Opening Comments by Senate Chair Dr. Kurt Meredith
Fall Faculty Meeting
October 16, 2006

As I approached the duties of Senate Chair this year I thought about the tasks ahead and whether there should be a particular focus for the Senate for the coming year. This is the start of a new curriculum cycle so there is plenty of work to do in order to satisfy that process. It seemed though that there ought to be a more unifying or perhaps inspiring theme to characterize the Senate’s work.

I have been reading about the evolution over the last few decades of community building as an idea and how this idea has transformed many organizations and institution. Community building has been variously and loosely defined but most of us have an intuitive sense of what it implies; something akin to clusters of like minded or similarly situated individuals forming lasting group affiliations. These affiliations then lead to actions that further define the cluster and somehow promote their worth, character or qualities. Recent understandings about the dynamics of communities have gone in fascinating direction and thinking about the implications for community building has become far more intriguing, complex and exciting than originally anticipated.

Communities do represent clusters of individuals. Some clusters are enduring others not. Once neighborhoods were thought enduring; now the buildings are, but the human participants less so, as mobility continues to increase. A community I watched form recently was the community of parents, students and faculty at Convocation last week. This community came together through ceremony and shared commitment than spanned generations and was forged from parental pride and student aspiration. We hope that for most involvement in this community is a lifetime commitment but we know this community too is dynamic and fluid.

Today, of course, we have both analog and virtual communities. The explosion of virtual communities has given us nearly unlimited possibilities for rapidly forming or disbanding communities and reforming them again. The enormity of the range of possible communities is framed by the vastness of the web. Last week it was announced that the 1 billionth person had logged on to the web. I do not know how this was derived but I am a believer. I am actually surprised it was not more. And according to Albert-Laslo Barabasi, writing in the book “Linked”, there are now more documents on the web than people on earth, which puts the number at between 6 and 7 billion.

Yet despite this vastness there is an intimacy, a connectedness that brings us together so that we are actually closer than we are apart. Six degrees of separation is the distance, according to this now famous phrase, that separates any one of us from anyone else. On the web, it turns out, any document, any site, any web community, is only, on average, 10 clicks from any other. Ten degrees of separation. Those doing web searches might argue this but efficiency is not always evident. On the web there are some new communities that demonstrate the degrees of separation we have from each other. Facebook is the best example with it’s “friends” component linking overlapping networks of tens of thousands of people.

Such connectedness helps us build powerful communities and teaches us something about their function and the roots of their power. The most recent example of the power of virtual communities and their capacity to rise suddenly and dramatically is YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/index). Two entrepreneurs understood the powerful urge people have to share some of themselves – via video – with others coupled with peoples’ desire for 15 minutes of fame. YouTube created a community that by virtue of its size conferred momentary celebrity status on all who virtually entered there.

As most of you know just last week Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion. YouTube has been in existence for exactly 18 months and has never generated a profit. Google bought it because of the power and breadth of the community. There is advertising potential in this community. Yet even as the sale was going through members of the YouTube community were engaged in re-conceptualizing that community. They were suggesting that this community should not be conceptualized as a fixed community; rather it would be more accurate to think of it as resembling a large flock of geese. If, they suggested, Google makes YouTube too commercialized the flock will rise simultaneously and migrate to a more hospitable web climate.

So community building is a dynamic process where communities evolve, dissolve, divide and merge. Resources in terms of membership and information available to these communities are limitless and are only 6 to 10 degrees of separation away at any given moment. Organizations can no longer be thought of as static entities with fixed infrastructure. Today that is only a comfortable illusion. The boundaries we build are fictions. Border crossers are everywhere. Our students already know this. They live and operate simultaneously and seamlessly in multiple, complex, flexible networked communities both analog and virtual. We see the outward signs of this with the array of digital equipment suspended from various appendages.

So what of community and the faculty at UNI and in the College of Education? There is some quite recent evidence that dynamic community building matters a great deal to university faculty.

The September 29 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a recent Harvard University survey of university faculty. 4500 tenure track faculty at 51 colleges and universities were surveyed on issues of importance to them in their job setting. Results suggested a major shift in faculty workplace preferences from previous, meaning my, generations. Previous generations indicated autonomy to be the single most important workplace need. Today new faculty seek to work in teams. Junior faculty indicate opportunities to work with senior faculty, opportunities for collaboration, professional interactions and a sense of unity are the most important elements in job satisfaction. One participant in the survey suggested, it is opportunities for engagement with colleagues that contributes to professional happiness.

Early participation in university communities through committee involvement, links to mentors, opportunities for leadership and a collegial atmosphere are all keys to job satisfaction. I hesitate to mention this in a contract negotiation year but regression analysis of survey responses indicated community issues are five times more likely to predict job satisfaction than compensation.

Many of you who have been around for a while are thinking, fine, give the new folks committee work, I’ll take the loot. The reality is new folks have already discounted our salaries by virtue of their career choice in education and they are looking for something more.

What does this mean for us in the College of Education? For now, for me, it means we are or ought to be open for exploration. We can create a multitude of communal landscapes to explore and mine in service to our individual and collective purposes within and beyond the college.

As we consider research work or explore other areas of interest, if we have a vision of ourselves and our colleagues as linked by as many strands and ties as our imaginations allow then the clusters we traditionally use to define ourselves, our work, fold into a vast array of possibilities and simply become staging points for exploration rather than sealed Rubbermaid containers of thought and practice.

References
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. 2003. Linked. N.Y., N. Y. Plume Publishing.

Fogg, Piper. (2006, September 29). Young Ph.D.’s say collegiality matters more than salary. Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. LIII, (6). Pg. 1.

http://www.youtube.com/index