Problems of Governance

 

At the departmental levels, one of the departments has had the chair-
man chairing the Departmental Education Committee. Another department does not
seem to care who chairs the DEC. Part of this situation is explained by a lack
of morale among faculty, many of whom now believe that decisions are made without
faculty input anyway, so why bother? (Recall that the Academic Division no longer
gives a vote to faculty - only a straw-vote.) Many faculty have simply given
up. This is, to some extent, the inevitable result of administrative intrusion
into faculty rights, of paternalism and of the abserce of essential democracy
in the college.

Another administrative assumption makes governance extremely difficult,
namely the assumption that once governance policy has been formulated at any
level, that policy becomes the property of administration upon which to act. Thus
departmental governance plans become the property of departmental administration,
divisidnal plans of divisional administration and college governance plans of
college administration. The resi lt of this assumption is twofold: 1) governance
plans at earlier levels become acted upon by administration at that level before
such governance plans have proceeded through different governance stages for
discussion and prioritization. This frustrates the governance process by pre-
venting its completion and double-tracks faculty so they must run on both sets
of tracks - very tiring even for young new trains! 2) A competition between the
two tracks emerges but one, again, where administration dominates and frustrates O
governance.

 

3) The Failure of Governance to be a Two-Way Process. Governance is a
two-way process in which faculty governance concerns are forwarded to management
and the board and the concerns of management are processed through governance
for consideration and comment. The essential vacuity of governance is illustrated
by the absence of the process from management to governance. Thus in the recent
five-year plan, the finally adopted plan contain s management initiatives which
have never been presented to faculty. Prominently included in the plan, they
give the appearance of having been considered by faculty and, of course, they
constitute a college plan so different from the divisional plans that many of
us wonder why we participated. The prover procedure would be for administration
to give their proposals to governace-committees for comment before incorporation
into the plan.

.This brings us to the overall context of governance and to the college's
role in governance. The administration's role has been questionable from the
beginning mainly because it has defined governance in an essentially unilateral
manner. The result is that governance-definition is fundameneally biased and
gives the appearance of governance without its substance. This is one of the
reasons why morale remains low at this college and why many faculty have simply
opted out of the system. Indeed, if governance is appearance without substance,
these faculty have made the correct response and those of us who have attempted O
to work within governance are merely being duped.

Ade | hee