The Kardia Group

Participation in a shared intellectual community is the essence of the academic endeavor - yet many faculty find that daily departmental life includes far too little of this key ingredient. Email, technology, diminishing funding sources, joint appointments, increasing regulatory demands, too many meetings, the complexities of a global community, reductions in infrastructure, and other realities compete with the already significant requirements of research, teaching, and service, leaving precious little time for faculty to intellectually enjoy their colleagues or the scholarly environment in which they are embedded.

This lack of intellectual engagement can create a number of problems in departments:

• an overall sense of disconnection or ennui
• a cliquish feel where the only significant connections are within subgroups of faculty (which can then lead to competition for resources, and other territorial kinds of behavior)
• insufficient resources or robustness as a community to effectively face challenges or crises when they arise
• individual dissatisfaction, and a diminished sense of loyalty to the department or the institution

Additionally, interpersonal conflicts are exacerbated through a lack of intellectual community. Faculty are naturally invested in being recognized and valued for their intellectual contributions. When the bulk of faculty interactions focus on everything but this basic sense of academic identity, it is common for individuals to feel disrespected and unsupported by their colleagues - a feeling that gets channeled into the various political, organizational, structural, and other interactions that they are having.

The lack of opportunity to sufficiently share intellectual realities with colleagues can also become the source of departmental level conflicts. For example, the common tensions between "core" versions of a discipline and emerging areas of scholarship are often created or intensified by departmental dynamics in which the only real discussion occurs when the stakes are very high: hiring, tenure, and promotion. Without opportunities to explore, understand, and negotiate these tensions, the creative possibilities of an intellectual community are lost, and the various camps retreat to their corners until the next high stakes battle begins.

Fortunately, the solutions to the erosion of intellectual community can be relatively simple. Most faculty do not consciously realize what has been lost, so just the identification of the problem can motivate change. Furthermore, the veneer separating the rich intellectual worlds of individual faculty is thin - so it doesn't take much to launch a satisfying discussion. Finally, a little bit goes a long way: the lack of intellectual engagement in departments is such that a few satisfying experiences can sustain the necessary reality of significant gaps in between.