PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE.

Trinity University's Michael Fischer wrings his hands about the difficulties involved in running a university like a Quaker Meeting.

At times, many of us in academe take pride in our commitment to consensus-based decision making, aligning it with such positive values as involving people in the decisions that affect them and favoring persuasion over coercion. At other times, however, even the most forceful advocates of consensus-based decision-making, among whom I count myself, get impatient. Our frustration leads to familiar complaints about herding cats, never getting another accomplished, and enduring interminable meetings that only complicate problems instead of resolving them.

That's always been the case: each of those New England town clusters (East Millpond, Millpond Centre, Millpond Hall, Millpond Heights) represents an irreconcilable breakdown of consensus among relatively like-minded people.  (I'm looking straight at you, administrative toadies on university committees.)

Our commitment to consensus waxes and wanes for many reasons but primarily because we are ambivalent about compromise. Compromise is almost always essential to achieving consensus in higher education. A proposed major change in a university – for example, a revision in the academic calendar or curriculum – typically attracts a core of supporters and an equally vocal group of naysayers. Between these extremes lies a not yet committed, more or less curious group, sometimes a majority of faculty members, who need to be brought along if the proposal is going to succeed. I say "succeed" rather than "pass" because without sufficient support, even a proposal approved by the majority can still be sabotaged or at least stalled. Tenured faculty opponents of the change can continue their dissent with impunity. Lukewarm faculty members can maintain their disengagement, refusing to staff key committees that may be necessary to implementing the change. Although unanimity is neither essential nor realistic, sufficient consensus, not just a majority vote, is crucial.

That's where an absence of viewpoint diversity comes in handy: it's easier to achieve consensus when the issue being contested is relatively minor (do we lower admission standards to a combined 850 or a combined 800 on the college boards?)  But everybody gets along to go along until the tension between consensus and, oh, producing meaningful intellectual development, becomes too much for compromise.

Measuring "sufficient consensus" is a judgment call administrative and faculty leaders must make before moving on. Familiar marketplace metaphors often guide our reasoning. The "buy-in" of the uncommitted results from "selling" them something. It can be something tangibly in their self-interest – e.g., the curricular change might lower teaching loads – but often in colleges and universities, carrots are as hard to come by as sticks, especially now, when budgetary pressures are increasing class size, freezing salaries, and whittling away travel support. Rewarding cooperation becomes as problematic as punishing intransigence. Buy-in accordingly comes from allowing the initially disaffected to leave their mark on the proposal that results: offering amendments, rewriting sections, raising objections to be dealt with later, all with the ultimate goal of achieving broad "ownership."

Precisely. As long as there's general agreement on what it is the administration is selling, the endless wordsmithing achieves nothing substantively different yet leaves everyone believing they've said their piece.

The problem Mr Fischer avoids mentioning is that there can be no compromise between faculty members who see greater access, or more accommodation, or more climbing walls, or a pursuit of athletic excellence and more commuter students, as desirable, and faculty members who see such things as distracting from, or destructive of, the higher earning.  The lion lies down with the lamb only in your prayers.

That makes his transition to a gripe about the absence of compromise in national politics silly.

At this level, suspicion of compromise has given way to hostility, with President Obama the target, contributing to the national legislative gridlock. It is striking how criticisms of Obama from the left and the right consistently disparage compromise. From the point of view of Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and other liberal columnists, Obama is a disappointing centrist who caves in too readily to his adversaries. From the point of view of Tea Party Republicans, however, he is a steamrolling socialist who must be resisted at every turn, not appeased in any way.

Either way, compromise gets stigmatized: as something the president engages in too readily or as a trap his right-wing adversaries must avoid. The only resolution of their differences that these ideological opponents can imagine is somehow tilting the balance of power in their favor: a game-changing election that will finally allow their side to get something definitive done. The game being changed or ended is the process of debate and negotiation across differences, which few are confident will lead to a better outcome than their own initial position. We are left with paralysis, short-term fixes, posturing for one’s allies, and endless searches for opportunities to weaken the other party.

No. We have two major parties beholden to electoral bases with very different interests.  That reality is itself a result of a compromise (Republican support for the so-called voting rights act enabled state legislatures to craft majority-minority districts safe for Democrats in such a way as to create other districts safe for Republicans).  That makes splitting the difference in a conference committee more difficult.

Whether we're looking at national affairs, or at academic politics, the absence of a consensus supportable by relatively small compromises follows directly.