The first thing I ask when a department chair calls about a personnel situation is whether they have re-read the handbook. The answer, almost always, is no, or yes-from-three-years-ago. The second thing I ask is whether HR has. The answer is usually some version of the same.
This is not a criticism. It is a pattern. Academic handbooks are dense, revised in pieces over decades, and rarely written to be read end-to-end. But the dispute in front of you has almost always been resolved in one before. The question is whether anyone notices in time.
Across the years I have done this work, I have rarely encountered a personnel situation that did not have an answer somewhere in the institution's own documents. The grievance procedure. The faculty handbook. The department bylaws. The collective bargaining agreement. A prior arbitration. A memo from the dean's office five years ago.
The work is finding the answer, reading it carefully, and translating it into a workable next step.
Why Institutions Forget Their Own Rules
There are structural reasons academic handbooks stop being used. They are long, dense, and revised in pieces over decades, which means even the people who wrote them often do not know what they currently say. They live in PDF form on intranet pages no one bookmarks. They are updated by committees, and the committees that update them are not the people who consult them.
The result is that institutions develop two parallel systems. There is the written policy, which sits on a server. And there is the lived practice, which is what people actually do, often in contradiction to the written policy, often without anyone noticing.
When a personnel situation surfaces, leaders default to the lived practice. They ask colleagues what was done last time. They check informal precedents. They try to remember what the dean said in that one meeting.
This works until it doesn't. When the situation becomes contested (when the parties or their counsel start asking what the institution's own rules say), the lived practice and the written policy diverge in expensive ways.
What Reading Actually Looks Like
Reading the handbook properly is a discipline. It is not skimming for keywords. It is reading the relevant section in full, then reading the related sections it cross-references, then reading the procedural appendices that govern how the rule is applied.
For a faculty grievance, this typically means:
- The handbook's grievance procedure section
- The collective bargaining agreement's parallel section, if there is a union
- Any administrative procedures the provost's office has issued
- The bylaws of the department, college, and faculty senate where they overlap
The reading takes time. An hour, sometimes two, for a substantial situation. It is the most leveraged hour you will spend on the matter, because everything that follows either aligns with what the documents say or doesn't, and the doesn't is what generates appeals.
When the Handbook Is Wrong
Sometimes the handbook is the answer in a different way: it is the answer because it is outdated, and the institution has been violating it without realizing.
I have seen institutions discover, in the middle of a contested matter, that their own grievance procedure requires a step they have not been performing. That their tenure review process has timelines that have quietly slipped. That their conflict of interest policy applies in ways no one has been enforcing.
This is uncomfortable. It is also the most common reason institutions lose otherwise winnable cases. The fastest way to lose a procedural argument is to be unable to demonstrate that you followed your own procedure.
Reading the handbook regularly, not just when something goes wrong, is the antidote. Many institutions could prevent half their formal complaints by sending senior leaders through a structured re-read of the relevant policies every two years.
A Practical Habit
For chairs and deans reading this, the practical habit is small: when a situation surfaces, before you call HR, before you call counsel, before you call a colleague, read the relevant handbook section yourself. Take the hour.
You will be surprised how often the answer is there. And you will be surprised, also, by how rarely it matches what people are telling you the answer is.