating in this collective experience. I find this conversation really validating. Can I just say, especially when you were sharing about your thoughtful process in choosing [mentors] and how long that took. Because, you know, I’m brand new faculty. And I just want to acknowledge that I’m sitting with a lot of faculty members who are senior to me and some that I’ve been a student with. So, I kind of feel compelled to put that on the table with some of this conversation because I do feel pretty vulnerable at times. I can get riled up.…But at the same time I’m very aware that even in the safety of this kind of space, that I don’t feel completely safe, so I just feel a little bit compelled to put that on the table, and maybe I should have done that earlier.
It was clear that most tenure lines at the schools of social work represented by participants are being populated with persons who show promise of obtaining outside dollars; however, even with that interest and competence, their experiences are fraught with challenges in the context of the politics accompanying these shifts to becoming “corporate” employees. My first semester in the academy, I wrote a grant for a training project in collaboration with [one of the state departments] and I did all the legwork, they were just the collaborators. And it was funded at $500,000. I thought that this is what we are supposed to do in the academy. I got a lot of encouragement from our Associate Dean to go after it…but no congratulations from our Dean when the grant was awarded…I didn’t know all the politics behind the scenes of what was going on with me having gotten this grant. But what I did know was it was a statewide project, so I was extremely busy…I got bought out of courses and I got my team together and what I noticed is that the Dean never said anything favorable about the work that I was doing; but the Associate Dean would always talk about how wonderful this was.…What I learned down the road is that the Associate Dean and the Dean were at odds. The Associate Dean had encouraged me to go after this grant. I was kind of like the pawn…So [in a faculty meeting] she [the Associate Dean] started talking about all this funding she had gotten, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, she’s brought in all this money! And so my colleague says to me, ‘Honey, half of that is your half million dollar grant.’…So then that’s when it started coming together that I was in the middle of these two women [Deans], both who had their own agenda, and I was just the pawn in the middle. And I was so naive because even when I learned that, I thought well, surely the Dean will see the importance of this and what kind of recognition this will bring to the school.
She continued telling the group that because she was new to the academy, there were times in which she had difficulty knowing the rules of the university until she had proceeded one way, only to find out that way was “wrong” and she had to do something else. This was a person who had written grants in her former practice experience and was not naive to the grant-writing and grant-getting process. She found herself in a completely new environment with different politics of oversight procedures and interpersonal dynamics.
The participants in our collective process were all very productive and well published. The discussions revealed that even for faculty who were producing, the evaluations of faculty were shifting and changing. Although older faculty had entered systems in which publishing in refereed journals was appreciated, we had watched the standards shift over time: first it was publish, next it was publish in certain type journals, then it was publish as empirically based pieces, now it is publish funded research. In the process, it seemed that the shifting expectations were not only a struggle for new faculty. Some participants underscored the challenges of being associate professors feeling “stuck” in terms of advancement, particularly in research-intensive schools where the “paradigm” for promotion has also rapidly shifted. As women, many associate professors have spent years doing what was expected—teaching multiple courses, advising students, actively chairing and serving on numerous committees, and being strong organizational citizens while still conducting original research and publishing. But only to find that as the paradigm /expectations quickly shifted, many do not have ‘enough’ of what only matters now—pubs, grants (especially when compared to junior faculty coming up for promotion who were so protected).
We also talked about our experiences in meeting the changing expectations. “We’ve had one faculty member that got told, ‘well, these articles don’t really count.’ And for some of the journals that count, I can’t imagine reading.”
As we recognized that we were all experiencing the consequences of so many things changing within the domain of the university, we became more and more transparent about our feelings. The women in the process began to sense the collective itself. Together, we struggled: If we were committed to the principles and values of our field of social work, what were we doing to manage the paradoxes, the uncertainties, and the conflicts that swirled around our daily lives? Was it even possible to build community in an environment in which faculty governance, intergenerational mentoring, collaboration, and former expectations were changing? I think most of us are very cautious right now. I certainly am. Before I come in the building, I have to prepare myself for what I think I may encounter at the moment. I am very cautious about what may be happening at any point in time when I get there. It might not have anything to do with me but it can affect me because I am a part of this group. I am very uncertain in that environment. Everything is so different from what it used to be. I’m always watching my back because I don’t know what’s going to happen.
