Mohan Dutta's reflections on the Academe

When Cathy N. Davidson in a Chronicle letter to College Presidents  wrote about the need for moral leadership among College Presidents, one of the points about her eloquent letter that struck me as inspiring was her plea to Presidents to actually be leaders. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a leader as the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country. To actually lead a group, organization, or country, a leader would fundamentally need to have the backbone to stand up for the human beings that make up her or his group, organization, or country, and adequately represent the issues and concerns of her or his constituents. Now for universities and colleges, one would assume that the key stakeholders are its students, faculty, and staff. Therefore, it seems to be common sensical that leaders would be responsive to these internal stakeholders. And yet somehow, these internal stakeholders seem to be often relegated to the background in decisions such...

In leadership training sessions and discussions, I have heard the articulation that "leadership can't be ideologically driven. A leader has to be pragmatic." This statement and its look alikes have puzzled me and continue to puzzle me. What is most puzzling about this statement is the active uptake of the statement among academic leaders. In this statement and statements similar to it, there is an implicit assumption that pragmatism is devoid of ideology, or that the commitment to some practical goal or outcome is itself an a-ideological position. This is troubling to me because the discursive move to separate the ideology of the logics of efficiency, effectiveness, bureaucratic organization, and market success from the roots of this logic in neoliberalism is itself a political move. Such a political move erases the underlying agendas of market logics to serve the dominant institutional structures of society and the interests of the powerful in shaping these institut...

For the last several years of my academic life, I have been drawn to leadership roles. But what does leadership mean in academia? What do we expect from our academic leaders? What roles do academic leaders play and what are the benchmarks through which we judge them? Is the only option in being a leader to sell your backbone to the dominant players of society? When I consider my own journey in leadership, I wonder: What is the type of leader I want to be? How does my leadership role work within the context of my role as an academic interested in issues of social justice and social change? How does the desire to be a leader fit within the broader realm of my academic identity as a scholar studying social injustices and seeking to work toward spaces of solidarity with those at the margins in order to address these injustices through scholarship? Do I get co-opted into a system that carries out the interests of the top 1% by chosing to participate in a leadership role in u...

I am reading the chapter in the "Destructive Org Comm" book on guidelines for managers. Within academe, one of the most vital ways of creating a climate is figuring out whom you are hiring. However, here is the limit to the information we typically are trained to attend to in making our hiring decisions. So on a search committee, the first thing one will pay attention to (and I know that this is the first criterion I have used in search committees I have chaired and served on) is the academic vita of the applicant? Is the applicant going to be a productive colleague? Are they going to add to the productivity of the institution as well as productively work their career up toward tenure and promotion? This I still believe is perhaps the most important criterion, particularly if you are at a research-based institution that values research productivity as a marker of promotion and tenure. Having already established the importance of paying attention to productivity and the pote...

My colleague Beverly Davenport Sypher talks about the negative effects of incivility within organizations. One such fairly powerful form of incivility is spreading baseless rumors. That rumors can have powerful effects, I have experienced this in my own life, and have seen in the lives of colleagues and graduate students. Rumors can be debilitating; they can limit your productivity and affect you emotionally. Rumors can be powerful particularly in academic climates as professionally academics are taught to take their integrity fairly seriously. And yet rumors are only just as powerful as you let them be. The moment one chooses to treat the rumor as a form of incivility that ought to be treated as such (a form of incivil discourse), one curbs the capacity of rumor to have much of an impact. Beyond the individual response though, I also believe that as collectives, we have responsibilities toward dealing with rumors as forms of incivility. And here, I have once again also been on the...

As I reflect upon some of my personal experiences in working through relationships with faculty, I am left thinking about what the role of a leader is in building a culture that nurtures difference and positively encourages an open climate, creating spaces for the diversity of opinions on issues and simultaneously encouraging faculty to participate in constituting a highly productive culture as productive citizens (In such a culture, the productivity of colleagues acts as a catalyst and as an inspiration, not as a threat that provokes pettiness). On one hand, it is immensely encouraging to witness the tremendous potentials that might be created and sustained when you bring a group of smart and engaged scholars around the table, create resources for them, connect them up with exciting opportunities, and give them the room to grow by working with them to address the barriers they face. In such a culture, the individual growth of faculty members is facilitated by the inspiration and exa...