Team of Rivals: Turning Academic Rivals into Academic Teammates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. Subscribe to JPRA
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".