The Skillful Teacher

Surviving Politically
Surviving politically within your institution means being able to
keep teaching in creative and purposeful ways with a minimum of
external interference. Doing this means negotiating and retaining
enough physical resources, fiscal support, and institutional credi-
bility to do good work. Learning the arts and skills of political sur-
vival is something that is not usually a part of the curriculum of
teacher education, but rather learned on the job. This chapter
focuses on general principles that seem to me to hold true across dif-
ferent contexts, although every department, college, and political
situation exhibits its own idiosyncratic features.
All of us work in settings in which power plays and shifting orga-
nizational priorities affect how we practice our craft. So many times
I have visited campuses as a speaker or consultant and been told
that particular campus is unique in its history of political disputes
and personality conflicts. Each campus feels it stands alone in its
history of dysfunctional conduct. In truth, my experience is that
every campus is dysfunctional in that squabbles based on personal-
ity differences and exacerbated by ideology and history exert great
influence over day-to-day life. The rarity is to find a team, depart-
ment, or whole faculty that works collegially and respectfully. A sig-
nificant number of college teachers I speak to also feel they practice
on the margins of their institutions. As new teachers they are
increasingly hired on temporary contracts with no guarantee of
renewal. Then, when they scramble on to the tenure track, they are
given mixed messages concerning the kinds of behaviors that 
are really rewarded within the institution. Facing tenure decisions
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in a few years, they have to make numerous daily calculations as to
when to hold their tongue, when to speak truth to power, how to
express a threatening idea in a nonthreatening way, who to trust
and who to steer clear of, and when requests made of them are dik-
tats masquerading as innocent suggestions.
Working on the margins can sometimes be exhilaratingly edgy
and creative. In times of economic austerity, or in situations of pro-
fessional isolation, it can also soon become debilitating and demor-
alizing. So a degree of tactical shrewdness, including the ability to
read the political culture of one’s institution, is a political necessity
for college teachers.