Coping With Change
As the collective biography experience was in its final day, the most compelling memories were those about our most recent lived experiences in our respective, constantly changing academic worlds. Perhaps because the memories were less distant and more palpable, we could focus on change and how we often found ourselves resisting it, even as we taught the importance of change in our macro practice courses, and when we talked about how others resist change. Our last dialogue grew to be about how we coped and how we used our power.
One participant talked about having entered academia as a second career after years in social work practice. She called it a “saving grace” that she was a little more mature and already had a sense of who she was when she came to the university. I think what happens a lot of times for junior faculty who are right out of school and what we are seeing a lot of now is folks who are going directly from Master’s to PhD Programs. They have not worked, they don’t have experience, they have not had a chance to experience the real world…and they kind of get stuck and sometimes are afraid to make that choice for themselves. So they remain in situations that are not necessarily good for them.
She raised a point about which we were becoming painfully aware, that the importance of practice experience appeared to be somewhat diminished as long as new hires possessed research and grant-writing expertise. What was happening to professional schools when their faculty had limited professional practice expertise, especially macro practice, from which to draw? However, even with her years of work experience, she was still struggling to find her voice within the changing academy.
We found ourselves second-guessing our own judgment. One participant who had talked earlier about having had a mentor who was inappropriate with her conveyed how she hoped she would be wiser in the future. You know, it’s one of those things that, at various points, we really think we are out of other people really exercising control over us. You know, I’ve got this degree, I’ve got that degree, I can practice, I can teach, I can do research. And then it’s like being hit on the head. And I assume things that feel that way have happened that way, have happened to all of us. But that’s a horrible situation in something that the purpose is to mentor. When you are engaged with a funding source in such an intense kind of scenario, it’s not even just the unfortunate nature that you had this mentor, but you’ve got an incredible network of people who are so interconnected and influential over what’s going to happen that, you know, it’s very scary if you speak truth to power, because you don’t quite know where that’s going to go.
Many possible responses to change were expressed in our discussion. There were those of us who were carefully protecting themselves; keeping their doors closed; working from home as much as possible; and feeling the loss of a sense of community. There were others who resisted the temptation to sequester themselves and to keep their heads down, their voices mute, who spoke their minds at all costs. Still others of us struggled with when to be quiet and when to speak up, not always trusting their judgment in determining when to do what. One person fervently asked, when and “how much do you compromise?” These were the questions important to managing the power used outside ourselves.
Finding Our Voices
Moving toward the end of the collective biography process, we were finally able to focus on power and how we, as women and as macro academics, use personal power…or not. One person mused, “interesting places where power sort of pooches out and you think you are in collaboration and, all of a sudden, it’s not collaborative at all, even though those are the words that are being used.” If there was a situation in which differences were highlighted, it was most evident in how we saw ourselves, our individual responsibility to push for change, and our diverse approaches to adversity. The frankness with which we shared about ourselves as organizational citizens revealed a variety of strongly held predispositions, personalities, and opinions about how to deal with change. I think that there’s something about my natural tendency to connect and to just blather, instead of sitting back and going, let me withhold. I don’t know how to withhold and it seems as though that’s what you need to do to be to be a good politician, to manage the kind of hierarchical power that seems to be what works [now]. And so, what I really wonder about is whether I could even acquire those skills, or whether I want to acquire those skills because if what it might do to me as a personality. Sometimes we see risk where risk does not exist in terms of when we use our voice to push back, when it’s time to put on our safe face. I think that because we are so relational and attentive to what’s all there, there’s some chance, and this is a chance that I think that others sometime engaged in more than me, is…to do what’s necessary to keep on keeping on instead of drawing the line to say, okay, this ain’t right. Let’s figure out another way around it. Because the issue about change agency is that we are in the middle of it being driven by somebody who’s in power. And there is another way of doing business, maybe that could get to the same end. It’s not as though we disagree with what’s necessary in order to keep the doors open in a university where the political world is not necessarily in the direction of public education. But there is a way to go that is not hierarchical that is more collegial and more emergent that might even feel better. But the idea of even talking about it in some environments represents a criticism instead of a discussion of an idea or an alternative. And so sometimes it becomes really difficult to have ideas in an environment where there is a prescription. And it seems important for us that a piece of it is to ideate, not necessarily to do the change action but to at least imagine the alternatives instead of really being concerned about the risk related to even opening your mouth.
