When Administrators Forget They Are Also Faculty

A faculty conduct code makes a demand that is easy to overlook: it applies to administrators as well. Administrators owe obligations to students, colleagues, and the university that stem from common membership in the academic community. They must carry out duties responsibly, with due regard for the equitable treatment of all personnel under their jurisdiction. The Code does not create two classes of faculty — those who govern and those who are governed. It creates one community bound by shared standards. That principle is historically honored more in print than in practice.

I have witnessed administrative conduct that fails the Code’s terms. Courses are cancelled outside established procedures and without transparent policy justification. When program decisions are made unilaterally, circumventing shared governance structures, the educational mission incurs not only a procedural cost but also a substantive one. Educational continuity fractures. Program integrity erodes.

The Code is explicit that no reprisals shall be taken against faculty who participate in governance proceedings or raise formal concerns. Yet the experience of filing formal, specific procedural objections becomes the occasion for adverse treatment. Assignments shift. The atmosphere of collegial respect that the Code demands gives way to coordinated institutional exclusion. The Code calls it misconduct. Administrators call it discretion.

The Code provides the remedy precisely because its drafters understood that authority is not self-correcting. Screening panels, hearing committees, evidentiary standards, and prohibitions against marking a faculty member’s record for complaints that were never formally investigated constitute safeguards, not bureaucratic formalities. They guard against the particular harm that occurs when those with administrative authority treat their positions as licenses rather than as obligations.

The standards of faculty conduct apply upward as well as laterally. An administrator who retaliates against a faculty member for filing a grievance has not merely violated a workplace policy. That administrator abandons the responsibilities of academic membership and structurally undermines essential governance. Administrative title confers no exemption. The Code was written knowing that rank would try to claim one.

Accountability that flows only downward is not accountability. It is hierarchy dressed in procedural language, and every institution that selectively enforces the Code has already revealed its priorities.