From the Institutional Text to Bicollegiality

Abstract

Does the long-term history of the words college, colleague, and collegiality offer us interesting clues about the particular relevance of the collegial order to the academic profession today? To consider the negative answer first, suppose we take the 1999 statement On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as our primary guide. Our ongoing preoccupation, it suggests, has to be the evolution of tenure policies. In this context, we must resist proposals to separate collegiality?understood as cooperative behavior in support of the collective enterprise?from faculty service and treat it as a fourth standard for tenure. To be fair and professional, we must define ex pectations of service by delineating the tasks we expect a faculty member to perform and then state clearly what satisfactory performance means. The candidate whose service meets these clear criteria will be regarded as a colleague worthy of citizenship in the academic community. If there is cause to entertain second thoughts about this position, it does not lie in faulty reasoning or inadequate understanding of what is at stake for the professoriat. The AAUP statement aptly underscores the threats to academic freedom, due process, and diversity that a collegiality standard?if it required faculty members to conform to established views or values? could entail. Implicitly, the statement advocates the promotion of collegial virtues through an understanding that links them to all three of the existing