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Managing From the Middle

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By Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg

Read most business-management books (something we do, by the way, with pleasure) and you'll find theories of top-down management and bottom-up action. In strategic-planning exercises, too, you'll see much ado about which things come from the top (i.e., the administration) and from the bottom (i.e., the faculty).

Considerable insight and significant practice emanate from both directions, but what we are finding is that there is a wide world between top and bottom and, done right, much to be gained by managing from the middle.

First some definitions. By middle management we mean that whole level of department chairs, subdeans, center directors, and vice provosts. One of us is a vice provost (for interdisciplinary studies) and the other a director (of a statewide humanities-research institute).

We each have a good bit of power -- over significant budgets and operations, over a wide turf, over a specific set of institutions.

But from another point of view, we are utterly and unequivocally middle managers -- unlike most academics, we both supervise staff members and have bosses to whom we report. We write annual evaluations that determine the raises (within prescribed limits) of our staff members. We have hiring and firing power (subject to university policy and fair practice). And we ourselves are evaluated every year, sometimes more than once, and can be fired from our positions. Classic middle managers, in other words.

In business terms, we should be unhappy, buffeted on all sides, our power circumscribed, criticized as power-mongering egomaniacs or gate-keeping obstructionists by faculty colleagues, despised as paper pushers or oddball intellectuals by real full-time administrators.

But we have stumbled upon a remarkable way of leveraging our middle-management power, our turf, and our mission by working (and playing) together. We have discovered the power of collaboration in ways that allow us to have a much larger impact within our own and each other's institutions, as well as in larger policy terms.

In order to explain how we are doing this, we need to cite some specifics to provide a model that other academic middle managers might be able to adapt. The basic principles are simple:

• Find others of like position who share your vision.

• Work collaboratively on that vision, fine-tuning and polishing it.

• Leverage the strengths at each institution in order to achieve a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

• Use that combined strength to secure support at your own institution.

• Where relevant, engage people from other institutions who share your concerns, cares, and collaborative disposition.

• Never, ever overreach your means, energies, responsibilities, and turf but, rather, use the aggregate resources of the consortium to achieve what you could not possibly achieve on your own.

• Work with people who work, and simply leave behind those who don't, won't, or stand in the way.

• Institutionalize the consortium only for the purpose of achieving your mutually defined ends. Institutionalization for its own sake is likely to limit vision and dampen commitment. The beauty of a voluntary association is that anyone can drop out and that staying in has only one requirement: dedicated participation.

• And the final principle: Keep your supervisors and your constituency apprised of what you are doing, letting them take pride in, and credit for, the relationships you are building with other institutions even as you promote the mission of your own institution.

Those principles can be applied to any number of agendas: academic freedom, affirmative action, raising the profile of the liberal arts, expanding the interests of and in the humanities, interdisciplinarity, collaborative models of learning, innovative pedagogies.

You will find like-minded individuals with such missions all across the country. Identify the best ones, the ones who come through even when budgets are due or there's a hiring freeze. Hone your agenda together. Distribute the work load, the effort, and the resources, both the ones you bring to the collaboration and the ones you raise together. Folks will step forward to take on what they can and what they do best. And then promote your agenda and your results together.

Now for the specifics. The ad hoc, utterly voluntary consortium that we have started is dedicated to digital humanism. We described our vision in an essay in The Chronicle Review called our "Manifesto for the Humanities in a Technological Age." By digital humanism, we mean not only the digitizing of archives (a wonderful goal in itself though one already advanced by a host of others), but a range of cutting-edge technologies created to advance innovative research and teaching projects in the humanities, arts, and social sciences that, in turn, offer insights and inspiration to engineers and scientists.

Somewhere along the way (it happened more or less by accident, searching for a name and a logo), we became known as "haystack." An acronym (of course), Hastac stands for Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.

The name stuck. Somehow it resonates. People remember it, remember us through it. It looks sciencelike (all those letters!). It connotes an ongoing search, cultivation, labor. And it prompted us to name our online newsletter of consortial activities Needle, all the ambiguity intended.

