In this article, Kegan and Laskow Lahey describe a concept they call competing commitments. Basically, when leadership (or anyone, I suppose) is trying to get change to happen, they encounter people who seem to be very on board and agreeable to that change and yet somehow don't change. According to the authors, these people are not liars or insincere. Instead, they have subconscious beliefs and commitments that they are holding on to that keep them from wanting to change. The authors recommend a process of self-reflection as a way to discover these hidden "competing commitments." They give several examples and describe this process of discovery.
This was an interesting article because someone I know sprang to mind immediately. I recently created a survey for the residents of Peter Hall (where all the foreign faculty at Sias live). After I created this survey, I got in trouble the director of housing on the foreign side. There is also a Chinese director--they work together. At any rate, she was angry with me for not consulting with her before I posted the survey. I did notify her about the survey, but I did not consult with her because as a representative of the teachers, I didn't think I needed her input or permission to conduct the survey. She didn't really argue with this idea but she said that it was really important to keep her in the loop.
So... competing commitments. When the director said this to me, my thought was, "Well, you have a funny way of showing it." Pretty much all complaints that the director encounters are immediately referred to the front desk. ("Talk to the front desk.") What usually follows for many teachers is a lot of run around. They are asked to sign up for repairs or the front desk workers tell them that the problem is being worked on. Then, the problem does not improve and the repairmen don't come to make the repairs during the agreed upon time. When they finally show up, as often as not, the teacher is not at home and the repairmen go away again, and the process starts all over with the teacher needing to sign up again. If the teacher tries a few times (a process that usually takes more than a week), then they must track the director down. Her office is not near the front desk and her hours are limited to the time when teachers are the busiest (working hours: 9-5, 2 hours off for lunch). We also have a chat group that is on our mobile phone, in which many of the housing grievances are expressed, but this director has declined to be part of that group. Most teachers get tired and give up before they actually find time and attention to work through the whole process and the director is not very accessible.
If I had to speculate, I would say that the director's competing commitment is that she doesn't want to be flooded with complaints. There are a lot of complaints and she is trying to filter them out. Unfortunately, she misses a lot of important information in the process and ends up being behind in addressing issues. It could be a survival mechanism. Kegan and Laskow Lahey note that sometimes competing commitments are valuable and cannot be given up. It is true that this particular director is Filipino. She spent a couple of years in the U.S. trying to get her citizenship (her husband is American), and during that time, two other foreign teachers held her position and it drove them both crazy. They were no more accessible than she was, and in some ways, less helpful. However, as she reprimanded me at length for not keeping her in the loop, I reflected on this dichotomy. Perhaps it would be helpful for her to be more aware of her competing commitment and perhaps let go of her prejudice against belonging to large chat groups--she wouldn't have to address every problem if she was just part of the group, but it would help her to keep her ear to the ground, so to speak.
In our last meeting, STRC (Sias Teachers Representative Committee) suggested she set up a chat group that she herself could monitor. It will be interesting to see what she does with that suggestion.
Social Justice
There is a lot going on here at Sias right now. I am part of several groups that are working for change on one level or another. I'm not in charge of any of them, but it is kind of interesting to listen to the different conversations that go on, because these groups tend to have competing interests. Just yesterday, my director from Kansas came to our campus and observed my class. I think I did all right because he also asked me to sign a letter of intent stating I was coming back next year.
Anyway, at our department meeting (the only one of the year), he described in detail the way that he was fighting for our rights in Kansas. He noted the general ignorance regarding our situation and the sort of passive efforts to disenfranchise us. For example, he has become a member of the faculty senate, and there was a movement to change the by laws so that the faculty senate members only represented the faculty who worked on campus. That is kind of a creepy suggestion from our perspective, even though to this point, our faculty hasn't had much knowledge or influence in the faculty senate. Still, as my director went on about equal pay and fair contracts, I wonder how disadvantaged we really are. Everyone in my department gets paid easily twice the salary of a Sias teacher, and they seem to scrape by. On principal, it seems fair that we should be paid the same salary as a Kansas instructor. The argument against is that our living expenses are lower, but that argument wouldn't fly in different parts of Kansas, as my director has pointed out, so why should it fly just because we are a little further removed?
On the other hand, the system in Kansas is not sustainable. They can't afford to pay their teachers there what they are paying them presently without the surplus from our campus in China. From a certain perspective, it is because the faculty senate has such a tight grip on things in Kansas that we exist and have to run such a lean machine here in China. The surplus money they make from our program is soaked up like a sponge by all of the "necessary" programs, services, and salaries in Kansas. So my director is perpetuating a broken system by trying to get us all to feel like we are being taken advantage of and to sign up for the union. I hope we do get a little raise, but I don't want the vision of "our rights" that he is trying to sell us. A system that can't afford itself is a system that doesn't exist, and I like working here.
When does advocacy become greed? It's an interesting question.
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