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Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. -Eleanor Roosevelt
Congratulations, newly minted tenure-track faculty! Your first semester/quarter is culminating, and you made it successfully to — not the finish line — but the next segment of the career track relay. Congratulations are also due to mid-career tenure track faculty as you navigate teaching, research, and service in preparing to submit your tenure and promotion dossier in an ensuing semester/quarter.
It’s report card time… (Yes, faculty should maintain a self-prescribed report card.)
You may have the teaching, research, and service tied in an axiomatic bow; however, there is more to professional success than the work products. Your success is also predicated upon how you ‘show up in your professional world.’ Put another way, how do you interact socially within a professional paradigm?
As a new and mid-career faculty member, do you find yourself listening and participating in the “campus talk” (later referred to here as “campus cacophony”) with tenured faculty (usually full professors)?
Consider this scenario…
You find yourself surrounded by one or more overbearing senior faculty members at the “water cooler” with unsolicited information more than you ever dreamed of entertaining.
Note: I am using the metaphor of the water cooler as any space — parking lot, hallway, campus lawn, dining hall, etc. — where unsolicited discourse can be sparked between senior and newly minted/mid-career faculty members.
Of course, the water cooler may be both literal as well as metaphorical and has become iconic in academic and corporate structures as a place where employees gather to share information about the workplace. While there are some positive findings on this topic such as one referenced in a brief article by Debra Bradley Ruder in “Harvard Magazine” entitled “The Water Cooler Effect,” I am writing as a person who has navigated academic and government employment landscapes for over 35 years. I emphatically do not recommend water cooler-based discussions on serious academic matters for new and mid-career faculty.
What To Do When You Find Yourself at the Water Cooler…
Inherently, as highly educated people with varying degrees of socialization acumen, you have strong intuition as to when you should walk away from conversations.
Decision time … Should you engage? Walk away?
You must and should realize that, as a new/mid-career person, physically walking away from these water cooler cacophonies may be detrimental to your career health. Instead, of physically walking away, there is the mental walking away from non-productive discourse (read, campus cacophony) articulated from my experience as “learning the artful technique of listening without verbally engaging in topics that eventually become career haunts at your current [as well as future] workplace.”
While there are several areas of discontent that fuel campus cacophony, I will focus on highlighting three prevalent discussion discontent points at the proverbial academic water cooler: salaries, teaching schedules, and leadership coups d’etat.
Salaries
While you must realize that others in your campus community have a need to know [your numbers] outside of you, it is not a figure that should be casually discussed with just anyone in the workplace. There are myriad reasons for this perspective, yet I will hone in on just a few reasons that will enable new and mid-career faculty to stay above the fray of campus cacophony.
Consider this…Someone hired in 2022 may have a dramatically higher entry salary than someone hired in 2017. Why so? One major reason would rest on the use of pay scales such as those offered by CUPA-HR (College and University Professional Association for Human Resources). Additionally, the time of hire, geographic location, and experience levels also impact salary variances. For example, if someone leaves a major NY university to take an assistant professor position in a small liberal arts institution in the Midwest (it does happen!), it is unlikely that the Midwest institution would lower the person’s salary from that which they “bring” from the NY institution.
Fact: Public colleges and universities publish salary information annually. For private colleges and universities, new and mid-career faculty with concerns about their salary should first consult with their immediate supervisor/s (department chair and/or dean) and next with the office of human resources, as necessary.
Teaching Schedules
The water cooler space is usually overly animated with who teaches what and when. There are some faculty who troll schedules when they are first published, creating a den of discord; put another way, campus cacophony.
What happens in the comparative space of ‘your schedule’ against someone else’s is problematic, at best. Yet, discussing these issues at the water cooler with tenured faculty is not a strategic move for new and mid-career faculty. It is no secret that new faculty [may] often receive teaching schedules that bring logic into serious question. Complaining to a senior faculty member [who is not your immediate supervisor] at the water cooler is a bad move on your career chessboard. This type of confiding your frustrations will not alleviate your scheduling concerns. While your water cooler listeners may sympathize, they may create talk (campus cacophony) of your complaining, which may become an indelible blemish on your career. Talk, instead, to your immediate supervisor who built the schedule.
Coups d’etat
The water cooler is historically a space for some senior/tenured faculty to engage new and mid-career cohorts into skirmishes within departments/colleges/schools and across the college/university through unproven allegations and highly opinionated allegations non-bolstered by demonstrable data. Instead of investing in the cacophony toward skirmishes turned into battles, take the time to educate yourself by first reading policy manuals and having discussions with your supervisor and other leadership of your unit. Early complicity with troublesome senior faculty who populate the literal and metaphorical water cooler spaces may curtail your longevity at the institution. Circulating petitions and using institutional email to send personal rants about administrative staff and fellow faculty are not only unprofessional forays but also potentially libelous. While, unfortunately, this type of behavior has been allowed to exist at some institutions, do yourself a favor and avoid engagement of any kind.
New and mid-career faculty, I wish you the best based on [my] lessons learned. As new and mid-career faculty, you have joined the institution to teach, research, and serve. Along the way to these goals, you will encounter tenured [senior] faculty who are exemplars of excellence in higher education who will shine the light on your academic path. Embrace the positive in avoiding campus cacophony.
