Vocabularies of motives in a crisis of academic leadership

Rousing and Redirecting a Sleeping Giant

“…The coalition seeking Albino's resignation coalesced around a rhetorical vision of Albino as an incompetent president, unable to manage the university's relationship with important publics, possessing several character flaws, and making poor decisions. Allen and Tompkins' (1997) analysis of their experiences and newspaper reports largely support the convergence on this vision by the vice chancellor, deans, and faculty members. But to not be drawn into the prosocial assumptions accompanying convergence, one must interrogate the content or stories on which the coalition converged.…”

“…They accused her of a breach of ethical conduct when her affair with her interview participant-Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric-became public. Another example is found in Allen and Tompkins's (1997) treatment of events that took place at the University of Colorado. Here, the group included a vice chancellor, deans, and representatives from Colorado's satellites.…”

“…The subsequent resignation of a senior editor who was not one of the letter writers indicates some veracity to the writers' claims (Bandler, 2002b). Similarly, although a small delegation at Colorado (deans and a vice chancellor) pushed for Albino's resignation, they had a letter signed by 78 individuals (Allen & Tompkins, 1997). There are several reasons some members are more overt than others, with one being a system of representation in which a few are selected to represent others.…”

“…The Albino presidency. Allen and Tompkins (1997), who were both faculty members at the University of Colorado, used ethnographic methods and newspaper reports to recount the incidents surrounding Albino's presidency. I summarize their account and then apply tenets of a reformulated SCT-antisocial symbolizing and power in the development of a coalition's rhetorical vision-to the case.…”

Blinded by the White: Challenging the Notion of a Color-Blind Meritocracy in the Academy

“…My dissertation advisor and mentor, an African American woman, spent most of her pre-tenure years deliberately choosing topics of scholarship that would not label her as a ''race scholar.'' Early on, she focused much of her scholarship on Computer-Mediated Communication and other seemingly neutral, mainstream organizational topics (see Allen & Tompkins, 1996; Blinded by the White 153 Shapiro & Allen, 2001). Allen has described the particular challenges of being one of few African American scholars in the discipline and the issues she considered as she gradually shifted her emphasis from writing about ''mainstream'' topics to taking matters of difference on more directly as her area of specialty (see Allen, 1998;Simpson & Allen, 2005) and has since made many significant contributions to the field in this area (Allen 2004(Allen , 2007Ashcraft & Allen, 2003;Simpson & Allen, 2005).…”