Early years at a new job will tax the training of even the most well-prepared. A key challenge involves navigating workplace boundaries. It’s difficult to imagine being more well-prepared for my first years as a Christian college professor. And yet.
Many professors have gone straight from undergraduate to master’s programs and begun teaching while completing their doctor’s degrees. While they have years of schooling, I had schooling and far more work experience than most. And yet.
My father became a college professor when I was 5 years old. The next year, he moved to the Baptist college where he would spend the next 35 years, and I would grow up on that campus. After school, I often watched his lectures through the window from his office into his classroom. I listened to him advising students. I observed interactions with his colleagues. And yet.
Brad Bull
In early high school, I started serving as a marshal at the graduation ceremonies over which he was in charge. I could barely carry the heavy mace from the stage to the distinguished faculty member who would lead the processional. I heard three commencement speeches per year. Then, as a college student, I served as Student Government Association president and attended cabinet and trustee meetings. In seminary, I was senior class president. I once again interacted “in the room where it happened.” And yet.
I left my master’s program not for Ph.D. work, but for a year as a hospital chaplain intern. I then served 11 years as a minister, eight at one church and three at another as I earned my Ph.D. Two graduate degrees and 18 years of experience in hand, I launched into academia with more experience than most beginning professors. And yet.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn I couldn’t function as a faculty member the way I had as a student government leader. I was used to walking into a president’s office, pointing out a problem and the problem being fixed. I was used to being treated collegially by faculty, not as a threat.
I didn’t fully appreciate the degree to which boundaries differ by roles rather than experience.
Later, even as a family therapist with all my training in systems theory, I didn’t fully appreciate the degree to which boundaries differ by roles rather than experience. And I was completely oblivious that, as a student government leader, I had more latitude of influence than I did as a professor — especially a new one.
A faculty turmoil
Half-way through my first year at one of the small private colleges where I taught early in my career, word got out that a senior faculty member had maybe been summarily dismissed. Rage broke out among the faculty over what was seen as a swift action taken against a beloved colleague without the benefit of due process.
“Rage broke out among the faculty over what was seen as a swift action taken against a beloved colleague without the benefit of due process.”
I was on the faculty affairs committee, which the possibly discharged faculty member had been chair. Amidst the unclear dismissal of our leader, there was confusion about who had the authority to call a meeting. After some testy emails, we held an emergency meeting. A veteran committee member received the assignment of composing a message demanding a meeting with the interim president.
The next day, we met to review the message. We were almost unanimous in approving it. But a first-year professor took strong issue with two phrases. The message charged the administration was behaving in an “unchristian manner.” In disputing the secretive nature of the firing, the message said, “Christian community demands total transparency.”
I asserted these phrases were inaccurate and overstated. I underscored my position by saying I would not sign the letter until they were removed. The author took umbrage.
Regarding the charge of “unchristian” behavior I said: “I know I’m just a first-year professor here, but having been involved in student government, I have more experience working with administrations than most people my age. I know there are things that happen that administrators cannot address publicly for legal reasons. We can’t charge them with unchristian behavior when we are not privy to all the facts they have.”
The author agreed to remove the word “unchristian.” I suggested the same applied to the assertion “Christian community demands total transparency.” However, the author stood firm on this one.
What happened next had its roots in my freshman year in college.
Debate team
On my Christian college debate team, I had been trained to cross-examine my opponents with the intensity of Perry Mason. My coach’s exact instruction was, “In a kind, Christian way, eat (your opponent’s) face.” This was the reason I had joined the debate team in the first place.
“I had been trained to cross-examine my opponents with the intensity of Perry Mason.”
At an exhibition for my high school, a college debate coach had asked for a volunteer to take the affirmative side of “Michael Jackson is a good singer.” It was spring of 1984. Jackson was the King of Pop. How could anyone lose that? Yet, to our shock and awe, the debate coach crushed the articulate volunteer.
I wanted to learn how to think outside the box and expose the flaws in the status quo. If it required condescension, so be it. I got so “good” at it I was once interrupted during one of my cross-examinations. The judge slapped her table and said, “Stop! I will not tolerate arrogance in my debate round. I know some of you are coached to do it this way, but I won’t have it!”
I apologized to the judge and to my opponent.
(For the record and because this seems relevant 40 years later: The fall semester 1984 resolution was “The method of conducting presidential elections in the United States is detrimental to democracy.” I had simply asked my opponent if he would want “a bad guy” as president. He tried to evade and burn the clock by asking me to define “bad guy.” With the voice of movie-trailer narrator, I replied, “You know. A bad guy.”)
Now, in my first year at a new university, here I was in a real-life debate with far more at stake than a “W” in the win column of a collegiate debate round. I said to the author of the letter, “You don’t really believe we have to have total transparency.”
The author, eyes blazing into me, gently pounded a fist on the table while saying with emphatic staccato, “I do believe it. Christian. Community. Demands. Total transparency!”
The fist pounding and flaming eyes were what did it. They triggered the college debater, trained to “eat face” of opponents. I asked, “Total transparency?” I gestured around the room. “I can’t help but notice that everyone in this room is wearing clothing.”
I let that hang in the now-awkward room as the author stared at me in simultaneous shock and realization. In the pause, and — to my shame — I ever-so-condescendingly accented my question with raised eyebrows to say, “Well?”
