by Rob Jenkins
Anytime the President of the United States sends American troops into harm’s way, politicians and pundits are sure to argue over whether or not he has the authority to do so.
I’m not qualified to participate in that kind of Constitutional debate, but I can offer the following observation: whether or not the President has the authority to send troops into battle in a given situation, he certainly has the power to do so.
That’s because authority and power are not the same thing, although many leaders fail to grasp the distinction. In particular, an alarming number of academic administrators these days don’t seem to understand the difference between exercising duly constituted authority and merely wielding power.
Authority is essentially the ability to carry out one’s duties and responsibilities. Faculty members have the authority to assign final grades, because doing so is one of their responsibilities. Likewise, department chairs have the authority to evaluate faculty members, deans have authority to hire faculty, presidents have authority over budgetary issues, and so on.
For authority to be valid, it must be ceded, which is to say derived from something larger than itself. The officers of a college, for instance, typically derive their authority from elected or appointed boards. At an institution that truly embraces shared governance, other individuals are also ceded authority in certain areas by the properly constituted by-laws and policies of the institution—for example, the faculty’s authority over curricular issues. Even a president does not have the authority, outside of the policies by which all are bound, to tell faculty members how to teach, how to conduct research, or what to write.
However, this does not mean that presidents and other administrators do not sometimes take such authority upon themselves. They can do so, even if illegitimately, because of the enormous power they wield.
Power is something quite different from authority. It tends to be seized rather than ceded. It is essentially the ability to force others to conform to one’s wishes, whether they want to or not, because of what might happen to them if they don’t. People with power can make other people’s work lives miserable, prevent them from getting promotions and raises, cost them their jobs—even if such actions are not strictly within their properly ceded authority.
Ultimately, authority is about cooperative and consensual sharing of responsibility. It’s about moving forward together, each with the ability to carry out the duties assigned to each. Power is ego-driven and self-centered. It’s about getting one’s own way and promoting one’s own self-interests, at the expense of others and even at the expense of the shared enterprise.
In these days when the rewards of power are so great—when administrative pay and privilege tend to dwarf those of rank and file faculty—too many administrators seem less concerned with exercising proper authority, while ceding appropriate authority to others, and more concerned with consolidating their own power. This is not a formula for institutional success; but sadly, it may well be a formula for individual success.