PROBLEMS OF GOVERNANCE

I want to comment on the process of governance in relation to the
five year plan which we have just completed at Douglas College. It seems
to me this process has been seriously flawed by the intrusion of adminis tration
into the governance process. There are three areas of intrusion: 1) The
Integration and Transmission of Divisional Plans to the College Education Com-
mittee 2) The Process of Governance at All Levels 3) The Failure of Governance
to be a TweWay Process.

Let me deal with these in order. 1) The Transmission and Integration |

of Divisional Plans to the College Education Committee. The divisional plans
were integrated by administration and carried by administration to the CEC.
This is a blatant intrusion of administration into governance. The integration,
transmission and advocacy of governance plans should be made by faculty. ow
could anyone think otherwise? The consequence of integration, transmission and
advocacy by administration is that faculty were fundamentally deprived of their
governance rights. This is absolutely intolerable in an academic educational
institution where fundamental rights of faculty should be sacrosanct. It is
also a sad fact in an institution where faculty rights have experienced a dan-
gerous erosion and where inertia and decay have set in mainly because these
rights are being denied.

2) The Process of Governance at All Levels. We have, it would appear,
made a gain relative to governance rights by chairpersons of governance commit-
tees being elected faculty rather than administrators. That gain is certainly
more apparent than real at the divisional level where the administrative officer
(the dean) is the staff-officer of the committee. I Don't know how you would
feel as a company-employee in an employee-meeting where a director is present as
staff-officer but many people would find it very intimidating. It is very easy
for the divisional education meeting to become de facto a divisional meeting
where the dean de facto manipulates the meeting. It is extremely difficult for
the meeting not to tecome subject to the undue influence of administration.

This is not a matter merely of covert interference only but also of
overt interference motivated by a failure of administration to recognize and
remain within the limits of its role. After the five year plan was developed
in our division, without consultation with the chairman of ADEC, our dean called
a meeting of ADEC, along with departmental chairpersons, to consider the plan.
A formal complaint was threatened and the procedure was halted.

When the divisional plan was being put together, combining the depart-
mental plans, it was with considerable difficulty that the dean was persuaded
that the chairman has the right provisionally to integrate the plans for con-
sideration by the ADEC committee. Administration's belief that it has the right
to integrate the plans is based on three things: 1) the fa lure to recognize
that ADEC is a faculty committee 2) the assumption that faculty really are not
capable of doing this 3) It is too dangerous to permit faculty to do this.

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