No Experts at Home

It seems awfully unfair, and certainly frustrating. They just won't let you be an expert at home. Sometimes environments won't accept expertise that is too close to the problem.

In an academic environment, everybody is an expert. Everybody. At something. That's how we got here. But there are some kinds of light that just has to be used very carefully. And that is the expertise about how to do our jobs - as guides for our students, as professional educators, and as scholars and artists.

The university academic environment is so different from other educational worlds - the K-12 world and the corporate training world, for example. Those results-focused employments are constructed for maximum effectiveness. That educational structure is fed by intensive research on obtaining clear goals and measurable outcomes. Expertise is drawn from wherever it may be found, within and outside the unit.

The university environment is different. It is not so very far conceptually from 11th-Century Bologna when a collection of individual law teachers formed a guild so they could share resources and expertise. The teachers employed the administrators. (Let me repeat: the teachers employed the administrators.) The autonomy of scholars today descends from that tradition of independent experts and scholars collaborating voluntarily on matters of common - and unique - interest.

The key here is "independent experts." Today's academic department is a collaboration of independent scholars, who are in fact expected to advance their scholarship and scholarly production through their own focused interests. And they are selected for employment by the way that their work fits in with those who would employ them. Today, the faculty do not hire the administrators, but neither are administrators "the boss." And the faculty do select their colleagues in most cases.

So everybody is an expert, and there is no structured hierarchy of experts. Academic departments are flat organizations with a single, often elected, member to assume the organizational responsibilities of leadership. While he or she may make decisions regarding the distribution of resources, rarely are they "the boss." Advancement has only two or three levels and is colleagially awarded. Everything else is broad-based and incremental. In general. Some environments do find ways to encourage and reward focused activity for interested scholars, and it can engender some collegial unhappiness if not carefully managed. There are some variations and exceptions, but at the core, the individual faculty member is employed as an independent expert collaborating with other independent experts.

What happens then, when one needs expert advice on the work of the department or the faculty? Experts are brought in. From where? From similar departments elsewhere. One expert here will go there, and perhaps one from there eventually will go here to evaluate and advise on the work of the faculty and their collective efforts.

Some advice may be found locally outside of the department, advice being more welcome from the neighbors, and from resource centers. But advice from an expert on the work of faculty may be welcome at home among departmental colleagues only when solicited. And only as much as solicited. They do know that you know something and will ask you for it when it would be welcome. The complicated academic relationship with authority so complicates our working and personal relationships. But I wouldn't trade it.