by Morgan Hite

There has been a lot of fury among instructors recently about the trend of the school, and, I hope, a lot of heated emotion on the part of administrators too. We, the instructors, have been asked in briefings and fora whether we think the school is growing too much. We've declaimed the lack of active faculty (working at least one course a year) in the administration. We've been distraught about new policies. But none of this really comes down to expressing what we feel.

We are feeling outflanked. In the power struggle between administration and field staff, their defense spending is outweighing ours. Their forces are growing, their tactics becoming more sophisticated and their moves more bold. Their values and priorities are having more of an influence on where the school is going than ours.

There is a power struggle. I do not wish to disguise that fact. We lose nothing by acknowledging this. As much as many members of the administration may be our friends, there is an undeniable fact that as a group their values and priorities are being shown to differ from those of the field staff. This has been exemplified in the past year by conflict over many things: the sale of hotel furniture; instructor participation in the GYCC meeting; and the treatment of an instructor whose students objected to his relationship with another student.

Let us not confuse these issues, however, with Safety issues. Safety issues have, it is true, included in other controversial events: the demise of fasting, the new Helmet Policy, and the questioning of allowing students to do first ascents. Frustrating as these may be however, our commitment to safety requires us as instructors to enter into these debates in a responsible fashion. These issues may come to be, in a confused picture, seen as elements of the power struggle; but they should not be. The issues of the power struggle are more what I would call How the School Looks issues.

These are issues on which we are not required to enter into the debates in a responsible fashion. They cannot be debated rationally for they are simply an issue of whose vision will prevail. We, instructors, are being told not to do things we want to do. We resent it. We are being told we cannot have relationships with students in the field. We are being told we ought not go to the GYCC meeting and air our views as private citizens. And we do not believe that we are being told these things for reasons which we honor or for reasons we feel have integrity.

We often say the school is becoming too big; what we really mean is that the administration is using new techniques on us we're not familiar with, techniques to push and entrench their priorities. They are citing legal considerations. They are citing "industry standards," although as Allen O'Bannon so shrewdly pointed out, we are the industry standard. They plan and make decisions so fast that we cannot keep up. They bring in new members from outside the school, people who have not been instructors and are not planing on becoming instructors. They ask for our input and then hypnotize us with the same arguments that have hypnotized them; as if to show that when the power is really in our hands, we too will see it their way. But it is not so.

But, we do not know how to beat them at this game.

In the mind of most field instructors (and I only express it that way for rhetorical immunity: I do not in fact know any who disagree) the administration exists to back up field instructors, to recruit and prepare students, and to research and improve safety. The direction of the school is best defined by the community of active faculty. It is we who know the students, who know the land, who hopefully embody the values of our land-centered experience. From our perspective in the field we are removed from, and to some degree immune to, the unhealthy prejudices and practices of society. Like it or not, such value and perception learning is part of our school. It is clear to the field staff that if we were running the school all of the issues cited above would have been managed differently.

Are instructors naive about the real world? Or is it certain administrators who are naive about (and out of touch with) the real real world?

I could write pages of outraged, cynical diatribe about what the motives of the administration appear to be to instructors. Suffice however to say they believe the following simple statement: NOLS's most valuable asset is not its field staff, not its physical plant and not it its administration; it is our name.

As field instructors we feel devalued, unrespected, and consequently restricted. We sense the administration believes that the school is too valuable now to leave things up to instructor judgement in a realm without written policy. To take things to a ridiculous extreme, our biggest fear is that we will be completely overseen in the field somehow - by satellite no doubt. Administrators will tell us what we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot read aloud, and where we can and cannot go.

This points out however the fact that at the present moment we, field instructors, in fact hold the final card. We hold the field, and that is NOLS. When we are out there we are totally on our own. The administration is powerless unless something spills out from the field; then they are able to step in and emplace their idea of the right answer. But clearly, unless things get so out of hand, it is we who have far more de facto power.

A power struggle like this will tear up the school. The administration cannot win because we control the field. We cannot win because we do not make the administrative decisions. The only solutions are either a completely complacent field staff which does not feel passionately about its values (hard to find in Outdoor Ed! But Chris Connaty tells me Pecos River Learning Center is working on it...), or a consensus on values between staff and administration.

Only the latter is really possible. The field staff wants administrative leadership that we desire to follow. There is a simple way to accomplish this, and that is to require all administrators (I'm sure we can figure out who they are) to be active faculty. It is not asking too much, to save the school from a death which we would have to call "institutional."

Lander, Wyoming, May, 1991