We also talked about our professional responsibilities as social workers, revealing a tension between what we expected of ourselves and colleagues from a social work perspective and that which encapsulated our identification as academicians. Were we social workers or were we academics and did it matter? I remember the [Dean] saying, I’m not going to say anything if there’s no chance for change. And I thought, then why are you a Social Worker? And why are we here? This frustrates the hell out of me. But this is the meta-message that we send our students, this is the meta-message that you are sending faculty.…So the party-line becomes, yeah, be a macro practitioner and yet still go out and get that 2 years post, get that supervision so you can, you know, do both. I mean, it’s just really safety is the meta-message I feel like I’ve come up with. And I am not an in-your-face kind of person and I think there are many ways to go about creating change. But, not attempting to do it, essentially saying, this [Provost] will not respond and I’m not going to put myself in the position or the [School] in the position of losing this capital that we have and that I have.
Another identified challenge was knowing when to ask a question or determining whether or not your question is heard. Because what happens is, when anybody comes into an organization, what they pay attention to becomes privileged. And so from a leadership perspective, I am thinking more than a community-building perspective, we are going to have to seize the reins to be leaders within our systems and what we pay attention to can also form the culture because if we assume the leader is the titular head, and the titular head happens to be embracing completely different values and assumptions and has a different way of looking at it then we could actually just allow that to become the culture. And so, the question becomes, how do you empower yourself within the organization to be a part of what you would like to see valued and happen?
Recognizing that schools of social work are housed within increasingly bureaucratic universities, we pondered the responsibility to remain true to our school’s missions, while facing a possibility of a lessening fit of our social work mission with these large institutions over time—if we, as macro social workers, were to remain true advocates. One participant talked about a new administrator who had recently joined her school. This was a community practitioner who did all kinds of community work and was late coming to academia, arriving from a completely different space and set of expectations. “And the first thing she said was, ‘Social Work [faculty] is too quiet. Have you seen what you all are doing? And you’re too quiet. You don’t rock the boat.’” Are we too quiet? Or has she over time been forced to adjust to the changing expectations of the academy? We did not hear the rest of her story…and the rest of ours is yet to be written.
Exploring Implications of What We Learned
Collectively, we identified several trends within our respective schools that we thought were contributing to a lessening of community—changes in faculty governance, formalized mentoring, intergenerational relationship building, and expectations. With these changes, we were sensing a reduction in what we used to think of as a collegium. We were forced to consider that perhaps the collegium is now an historical artifact as it was conceptualized earlier. Ironically, as one of us pointed out, we hear a great deal about community engagement in regard to town/gown connections; however, it feels as though we have less opportunity to build community within our own organizations among faculty colleagues. This has implications for workplace communication, socialization of faculty and students, development of an integrated curriculum delivered with a joint vision, the ability to make change within our environments, and finding our voices within the corporate university. This, of course, has greater ramifications than just those impacting women macro social work academics, which had been the focus of our time together. Implications for social work might be that within university institutions, social work academics can model healthy workplace communication that includes respectful and supportive socialization of faculty and students using good social work practice skills. From there, it just may be possible to push against the prevailing pressures to make changes in our environments that empower both faculty and students to courageously build on their strengths, so that ideas and the human touch are recognized as enhancements to the corporate university. With that, then, perhaps the social work educators can show the way from Tuchman’s (2009) worry about training toward real education in a changed academic environment.
