Building a Bigger Room: Creating Equity by Demystifying the Journey to Full Professor

“Have an international reputation.”

“This will look good on your CV, so you should do this work.”

“My son should want to take a class from you. That’s how I decide who becomes a full professor.”

In the United States (US), there seems to be a distinct discourse surrounding promotion to full professor, most of which we heard on our journeys toward this rank. While we recognize our privilege as two cis-gender white women full professors at research institutions in the US, we also want to use our positional power to break down the rhetoric surrounding promotion to full professor with an eye toward professional development and faculty growth.

In this paper, we rely on the concept of language games (Wittgenstein, 2010) to examine the rhetoric and images surrounding promotion. Language games succeed when people are playing by the same rules, yet language and its associated rules are manipulable, resulting in a breakdown of the game. Using the concept of a language game, we break down some common ways language is used to either propel or hinder someone’s promotional track. There often is a breakdown between what is written in promotion guidelines versus how other full professors speak to the next generation.

Through the language game lens, we can explore where each party in the process has agency – the professor seeking promotion and the supervisors meant to help them. So often, the process of becoming full professor is dehumanizing and fraught with landmines we might not know exist. Moreover, the problem is exacerbated in the US when gender and race are added to the intersectional mix (Marini & Meschitti, 2018). Oftentimes, for instance, Black academics undertake unseen emotional labor and extra service that goes unnoticed in official promotion standards (Rockquemore & Laszloffy, 2008).

The paper will introduce a framework that opens the “black box” of promotion by breaking down some language games we have heard along our way. Professors can reclaim their agency by telling their stories in powerful ways, while supervisors can do a better job of mentoring and engaging employees rather than making promotion combative. By presenting this at EGPA, we hope to engage in a broader conversation with our European colleagues to distill international differences (see Dnes and Seaton, 1998), turning this project into a larger field-wide conversation and making the framework applicable and/or tailorable to different university systems and contexts.

References

Dnes, A. W. and Seaton, J. S. (1998) “The reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom”, International Review of Law and Economics, Volume 18, Issue 4, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0144-8188(98)00017-9

Marini, G. & Meschitti, V. (2018). The trench warfare of gender discrimination: evidence from academic promotions to full professor in Italy. Scientometrics, 115, 989-1006.

Rockquemore, K.A. & Laszloffy, T. (2008). The Black academic’s guide to winning tenure without losing your soul. Lynne Reiner.

Wittgenstein, L. (2010). Philosophical investigations. John Wiley & Sons.

This paper offers a critical lens of the normative approaches to public service leadership that emphasize behavior, traits, and intra-organizational practices. The paper argues that contemporary pedagogy of leadership in public administration should reflect more explicit assessment and interpretation of governance structures and institutional regimes to advance public value. The current context of intersecting and evolving public governance systems, whether at the domestic multi-jurisdictional level (e.g. federalism), inter-organizational (e.g. inter-agency commissions, or international level (e.g. European Union), requires a more context-analytical leadership pedagogical approach. This pedagogical approach assumes that contexts fluctuate and public administrators must be nimble in implementing public programs and policies in varied governance contexts. The paper presents examples of public service leadership cases “ripped” from the headlines and instructor guide for case analysis and action that include the following components:

• Synthesize the leadership opportunity in the context of the public aim or need to address.

• Explain the contextual factors that frame leadership opportunity, including the governance systems that define scope of authority, institutional regimes that guide values and norms of the leadership domain.

• Generate specific recommendations to address the leadership opportunity that leverage the opportunities and intersections of governance structures and institutional regimes.

“Learn by Doing: Teaching Policy Analysis Through Integrated Experiential Learning Projects” will propose a framework for teaching policy analysis that relies on theoretical foundations, but continuously integrates practical application and experiential learning. I then illustrate the framework’s application through a proposed course structure that includes learning the five-stage model, weekly team decision-making, writing project deliverables, the final paper, and client briefing. This course format provides students with a rigorous analytical framework for tackling complex policy and management issues (of any topic) pertaining to the public and nonprofit sectors. The presentation will include best practices related to how course sections come together, handling client communication, conducting research and other critical success factors. It will also include challenges related to recruiting clients and agreeing on an issue that is narrow enough to address comprehensively in the time allotted and that is not framed in a prescriptive way.

This kind of teaching approach serves as a bridge from the classroom to the professional world and sets up the students with highly transferrable skills that they can employ adeptly in interviews and on the job. Students overwhelmingly isolate the experiential learning coursework as the most valuable experience from their graduate studies, and the clients find value in the project deliverables as well.

Results and impacts from the experiential learning policy analysis coursework are evident both inside and outside of the classroom.

1. Students transform their writing styles and become incredibly agile at writing direct and cogent analytical arguments.

2. Students hone their presentation skills. For many, the briefings are their first experience with formal, and in the case of the live briefings, high-stakes presentations.

3. Students learn how to think on their feet and how to sell a defensible argument with actionable recommendations in a relatively high-pressure context.

5. The client-based work not only helps connect the graduates (and the school’s name) to the professional world but also associates the school with a product that can be marketed.

6. The regular involvement of live clients guarantees that students are exposed to

current issues.

7. It's important to keep the analytical framework on the cutting edge.