The consortium brings together middle managers from more than a dozen institutions, mostly directors of humanities and critical-media-studies centers working with directors of research centers in science and technology.

Our motivation is quite basic in that the technology devoted to the humanities is much less developed than that supporting the social and natural sciences, despite the fact that, intrinsically, the amount of data that drives the humanities tends to be significantly larger and more complex than that which drives other fields.

Indeed we are all in awe of the enormous data demands of the humanities and arts. An instructive example comes from the American Council of Learned Society's Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences. The largest astronomical survey ever undertaken -- the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of a quarter of the entire sky -- uses X-ray, infrared, and visible-light images of more than 100,000,000 celestial objects and entails more than 40 terabytes of information.

By contrast, the compilation of video interviews of Holocaust survivors in the Survivors of the Shoah Project uses 180 terabytes of memory, and also entails a range of complex problems including intellectual-property, translation, privacy, and open-access issues -- real-world problems that engineers need to be sensitive to and concerned with in designing technologies as well.

Our group is seeking to develop tools that promote distance collaboration (blogs, wikis, real-time video annotation systems, gaming environments for distance teaching, learning, and even real-time virtual meetings). We're working on multimedia archiving and presentation of "born digital" materials. Beyond the technologies themselves, we're focusing on the questions that arise about their actual use and on developing criteria for tenure and promotion of those who work with those technologies.

We are also starting an ambitious public outreach in the 2006-07 academic year, in which dozens of separate institutions will sponsor seminars and workshops. A public symposium will be held at a different institution each month, featuring a scholar in the humanities and a major technology innovator. People will be able to view all of the events of this distributed lecture series on the Web and contribute to the discussion via blogs created by Hastac. All of the proceedings will be archived in an accessible and expanding data base. This year-long effort involves an array of public and private universities, science centers, and humanities institutes around the world.

The point we are making here is that no one of us could do this alone and have an impact. By working across institutions, we have been able to create a mind-boggling array of goods, and we've managed to create enough momentum that we are encouraging others to spin off projects of their own. We have been able to do this with no appreciable increase in our resources (although we are certainly not above welcoming any visionary foundation or corporation that might offer us additional money).

The magic is simple. We have dedicated some of our institutional resources and individual energies to the project. Networks of middle managers in motion.

Middle managers are just that: those able to bring together the faculty members we serve, to leverage modest amounts of money, to use our respective pulpits (we hesitate to add the adjective "bully," but sometimes even that), and inform upper-level university administrators of the unique activities and successes of cross-institutional collaboration.

We have learned valuable lessons of collaboration from our colleagues in the sciences and have put those lessons to use in ways that our science and engineering partners are now marveling at.

We have been aided in this, as one would expect, both from the top down and the bottom up. All of us who have been involved have been fortunate to have supervisors who praise innovation (especially if it is cost-effective). Without them, this venture would not be possible. And all of us have been able to draw upon scholars within our own institutions who are equally adventurous risk takers.

We rarely work within normal institutional structures such as departments. We seek out colleagues who like acting collaboratively -- people who have shared interests and a willingness to try something that might work, without assurances in advance that it will. Those colleagues know others who are equally capable of quelling the critical voice long enough to see what might be possible even without the benefit of enormous amounts of power, authority, or money.

Middle managers are rarely seen as either the humble force that needs to be unionized and organized nor as the titans who hold sway in the world of business and academe. Yet, working collaboratively, we can make waves. We are, to academe, what software is to computers, if you will. We make it compute.

There are a lot of middle managers in academe. And there is a lot that needs changing. "Middle Managers Collaborate!" doesn't have quite the zing of most inspiring slogans. But it works. It's exciting, it's empowering, and it is exactly the model of networking, linkage, branching, and tipping points that, everyone knows by now, are the hallmark of new information technologies and new information communities.

Middle managers are the nodes in institutions, the places where various networks come together in productive relationships. Ignored by labor organizers and disdained by CEO's, middle managers may yet prove to be the visionaries who mine and catalyze the possibilities of the information future. It is certainly worth a try. After all, we have nothing to lose but tired old practices -- and we have whole worlds of new ideas to gain.