When trust is all you've got to stand on

Last night a colleague asked me what I thought of a proposal for a new major in another department, and I struggled to respond. The proposal is way outside my discipline, my department, and my area of expertise, and I'm simply not qualified to judge whether it's rigorous enough or coherent enough to line up with what our college stands for (which is another question entirely but let's not go there today). I have only one basis to evaluate the proposal: Do I trust the colleagues who developed the new major?

It's astounding how many of our decisions on campus really come down to trust--or its absence. We might come up with a whole chain of reasons to rationalize our vote for or against certain proposals, but often our support depends upon a simple question: How much do I trust this colleague or this department to carry out what they have promised to do? How much do I trust them to serve the needs of the college as a whole above their own needs?

The problem with this approach, of course, is that trust is such a wobbly concept, vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation and exploitation, and violations of trust are hard to forgive. Often discussions in faculty meetings veer into peculiar territory when someone starts responding not to the current question but to some violation of trust going back months or years or perhaps even decades. It's hard to fight that kind of prejudice when no one will admit it openly, so we couch our arguments in jargon or niggle about rigor until we're all approaching rigor mortis.

In the past I've trusted unwisely and been badly burned, but I like to begin from the assumption that people will do what they say they will do, especially if they put it in writing. So I answered my colleague by saying, "I don't know if the program is great, but I trust the people who wrote it." I'm taking my stand for trust--but if someone violates that trust, look out!