Most of the three or four people who might encounter this blog are almost certainly aware that the AFM’s Symphonic Services Division and the Black Orchestral Network did a webinar this afternoon, hosted by the League of American Orchestras, on their jointly developed guidelines for revising the probationary process,
There is a lot of interesting stuff in the new guidelines, as well as some unanswered questions and one or two ideas that should not have made the cut. (Unfortunately there does not appear to be a publicly available link to the new guidelines as of the time of writing; I’ll update this if I find one or someone sends me one.)
But the guidelines do have a slant, which likely stems from one particular botched tenure decision in particular: the Kansas City mess. Of course it’s not a bad thing to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted if there are horses still in the barn. But I think that the anger over that particular situation has overly influenced the development of these guidelines, and perhaps limited the collective imagination of the drafters as well. In trying to prevent one set of problems from happening again, there is always a risk of creating new ones and ignoring other possible ways that things can go pear-shaped.
Having said that, there are a lot of good ideas in the guidelines. Perhaps the most radical good idea is proposing that the probationary period be one year instead of the standard two, although of course in practice “one year” will end up more like six months. I think this could work if the probationary process involved more evaluatory (and is that even a word?) activities; chamber music, moving around the section for section strings to allow more people to give informed feedback and more solo activity for principal musicians, and the like. The real problem with the present two-year process is one the presenters today didn’t mention: it doesn’t align with the way orchestras allow musicians to take long-term leave. It wasn't really clear to me what the drafters of the guidelines view as the problem they're trying to solve.
Another good idea is to provide probationary musicians with one of two "advocates" to help them through the process. Those of us who've been in orchestras for a while can easily forget that what we understand about how our orchestras work is far from obvious to a new member, and that they all could benefit from more support that we got when we were in their place.
I worry that the drafters too lightly passed over many of the issues inherent in appointing and supervising such advocates; as participants in a bargained process between an employer and a union, they will have legal responsibilities that will require training, supervision, and accountability. To whom they will be responsible for how they handle those responsibilities will really matter if things go off the rails. But, as the presenters pointed out, lots of these details will need to be addressed in local bargaining.
The biggest flaw in the guidelines is its approach towards feedback for the probationary musician. The guidelines not only state that all feedback be attributed to individual tenure committee members, but state that the candidates for tenure have access to that feedback.
This seemed to be a core issue for the BON folks at least; the need for “clear, non-anonymous constructive feedback” was the first thing that Emilio Carlo from BON mentioned in his list of things BON was asking for, in fact. His justification (and Rochelle’s) for this was that musicians should be willing to stand behind their words. That sounds nice. But, in practice, non-anonymous feedback that the candidate will see is just about the perfect recipe for shutting down honest feedback. It would be unfortunate if suspicious minds saw this as a feature and not a bug.
I’ve sat in plenty of tenure committee meetings and heard harsh criticisms of probationary musicians, either from committee members directly or from section members through an anonymous commenting system. I don’t enjoy it, and frequently I feel that the criticism is unfair and sometimes even malign, so I certainly get the distaste that the BON has for such feedback. My orchestra takes the destructive potential of such criticism so seriously that committee members are barred from discussing anything that happens during such meetings outside of the committee, and management only distributes the comments from the section members by hard copy at tenure committee meetings, which the committee members aren’t allowed to take with them out of the meeting.
But the alternative is worse. To put it simply, honest feedback can be negative, in some cases harshly so. Such honest feedback could be very painful for the probationary musician to receive. That doesn’t make it wrong, or useless, or destructive - if it’s handled properly. But handling it properly doesn’t mean telling one musician that another musician - with whom they might end up working closely for decades - thinks that their pitch, or rhythm, or leadership, suck. Very few musicians are going to say things like that directly to a colleague, and that's not a bad thing. I doubt that most of us would want to be in a workplace where such frankness was the norm. If I was completely frank with every colleague who pissed me off, I'd have even fewer friends than I do now. And I'm sure not anxious to hear their unvarnished opinions of me and everything I've done over the years.
But committee members might honestly hold negative opinions about probationary musicians, and, unless completely unsupported by anyone else, those are opinions that the probationary musician needs to hear about. If a majority of a tenure committee feel that a probationary musicians shouldn’t get tenure, a system in which their feedback is not anonymous - but their vote whether or not to recommend tenure for the candidate is secret - is liable to backfire badly. Probationary musicians won’t hear what they need to until a vote is actually taken, by which point it’s way too late to try to address the issues that might have been raised through anonymous feedback.
And what about the possibility of a committee member being sued for libel for negative comments? The presenters had no good answer to this question today; the best they could do was to point out that management would be responsible for not passing on comments that were inappropriate or unhelpful, which seemed to me to be dodging the question. As anyone who's followed the New York Philharmonic debacle knows, lawsuits don't have to have a solid basis to be filed and publicized. But, with management filtering the comments to ensure that nothing that might be subject to litigation is passed to the probationary musician, where’s the danger in anonymous comments?
As a friend of mine pointed out to me after the webinar ended, attributed feedback given to the probationary musician should come only from the person who will actually be making the decision and who will be accountable for it - the Music Director. It’s their job to decide what feedback from the committee or anyone else they agree with and what feedback will inform their decision - because the Music Director is the sole decider. That’s who’s accountable for the decision - not the tenure review committee.
I should mention two other aspects of the webinar that struck me as odd. The first is that the host was the League of American Orchestras. I can’t recall another time that the AFM discussed bargaining any topic in such detail and so publicly on a League platform. That’s not meant as a criticism, by the way. Clearly this was a presentation intended to influence how both labor and management approach this particular issue in local bargaining, and I can see why the AFM hosting it would not be the right “look.” The AFM may not even have the infrastructure to do this kind of event. But I will admit that, as a long-time advocate for the League and the AFM working more closely together on issues of mutual concern, this wasn’t exactly what I imagined. I guess one is never too old to have one’s imagination stretched.
I hope and trust that there are other issues, in addition to this one, on which the League and the AFM are finding common ground. We may fight over whose turn it is to paddle, but we should never forget that we are all in the same small boat in the same enormous ocean.
The other thing I noticed was both odd and disturbing. There was not a single mention of ICSOM or any other AFM player conference during this presentation. But national guidance on controversial subjects of mandatory bargaining is something I never could have imagined that the AFM and ICSOM would not be joined at the hip in presenting. I’m sure I’m not the only dues-paying member of both ICSOM and the AFM that would like to hear a frank and public explanation from the leadership of ICSOM and the AFM for ICSOM’s absence from this process.
Which doesn’t mean I expect to get one, of course. Maybe that’s a lesson about the problem with non-anonymous negative feedback.
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