Rank, Title, Position, and Power

One of higher education’s greatest weaknesses, operationally, is our continued fixation on rank and title. For all of the vaunted progressiveness of higher education, we are deeply conservative in our organizational structures and our relationship to and framing of power within our organizations. Institutions of higher ed are primarily very hierarchical, and despite structures of shared governance and norms of academic freedom, people are often deferential to position and rank, and perceive these things to carry inherent power.

I am often surprised by the continued reverence for rank in colleges and universities. I see an interesting tension that this creates, especially in institutions whose missions are openly and directly focused on social justice and equity. There is some great feminist scholarship on the ways that hierarchical organizational structures re-inscribe inequities of gender, race, class, nationality, and sexuality. Kathy E. Ferguson’s 1984 book The Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy is an early exploration of this topic and Joan Acker’s work on hierarchy and gendered organizations is also excellent. There are a lot more scholars in the field of critical leadership studies who look at these issues. These scholars point to the ways that hierarchical organizational structures are dependent on and reinforce broader structures of social inequality.

But beyond the ways that hierarchies in organizations uphold inequality, they also stand in the way of innovation and responsiveness. There is also a lot of research in business that looks at the impact of organizational structure on innovation and growth. Most of it demonstrates that bureaucratic and hierarchical organizations struggle to adapt to changing environments and to continue to innovate. The kinds of bureaucratic, hierarchical structures that exist in universities are rigid, ossified. They create barriers to the flow of knowledge and information, and they endlessly generate rules and regulations that serve more to preserve their own existence than to further the mission of the organization. The more layers and levels that exist in an organization, the harder it is make decisions and implement change. You also tend to see the proliferation and continual revision of strategic initiatives, accountability metrics, key performance indicators, and other institutional efforts that keep the many layers of management gainfully employed while drawing attention and effort away from the day-to-day functioning of the organization.

The bureaucratization of higher education and the continued growth of the administrative class locks our institutions into rigid structures that can’t innovate, while at the same time, innovation and knowledge creation are supposed to be our entire reason for existence. I think this tension can lead to extremely dysfunctional workplaces. I recently read an article by Paul Gentle and Louise Clifton (“How does leadership development help universities become learning organizations?“) in which they argue that the deference that tends to be exhibited in hierarchical organizations can get in the way of sharing knowledge and supporting institutional learning. The structures that we’ve created impede our ability to fulfill our institutional purpose.

The focus on rank and position also lead to situations where people become more focused on protecting and advancing their own position than on working collaboratively to achieve institutional goals. It also means that people across the organization spend way too much time thinking about and talking about (and complaining about) the various positions and titles that they and other people have than on thinking about the work that needs to get done. And I don’t even want to think about ways that this kind of culture have enabled us to give university presidents other other “top” leaders exorbitant and completely unwarranted salaries and other perquisites built on the backs of an increasingly precarious and poorly compensated workforce of adjunct faculty and expendable staff. Or the ways that deference to institutional rank enables abusers and harassers to continue to be promoted and supported by our institutions.

Until we take a hard look at our obsession with rank and positional power, and stop creating endless layers of vice presidents and associate vice presidents and assistant vice presidents and senior vice presidents and whatever other Frankenstein administrative titles we can come up with, higher education is going to continue to sink like the top-heavy stone its become. We are unable to create the kinds of institutions that can truly educate students for the world we live in today in an affordable and effective way. We can’t create the new knowledge we need to solve the intractable problems we face. We are stuck perpetuating our own bureaucratic structures and fixating on who has what title and who we are empowered to work with and to whom we must defer. We can’t collaborate, we can’t engage in honest dialogue about the problems we’re facing, and we can’t implement meaningful institutional change.

Maybe this all sounds a little dramatic. I think I’ve just seen a little too much of this lately and it makes me feel very tired and annoyed. I think we can do better. I think we need to do better, and I think that we have no business talking about how we are working for social justice and equity while we continue to uphold very inequitable systems in our own house. We owe it to ourselves to create healthier, more functional workplaces and we owe it to our students and our communities, as well. I’m not sure we can meet fulfill our promise to our communities if we don’t re-think the way we work together and organize ourselves. And I think we’re seeing that higher education can’t survive without changing.


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