Are Faculty Members Like Cats?
If you go to Google and type in “Managing people is like”, the rest of the sentence will come out as “herding cats”. If you then replace the word “people” with “lawyers”, you will get hundreds of hits; replacing it with “scientists” gives a few dozen. Try “students” instead, and you’ll get around sixty hits. With “academics”, “faculty”, “faculty members”, “professors” and “teachers”, you get hundreds. The idea of faculty members being described by deans and other administrators as cat-like is quite intriguing. I was surprised when I heard the expression used in the UK not long ago, but it turns out that it’s so commonly used in the English speaking world that it has lately become a cliché.
Why do administrators in western universities liken faculty members to cats? Judging from various internet sources, it appears that administrators are annoyed by the independence of the teaching staff, not to mention other qualities such as shrewdness, suspiciousness and resistance to change. One university president recently remarked that “Faculty members are professional contrarians, and the academy rewards them for it by giving them tenure.…When you finally give in to the contrarians, they can't take ‘yes’ for an answer” (see "Shared Faculty Governance: An Essential Institution" ). The theme of resistance to change recurs in various sources. Suzanne Lohmann once emphasized this in a paper entitled “Herding Cats, Moving Cemeteries, and Hauling Academic Trunks: Why Change Comes Hard to the University”. In that paper she referred to the difficulty of managing faculty, changing the curriculum, and promoting change in general in American universities: “Just like private corporations, institutions of higher education grapple with a combination of external forces that are pushing for change and internal forces that are resisting change, except that these two sets of forces are magnified in the case of the university.”
From personal experience working as a course coordinator, I can confirm that managing people is not a walk in the park, but I do not think that faculty members have special feline qualities that other people lack. The fact that the same metaphor is used for other categories of people proves it.
Posted by May Mikati on 26 December 2011, 6:41 PM
If you go to Google and type in “Managing people is like”, the rest of the sentence will come out as “herding cats”. If you then replace the word “people” with “lawyers”, you will get hundreds of hits; replacing it with “scientists” gives a few dozen. Try “students” instead, and you’ll get around sixty hits. With “academics”, “faculty”, “faculty members”, “professors” and “teachers”, you get hundreds. The idea of faculty members being described by deans and other administrators as cat-like is quite intriguing. I was surprised when I heard the expression used in the UK not long ago, but it turns out that it’s so commonly used in the English speaking world that it has lately become a cliché.
Why do administrators in western universities liken faculty members to cats? Judging from various internet sources, it appears that administrators are annoyed by the independence of the teaching staff, not to mention other qualities such as shrewdness, suspiciousness and resistance to change. One university president recently remarked that “Faculty members are professional contrarians, and the academy rewards them for it by giving them tenure.…When you finally give in to the contrarians, they can't take ‘yes’ for an answer” (see "Shared Faculty Governance: An Essential Institution" ). The theme of resistance to change recurs in various sources. Suzanne Lohmann once emphasized this in a paper entitled “Herding Cats, Moving Cemeteries, and Hauling Academic Trunks: Why Change Comes Hard to the University”. In that paper she referred to the difficulty of managing faculty, changing the curriculum, and promoting change in general in American universities: “Just like private corporations, institutions of higher education grapple with a combination of external forces that are pushing for change and internal forces that are resisting change, except that these two sets of forces are magnified in the case of the university.”
From personal experience working as a course coordinator, I can confirm that managing people is not a walk in the park, but I do not think that faculty members have special feline qualities that other people lack. The fact that the same metaphor is used for other categories of people proves it.
Posted by May Mikati on 26 December 2011, 6:41 PM
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