Professor Dirk Gibson has been a faculty member at the Communication and Journalism Department for 20 years. In that time, much has changed around the department, but very little progress has been made, he said.
When he first arrived at UNM in 1996, Gibson said the department was “the neatest place.” His first year with the department was a time when scholarly giants roamed the halls, “and they acted like giants”, he said, referring to academic figures such as intercultural communication expert John “Jack” Condon, Jean Civikly-Powell, and former department chair, the late Everett Rodgers.
“Then, my second year here, Ev was kind of chased out as chair,” Gibson said, by a “coalition of the disaffected” nurtured through Karen Foss that confronted Rodgers with a petition resulting in his resignation.
The following year, Foss took the helm, he said, “and for the next 18, 19 years this place was run on the philosophy of ‘why not?' If Karen wanted to do something, but there was a rule against it, she said ‘well, why not?’”
Given that rules are incapable of standing up for themselves, Gibson said he himself “stood up a couple times and payed the price.” Gibson said this was the point at which the department contracted a strain of office cronyism, the symptoms including the hiring of three successive chairs who were effectively Foss’ proxies, he said. These chairs exercised departmental control “with the same objectives, same agenda: rewarding themselves and their friends, punishing other people.”
In an email to the Daily Lobo, Karen Foss wrote that she and her fellow Iowan chairpersons had different philosophies and approaches to the position.
“All of the chairs I have worked with since coming to UNM in 1993 have worked extremely hard, have had the best interests of the department and especially our students in mind, and at the same time have tried to do their best to address individual faculty needs," Foss said.
Dean of Arts and Sciences Mark Peceny commissioned a C&J department climate study not too long ago.
“Basically, we can’t get along. We have a combination of ‘the clique’, you know, the older people, and then a couple of new, very aggressive young people,” Gibson said.
84 percent of the department faculty and staff - 26 out of 31 total individuals - completed the online survey while 17 of those 31 participated in interviews.
Three graduate students were also included in the study, with two completing the survey and all of them participating in interviews. All three students reported feeling emotionally and intellectually unsafe, the report stated.
Although there were some positive points in the results, such as a shared commitment to excellence and a healthy regard for students among faculty and staff, the 2014 study reported that “overall there is a strong tendency to focus on problems in the department.”
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“Ignoring, dismissing, and justifying behaviors which people find offensive has made problems worse," the report stated.
In the study, one student interviewee said “there is a deep mistrust throughout the department.” The study refers to the lack of trust within the department as “overwhelming”.
There were hints of nostalgia among participants of the study as well.
“We used to disagree but still respect each other. Now we don’t have that,” the report found. “We went from being colleagues to feeling like we had to watch our backs.”
Among complaints of negative communication, the study reported instances of unkept promises of confidentiality, and unprofessional gossip. One interviewee went as far as saying “we promote and teach communication, but we are the worst at it.”
When considering leadership, the report found Foss, who was chair at the time, to be “smart, hardworking and caring, but she (didn’t) want to be chair.”
Once she retired, there would be an opportunity to find someone who is up for the job, the report stated.
“The department has gone from a peaceful and neutral space to a hostile environment because of (certain people),” the report stated.
Gibson said faculty meetings became so hostile, he was driven to seek counseling; his counselor strongly discouraged him from participating in the meetings, which were the cause of his stress, he said, resigning him to the role of a passive spectator.
“I’ve pretty much done that for the most part, I kind of just sit there and listen. It’s very difficult when you hear the kind of things that are said," Gibson said,
Richard Schaefer, a Communication and Journalism faculty member since 1996, said he has witnessed a fair amount of change in his time - namely the increased amount of department faculty, which has led to some challenges.
“The department has become one that is a little bit harder to manage than it had been in years past,” he said.
With more faculty has come the propensity for clashes of ego as well.
“There have always been divisions because it is an integrated department,” Schaefer said, referring to the composition of a department that houses a journalism and mass communication undergraduate program, a professional communication undergraduate program and communication graduate program all under the same roof.
Sometimes when a person almost exclusively works in any one of those areas, they tend to develop the notion that this area is more significant than the others, Schaefer said, which could result in a failure to cooperate at the level that former interim chair Janet Shiver might have hoped for, he said.
“We have people in the program who haven’t worked in large organizations before, in organizations where there has got to be a lot of give and take and a lot of compromise,” Schaefer said.
In a large organization that has only gotten bigger in recent year, efficiency of work at the department calls for necessary levels of trust among colleagues.
And its members understand the importance of addressing fairness within the department.
“In some respects, some of that is good, that (it) gets problematized," Schaefer said. "But if everything gets problematized, after a while it just feels like not enough is getting done that needs to get done."
With a political system in place within an academic environment, most discussion is reduced to window dressing, thanks to the undemocratic nature of the department.
“Decisions are made by the leadership," Gibson said. "And then it’s a top down process."