In addition, at least in part, what we learned represents the paradox that Newson (2012) identified when she said that “A feminist vision for the university hardly seems compatible with the commoditization and commercialization of teaching and research that accompanies corporatization” (p. 28) or when Lazzari, Colarossi, and Collins (2009) wrote “practicing feminist principles in both formal and informal leadership roles requires courage by individuals and support and kindness from others” (p. 357). The collective biography experience provided glimpses into the type of supportive environment needed to grapple with the paradox of a feminist perspective within the corporate academy. The inquiry process itself may be an important strategy within today’s social work education. As Vakalahi and Starks (2010) conclude in their study of women of color as social work educators, the importance of continuing to build bridges among women cannot be underestimated and the legacy of women who have encountered barriers within the academy is dependent upon their never forgetting the importance of being there for the next generation.
In the process of engaging in a collective biography, we learned that coming together in this way could be an empowering experience if you can trust the participants and the process. In sharing memories and reflecting on those memories, we found a place to deeply explore the environments in which we work and to normalize the perceptions and strongly held feelings that accompany the changes we were experiencing. Our connection continues through the dissemination process of our work together in ways with potential to keep us linked and supportive of one another as colleagues as change surely continues.
Our process made clear that we as macro social work women had always been crossing communication boundaries. Even though we still questioned ourselves, there was a great deal of self-awareness on which to continue our professional and personal development and growth. Some might call this resilience; others might call it stubbornness; and still others might call it tenacious determination to have our voices heard. Whatever it is, it looks a little different for each of us. Collectively, it made us recognize the importance of pooling these differences into deeper understandings. Could this also be a way to preserve social work’s education mission?
We learned that we are not alone in experiencing the transformation of public education and its move toward a more corporate university. Reflecting on how these changes are affecting professional education and educators housed in professional schools was important to our increased understanding about university life. We particularly learned that bringing together faculty members across generations is needed in order to avoid intergenerational splitting, leaving junior faculty to be socialized by administrators, and isolating senior faculty from their generative role and responsibility in order to assure that macro education continues as a part of social work curriculums.
Our collective biography reminded us that some of the themes we were identifying were not entirely new. For example, Bent-Goodley and Sarnoff (2008) had recognized that “mentorship opportunities for women are challenged by systems largely structured around individual achievement with few institutional and systemic reinforcements of the value of mentorship for both the mentor and mentee” (p. 3). Our findings revealed that mentorship continues to be structurally bound and that it may be critically important for women to recognize that formal mentoring systems must be undergirded by informal mentoring that sustains women in schools and universities that do not reflect feminist values. Thus, senior women may need to make special efforts to reach out to new faculty members in creative ways, not always rigidly bound by formalized mentoring systems.
We discovered that each of us has our own strategy for coping and with that came renewed respect for our different styles, personalities, and predispositions. We approached a better understanding of how difficult it is to sustain social work values and feminist thought within organizations that are becoming more bureaucratic and hierarchical. At the end of our time together, we remained undaunted in our commitment to do the best we can to prepare our students to be savvy critical thinkers about change agency in addition to seekers of employment.
We identified multiple approaches to surviving within our respective settings, recognizing that there are times in which one has to take care of (protect) herself and times when one needs to speak up. There is no one best way…there are multiple ways to engage in managing change and each of us is finding her way. In the end, it was a positive experience to have taken the time to really share our memories and experiences. As one of us commented, “My immediate gut feeling is that it’s going to be hard to go back where there isn’t this kind of creative talk. And it’s really what I need to survive.”
Unlike Lorenzetti (2013), politics and power, perceived or otherwise, seem to have overcome our sense of feminist solidarity. In winning our place in the academy, we wonder whether we may have lost our authentic voices and our connections in community. Commodification and commercialization have not helped, but we have to ask whether those feminist connections were so ephemeral to have disappeared under pressure? Or were feminist principles never really a part of academic environments, and schools of social work simply tolerated as countercultural to the universities in which they were housed? Are our eyes more open now to the paradoxes that already existed? More connection potential and support may not be feasible (even possible) in the current environment. We call for a continuing discourse about ways to cope and strategies to sustain voice and community within changing academic environments.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.