Faculty Animosity: A Contextual View

Abstract

Professional conflicts and deep antagonisms within departments and colleges are common aspects of life. There are tales of life long rivalries between titans--for example, Kant's dispute with the theological faculty (Carlson 2008)--and I suspect many of us lesser beings have observed or experienced the adverse consequences of professorial disputes. For some of us, interpersonal conflicts have grave consequences and the costs are high. This analysis examines faculty animosity from an interdisciplinary point of view, focusing on the social and organizational structures and processes that may foster the individual actions and reactions associated with interpersonal antagonisms. Animosity means ill will and/or resentment associated with hostility toward a target. As used here, faculty animosity involves bearing an explicit or latent antagonistic attitude toward one or more colleagues that leads to hostility, avoidance, and rejection. It may involve conscious and visible vindictiveness (enmity), or angry brooding over a perceived slight (rancor). The conflicts and animosities that arise within the academy are problematic because they diminish the quality of our professional lives, with adverse effects on students as well as faculty. This analysis employs ideas from several fields to reframe the problem, offering some interpretive vantage points from which to consider the origins and consequences of faculty animosity. Part one examines the culture of academe as a whole, with its longstanding celebration of argument. Adversarialism has historical roots in the academy, as evident in the use of particular metaphors and instructional practices. Part two describes how the structure of institutions creates a hothouse climate that may intensify hostilities, leading in the most extreme cases to social elimination (workplace mobbing). Shifting focus from the general to the particular, part three examines whether the professional culture of professors of education might itself engender contention. This section speculates that professors of education, by virtue of their unique status within higher education, may work in settings that have the potential to amplify interpersonal antagonisms. The article concludes with an analysis of the consequences of faculty antagonisms, offering some concrete strategies for change. The Argument Culture Beverly Gordon, an associate professor in a school of educational policy and leadership, once described her intellectual research site as a 'hood--a very dangerous place. You can be ambushed and assaulted. You can be robbed or have your possessions stolen. You can be shot in a drive-by shooting. You can get caught in the cross fire of different warring gangs. You are recruited and can even be forced to join these gangs for your own safety and protection, and yet you still have no real guarantee of safety. You can become a prisoner within your own dwelling because the streets are dangerous and the gangs are unrelenting, unforgiving, and revengeful. The gangs of the 'hood have histories, reputations, and identifying attributes that demarcate the territories that they uphold and guard. Being a good citizen and trying to play it safe is not enough. (1999, p. 407) The residents of Gordon's 'hood were middle class men and women employed in higher education--The 'hood I work in is the (ibid.). She noted that those who work in Academe are as vulnerable to attack as those who live in dangerous neighborhoods, observing ... your smile of recognition speaks volumes about the parallels of life within the Academy and life in the mean streets of urban American society. The metaphor works because you, rather we--those of us that live in this academic 'hood--are as vulnerable as our urban counterparts, but in the university, instead of blood, there is an vacated/empty office, which more often than not is reoccupied before the corpse has time to cool. …