Higher education increasingly requires teamwork to get the job done. Yet, turning a faculty of independent-minded operators into a team of cooperators and collaborators is a daunting challenge. A reward system that encourages competition for scarce resources makes it even more difficult to motivate faculty to rally around a common cause. In this paper, we draw from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, to discuss what it takes for leaders to get rivals to work together for the good of the order. First, we propose that academic leaders do a better job of emphasizing the mutually reinforcing nature of teaching, scholarship, and service in carrying out the University's purpose, as well as better rewarding different kinds of faculty contributions to that purpose. We reason further that the best way to do this is by cultivating an academic environment that promotes and rewards teamwork. By shifting the administrative focus from an individual orientation to a team orientation, we believe the environment within which faculty members live and work can be made more engaging, rewarding, and productive. We then apply four of Lincoln's leadership qualities: (a) acknowledging when failed policies demand a change in direction, (b) leading by example, (c) understanding the emotional needs of the team, and (d) establishing trust and keeping your word to the challenge of transforming a highly individualistic faculty into an academic team. This requires a clear vision and having all team members understand the bigger picture and their roles and responsibilities in bringing the bigger picture into focus. Finally, we discuss the power of teams to accomplish what cannot be accomplished individually, and take the discussion beyond the college campus to include implications for the larger park and recreation profession. What we learn from studying Lincoln is that the key to success rests in a self-assurance that allows leaders to surround themselves with highly competent contrarians while simultaneously persuading them to embrace a unifying vision that serves the best interests of all.
In this paper, we discuss the role of public parks in telling the nation’s story via statues, memorials, and monuments. We ground our discussion in affect theory, which addresses the affective responses statues, memorials, and monuments elicit in visitors. Of particular note is affective dissonance, which suggests that a statue, memorial, or monument may evoke a variety of conflicting affective responses. The way in which visitors reconcile these conflicting affective responses shapes their public memory of significant events in our nation’s history. As more is learned about the checkered past of individuals venerated in statues, memorials, and monuments, how should public park administrators respond? We provide several examples of statues, memorials, and monuments that are controversial in nature, and discuss how public park administrators have responded to the challenge of telling the nation’s story through the reinterpretation of events. We also consider the complexity of the management implications, focusing in particular on who should be driving the decisions made. We then discuss the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as a good object lesson in how to deal with the affective dissonance involved in recasting public spaces. In so doing, we underscore the importance of frame theory in educating visitors about the preservation, modification, or removal of existing statues, memorials, or monuments.
The recent social upheaval in the wake of George Floyd’s death is reminiscent of the country’s turmoil in the late 1960s. In response to that social upheaval, President Lyndon Johnson charged what came to be known as the Kerner Commission with investigating the riots’ causes across 20 major American cities and recommending what could be done to prevent their reoccurrence. Among the most prominently mentioned causes of the riots was “inadequate recreation areas and facilities” in impoverished urban areas (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968, p. 104). In its recommendations, however, the Kerner Commission largely ignored the importance of recreation areas and facilities. Our commentary discusses why that was the case then, and why that should not be the case now.
The recent social upheaval in the wake of George Floyd’s death is reminiscent of the country’s turmoil in the late 1960s. In response to that social upheaval, President Lyndon Johnson charged what came to be known as the Kerner Commission with investigating the riots’ causes across 20 major American cities and recommending what could be done to prevent their reoccurrence. Among the most prominently mentioned causes of the riots was “inadequate recreation areas and facilities” in impoverished urban areas (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968, p. 104). In its recommendations, however, the Kerner Commission largely ignored the importance of recreation areas and facilities. Our commentary discusses why that was the case then, and why that should not be the case now.
The coronavirus pandemic, for all of its damage to human health and well-being, has brought to light the wisdom underlying the idea of One Health, whose advocates reason that health is a reciprocal relationship between our species and the environment that sustains us. What is good for people should also be good for the environment, and what is good for the environment should also be good for people. Their preferred future is one in the same. As the recent days, weeks, and months have also shown, leisure is not necessarily a cure for what ails us. Indeed, leisure pursuits may have contributed to the pandemic's spread. What, then, are we to make of leisure in the time of the coronavirus? We believe it is a fundamental lesson in ecology.
