Thread by @Jessifer

“‘You don’t behave enough like staff,’ I was told derisively by the tenured professor who was then my supervisor.” A devastating and important read by @readywriting. chronicle.com/article/stop-i…

In my last admin role, the staff on my team were treated in deeply problematic and patronizing ways. (Lee was on that team. Her voice matters.) I saw, not only what was said about them and about me (also staff), but heard some of what got said about them behind their backs.

I remember far too many meetings where I had to relay the contents of those conversations to the members of my team. It was devastating to morale and did direct harm to even the very positive relationships we had with many faculty.

At that institution, the faculty/staff divide was a deep trench. I was once told by the provost in front of a room of other administrators and faculty members that I “spoke too much like faculty.”

When I was asked to collaborate with a faculty member on a major reorg of the teaching center, the provost pitted us against each other, literally telling the faculty member to be “hard on me.” When I subsequently felt bullied, the provost didn’t follow up on the situation.

When I considered filing a grievance, I was told the grievance board would be made up entirely of faculty and that a staff member had never filed a grievance against a faculty member. A draft of the grievance still sits in my HR file.

Questions were regularly raised about why the staff members on my team were teaching, instead of “doing their real jobs.” The members of my team had over 60 years of collective teaching experience among us.

Staff on my team were regularly left out of conversations, even around initiatives that they originated.

I was told by a faculty member that I should be “ideologically neutral,” that my role was to serve faculty, not to have or express my own ideas about teaching and learning.

The members of my team were accused of “padding our CVs” if we published, and when I made research a large part of their job descriptions, I was told it wasn’t appropriate to give staff time for research when their job was to serve faculty.

I was told busy faculty would resent us for having time to do research. The members of my team were prolific technologists, teachers, scholars, while also being brilliant faculty consultants and collaborators.

As I wrote in a piece for the AAUP, I was told by institutional leadership that “a teaching center should be like a cafeteria,” a service unit, a one-stop shop for “basic, remedial help.” aaup.org/article/human-…

I sat in one meeting where an associate provost asked to see the job description of a senior member of my staff, someone with over 20 years of experience in the field, because they were (like me) resistant to the idea that a teaching center is merely a “service unit.”

I’ve argued in much of my writing and talks how important collaboration is to the work of education. So many of the staff at an educational institution are also teachers, teaching teachers, and working directly with students to advance the educational mission of the institution.

Instructional designers are teachers. Student support staff are teachers. Advisors are teachers. Librarians are teachers. RAs are teachers. And so often students are teachers. This work needs to be recognized and valorized.

Faculty developers are teachers. Writing center staff are teachers. Student tutors are teachers. Tutoring center directors are teachers. Disability resources staff are teachers. I could go on.