Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality: Confucian Relationality in an Age of Measurable Outcomes

Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality espouses the concept of relationality-the idea that people’s activities necessarily emerge through contextual engagement with others-as an alternative to the publish or perish ethos in higher education. Building on research by comparative philosophers, Mary K. Chang constructs a concept of Confucian relationality and engages it to question universities’ increasing reliance on market-oriented metrics to determine their strategic directions and gauge faculty productivity. Using a process-oriented approach that features change, the embodied connectedness of people, and the extensive impact of personal cultivation, Chang situates higher educational institutions as continually constructed by people’s actions in ways that cannot be wholly described or quantified-and need not be. Values are powerful in educational contexts because they direct how administrators, faculty, and students focus limited energy. Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality reevaluates what universities normatively value and offers a holistically expansive view that positions faculty as experts and learners whose activity is inseparable from the contexts constructed by the relationships from which they emerge.