To travel hopefully is to have faith that an investment today will pay dividends tomorrow. In this article, the authors discuss several different kinds of professional investments that have paid off for them throughout their academic careers. Some of these dividends are obvious. They can be measured in dollars and cents earned as a result of sustained professional involvement. Other dividends are less obvious. They can be measured in a wealth of relationships and experiences that contribute to a full and satisfying life. While acknowledging the importance of financial dividends, especially early in one’s career, the authors emphasize the importance of social/relational dividends that enrich later life.
We believe the education of future park, recreation, and tourism professionals is incomplete if it does not prepare them for moral leadership in a participatory democracy. We anchor our thinking in Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture and build our case by revisiting Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, in which he admonished higher education for not preparing students, regardless of major, for assuming responsibility for their country's moral character based upon conscientious consideration of civilization's major philosophical ideas. We then apply Bloom's criticism to the education of park, recreation, and tourism students. Based on our analysis, we implore educators in our field to live up to their educational promise by embracing service learning and community-engaged learning as critical components of our students' professional preparation to ready them for civic engagement as well as a career in parks, recreation, and tourism.
In this article, we discuss the role of administrators in contributing toward a more perfect academic world through differentiated workloads. We begin by envisioning what a perfect academic world might look like and then describe ways in which the academic world professors inhabit falls short of that ideal. We then explain how differentiated workloads might help close the gap between the perfect academic world we envision and the imperfect academic world professors inhabit. Finally, we suggest how intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional barriers to differentiated workloads can be negotiated, as well as calling on academic administrators to implement differentiated workloads to make institutions of higher learning more accommodating.
In this paper we examine the responsibility of professors and park and recreation professionals in public discourse. Working from a basic understanding of the American Association of University Professors' "Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure," we begin by discussing the special responsibility professors have to be accurate, restrained, and respectful of differing points of view, even as they advocate for their own points of view. In making our case, we describe three "hats" professors commonly wear: that of educator, researcher, and private citizen, and the opportunities and obligations pinned to each hat. We pay special attention to "extramural utterances," those occasions when professors go beyond their roles as educators and researchers to speak up and out in public life as private citizens. We then apply the lessons learned about the responsibility of professors in public discourse to park and recreation professionals who may also be inspired to speak up and out publicly about contemporary events. Finally, we conclude by offering some general rules of thumb for professors and park and recreation professionals who wish to make their voices heard in public without jeopardizing their job security or doing damage to the integrity of their profession.
In this paper, the academic afterlife of a purposive sample of 12 recreation, park, and leisure studies educators from a variety of universities throughout the United States and Canada is discussed. The paper begins with a brief review of the literature on successful aging. That literature's insights are then applied to the lived experiences of the study's 12 participants. The results of the inquiry illuminate rich and varied individual differences. At the same time, there are commonalities across the study's 12 participants that underscore the importance of increasing control over one's time in retirement accompanied by an increasing sense of responsibility and accountability for the use of that time. The paper concludes by interpreting the study's results in light of Stebbins's (2013) three categories of leisure and five leisure lifestyles to better understand the prospects for leisure-centered retirement living.
We apply lessons from Moneyball, Michael Lewis's (2003) best-selling account of the Oakland Athletics's use of “sabermetrics” to find undervalued baseball players to help build a cost-effective team to the context of recreation, park, and leisure studies. Specifically, we coin and apply the term “academetrics” to find undervalued faculty members to help build cost-effective academic teams. We also draw analogies between the effects of long- term baseball contracts and tenure on performance, as well as describing different kinds of academic leagues, different kinds of academic players, and what it takes to “win” in academe. We conclude with a discussion of how academe's traditions, just like baseball's traditions, interfere with the progress of the “game.”
Abstract This article is intended to provoke thought and discussion about what it takes to be a department chair and what it feels like to be a department chair. To accomplish our purpose, we draw an analogy between test pilots and department chairs based on Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff (1979). We reason that test pilots and department chairs should share certain qualities, or what Wolfe calls “the right stuff,” to carry out their respective missions. Chief among those qualities are leadership, trust, fairness, an ability to build consensus, a positive attitude, and clear communication. In making our case, we contrast academic leadership, or “piloting,” with academic management, or “being a passenger in,” the academic enterprise. The article is based on our collective administrative experience chairing a variety of academic departments in parks, recreation, and tourism, as well as the administrative experience of several generations of our colleagues, who, for the good of the order, have taken a turn at the controls.