“If this were a community of total transparency, we’d be a nudist colony.”
I audibly exhaled to calm myself and release the pressure from the room. I gently but with a tone not fully evaporated of condescension said: “See? If this were a community of total transparency, we’d be a nudist colony. There are necessary limits to transparency. The law requires confidentiality when it comes to certain personnel matters. We just need to make a request for a meeting without making any accusations or comments.”
That second aggressive phrase was removed, the revised draft printed and we all signed it.
Invited to meet
The next day, we got an email from the university president inviting us to a meeting in six days on a Tuesday at an atypical time. Why not Thursday or Friday of this week? Why not Monday? Via email, we wondered why the weird number of days and odd hour. We knew the interim president was in town and the situation was urgent. During whispered informal chats in hallways and offices, the anger and fear simmered just below boiling.
Meanwhile and astonishingly, despite all the time we spent figuring out how to replace our chair who had possibly been fired, none of us — including all the senior professors — had thought to read the faculty handbook’s policy on termination.
The next Tuesday at the weird time, our committee gathered with the president and upper cabinet members. The president, one of the most noble, gentle and wise men I have ever known, calmly and kindly thanked us for our request for a meeting.
He said: “I imagine you have wondered why we are meeting on this day at this time. The faculty handbook states that when someone is terminated, they have 10 days to appeal. The first level of appeal is to” — wait for it — “the faculty affairs committee. Our campus attorney told us that if we communicated with you about the case in any way, the appeals process would be irrevocably damaged. The 10 days expired” 15 minutes before this meeting.
The interim president said just enough to let us know actions were taken in good faith and following proper procedure and investigation. We could do the math of there being no appeal. We talked briefly about logistics.
I asked a sincere question about provisions for innocent parties impacted by the termination. That led to a sharp rebuke from one of the cabinet members, who asked what business that was of mine. The president raised a hand to interrupt the upbraiding. He nodded acknowledgement at my sincerity and said the gist of my question was being addressed. The letter author with whom I had clashed backed me up by thanking the president.
Then, after less than 15 minutes, the meeting was over.
‘Thank you’
Out in the hallway, one of the committee members walked away without comment. I only saw a glimpse of the person’s face. It matched the subsequent gait down the hall: Shock that a beloved friend might be guilty of whatever led to such an abrupt mid-semester dismissal.
The letter author and I turned to face each other. I said, “You did a great job in there.” My colleague smiled and nodded thanks. Wide, unblinking eyes said: “Dear God. Thank you for stopping us from sending that original letter.”
The naked truth is hard. Boundaries can be ambiguous. I once painfully learned this as a child on a camping trip, playing hide and seek, running in a moonlit forest. No, I wasn’t naked. I’m mixing metaphors. A wire that ran neck-high to my 11-year-old frame marked a boundary in the woods. My frame wound up splayed on the ground after I got clotheslined. Thus, I added to my experiences: Don’t run in the dark. This applies not only in forests but also in — or especially in — Christian community.
As a high school exchange student in France, I ran over a dune and onto the beach where I suddenly discovered my United-States-Bible-Belt level of modesty was not abreast of French culture. Turns out, every beach in France is tops-optional. I stared at the sand as I hustled to the water.
“Naked is honest, but you need to be prepared for it.”
Thus, I added to my experiences: Naked is honest, but you need to be prepared for it. And what is morally neutral at the beach with consenting participants often breaks healthy boundaries in other settings — especially in Christian community.
Relationship scholars identify three degrees of boundaries: rigid, porous and healthy. Rigid boundaries allow no flexibility — like preventing not only a 6-year-old but also a 17-year-old from seeing an R-rated movie, even if it has historical merit. A porous boundary would be the “total transparency” of letting all the kids see whatever they want. Healthy boundaries are contextually flexible, rooted in respect and nurture well-being.
In Christian community, one of our wise exhortations comes from the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth — the Las Vegas “Sin City” of its time. While we have accurate mirrors today, Paul was writing to a people for whom a mirror was polished metal that gave a blurry indication of reality. In that context, he said, “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror. … Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
Yikes. God knows the naked truth about me. Poor God. And yet: Loving acceptance.
We can then extrapolate to paying this grace forward. If God knows me but accepts me, I must extend grace to others. This grace must be extended even amidst — especially amidst — the unknown that is created not only by the concealing “clothing” of ignorance but also by the concealing “clothing” of healthy boundaries.
Now, to be sure, Southern Baptist Convention: Hiding sexual perpetrators does not fit the category of healthy administrative clothing. And to you, Any Generic Christian University: It is also not a healthy boundary to sign faith statements we don’t believe or to mislead students into programs in which they have no hope of succeeding — no matter how much you need their tuition dollars and head count.
We shouldn’t be naked, but we also shouldn’t be wearing masks.
Brad Bull earned degrees in psychology and divinity from Baptist institutions and then completed a Ph.D. in child and family studies at the University of Tennessee. He is a licensed marriage and family therapist who has served as a hospital chaplain, pastor and university professor. He currently works as online private-practice family therapist in Tennessee and Virginia. He is a freelance writer and speaker who can be reached at DrBradBull.com.
Related articles:
How transparent are churches and denominations?
Anonymous group calls for more transparency from SBC’s North American Mission Board
What your pastor can’t tell you but really wants you to know