George M. Dennison
History
University of Montana-Missoula
A recent entry in the ceaseless flow of "how to" primers in higher education, this book deserves the award for redundancy, sententiousness, and pomposity. With one or two exceptions, the contributors follow the editor's lead in breathless announcements of the discovery of conflict in academe and then proclaim their approaches as the proven means to transform conflict into progress. Anyone with any experience in higher education will wonder about the cogency of these claims and will most certainly ask how these contributors managed to miss Woodrow Wilson's famous comment that he learned politics from the professionals at Princeton before going to practice among the amateurs in Washington, D.C. As I understand it, politics has to do with who gets what and the process of resolving the resultant conflicts without resorting to violence. Most assuredly, higher education has a rich history of conflict that reaches back to the beginning of the academy.
Nonetheless, the conflict has changed over time with regard to antagonists and intensity. The book focuses on "strategies" for managing conflicts that separate administrators from faculty, faculty from students, students from students, and the like. For the most part, the authors rely on familiar case studies that hardly require elaborate models to understand. In addition, each contributor appears to assume that the reader has no awareness of such commonsensical responses to conflict as establishing the facts and seeking amicable resolution before resorting to formal grievance processes, mediation, arbitration, or litigation. As a result, each has a slightly different description of these processes. In my view, elimination of the redundancy would have reduced the book by three-quarters, a worthwhile improvement.
The tendency to make exaggerated claims detracts from the effectiveness of the book as well. The contributors concentrate more on selling their "models" of conflict management than on enhancing understanding. As an example, Janet Rifkin asserts that "The American university is in the process of being reconceptualized. There is no longer any serious debate about the fact that institutions of higher education need to be managed, that they are similar to corporations and companies, and that the tools of modern management should be applied to universities which are no longer being understood as remote, ivory towers" (192). Nonetheless, most of us still believe that universities differ from corporations and companies, but one searches in vain for some glimmer of how Rifkin "reconceptualizes" the modern university in terms of pedagogy and intellectual activity. Instead one learns that "deans, chairs...and all other administrators" must become "managers and supervisors" rather than "intellectual leaders." Good management, not responsive education of the highest quality, provides the vision. The editor, Susan Holton, offers the extreme case in point. "The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a process for managing any conflict which you may encounter" (221, emphasis supplied). Or even more pretentiously, if immodestly, "The Holton Model for Conflict Management is one which can be used with any conflict in any setting." However, the seeker for the right way must use "all parts of the model," with no deviations. While the other contributors make more modest claims, each has an approach to sell rather than understanding to convey.
In fairness to the topic, I concede the utility of guides to conflict resolution. We all know from experience that conflicts occur daily, even hourly, involving administrators, faculty, staff, students, alumni, system officials, trustees or regents, government bureaucrats, politicians, and citizens at large. Since conflict involves disagreement about issues, benefits, competing claims, or all of these and more, it seems clear that all conflicts resemble each other to some extent. In my view, the central question asks what we do about conflicts, manage them or resolve them? To seek merely to manage them reeks of an approach the militants of the sixties labeled "co-optation." Successful conflict management protects institutional prerogatives while neglecting institutional goals. I submit that we must have a larger perspective.
Two of the authors, Gerald Graff and Clara Lovett, provide useful assistance. Gerald Graff argues persuasively that college and university administrators have practiced conflict management as described above since well before the turn of the century (12-27). When the "common set of beliefs" that had held earlier colleges together atrophied in the last century, academic administrators invented the strategy of "patterned isolation" as a brilliant if evasive response to conflict. Whether the conflict concerned personal animosity, curricular design, or program development, administrators authorized new departments separating antagonists to distant parts of the campus; created new schools with professional orientations and arrays of courses duplicative of other offerings; or established "distribution" requirements as the means of general education with great variation by discipline. As a result, curricular discussion degenerated into trivial debates about the placement of courses within the smorgasbord, and warring factions rarely encountered each other except on social or ceremonial occasions. Denial or avoidance left the university free to develop with "Bureaucratic modes...as a low but tolerable common denominator, linking individuals, cliques, and factions who did not think in the same terms" but did not have to confront their differences. Two apt descriptions of the modern university come to mind: "...a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central heating system;" or "...a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking" (The Uses of the University, 1982).
Patterned isolation as a means of conflict management worked in an era of increasing resources and relative freedom from external interference. However, resource scarcity and the emergence of the cultural wars within society at large marked an end to its effectiveness. Rather than conflict management, Graff recommends that we recognize and make use of the educational potential of conflict resolution, as does Clara Lovett, although not as forcibly (113-127). I concur with Graff. To focus upon conflict management rather than resolution misses the teachable moment. For the conflict manager, an outcome that allows all parties to feel good becomes the major objective, rather than an equitable resolution that furthers the educational goals of the institution. Thus, a collaborative approach to collective bargaining or decision making deteriorates into nothing more than co-optation rather than a creative way to find solutions that deal with the real interests in dispute. If we in higher education allow this approach to replace the "patterned isolation" of the past, we will experience what Kenneth Burke referred to as the "bureaucratization of the imagination." Rather than joining the issues and seeking to reconcile the competing perspectives, we deny and evade them to the peril of the university and our society. Even if joining the issues exposes us to great risk of failure, I doubt that we have a choice. Failure or irrelevance seems inevitable if we choose the other approach.
For that reason, books such as this one have significance larger than their inflated contents warrant. Who can say how many aspiring administrators will accept the not-so-subtle message in books, seminars, and workshops designed to transform them into managers rather than intellectual leaders and universities into bureaucracies rather than "seminaries of higher learning," a term commonly used in the last century. What, then, becomes of the grand question which has preoccupied us during this century: What are the uses of the university?