From recent comments, I don't think I've been clear about the nature and role of the task force.
First, we are not a committee-representative-of-faculty, a representative body in the sense of "persons who represent the views of the A&S faculty."
- We weren't selected by the A&S faculty or given our charge by them.
- The task force was created by, and we were asked to be on it by, Dr. Sethna.
Second, this work is not part of shared governance. The UWG Policies and Procedures Manual gives the President, not the faculty or the Faculty Senate, the authority to determine organizational structure. It is not something to put up for a vote of faculty. We are asked only to make recommendations to Dr. Sethna on how he should carry out that authority, given his decision that COAS will be split up. He, of course, may accept or reject our recommendations.
Third, our job is not to consider the wisdom or the timing of splitting up the COAS. Our task is to develop implementation plans and procedures for:
- Division of the A&S budget
- Governance structures
- The names of the new colleges and their membership
- Facilities allocation
- Other relevant issues
Fourth, we have been and will continue to be guided by what we learn from faculty, staff, and administrators, but the recommendations have to be ours. Thankfully, as we've worked on our first recommendation - what colleges to create and which departments should be in which colleges - we've been able to get a lot of input and craft something that reflects that input fairly well.
Fifth, so we can keep on track, get more timely feedback, make mid-course corrections as needed, and finish up by mid-October, we will make interim recommendations at least every month, sometimes more often. Our first recommendation, on the structure and membership of the new colleges, should be out in the next few days.
- Are we acting in good faith? I believe that we are acting with honest intention, without any intent to defraud or to act maliciously, with the good of UWG in mind.
- Are we rushing to make decisions? Not to my mind. There's so much work ahead, we'll have to be efficient to finish by mid-October.
See, what I thought was happening -- what I imagined the committee and all this talk was about -- was how we were going to have a process that empowered the faculty. A process that was _explicitly_ a message about how to use power correctly and a redress to the utter disenfranchisement we've experienced since May.
ReplyDeleteHad I known it was going to be a reiteration of the exclusive, top-down, daddy-knows-best kind of bad leadership we've been experiencing from front campus, I would have been even more dismayed.
Count me more dismayed, now that you've described what you think your committee is doing.
I accept the power of the sovereign to divide the college, and that this will happen (and don't need bold type to help me accept that, thanks). What my difficulty has always been about is the process, the exclusion, the practice of power as a weapon against the people who have to experience its effects. Whether or not you've been appointed, whether or not you believe you're rushing, whether or not you think you have the best interests of the university in mind, is immaterial.
What's material is how you treat the people you govern -- as adults who are equals with you and have concerns and ideas you should be listening to, or as five-year-olds who get told only what you think they need to know and whose opinions are cute but ultimately unimportant. I'm feeling like the tone of this post suggests it's the latter.
Why not think of yourself as representing the faculty? Where's the harm in that? Why do you feel your power comes from the president and not the faculty? Where's the harm in considering yourself speaking for the disempowered in this situation? Isn't there greater moral force when you do, at least here in the US of A?
Well, these are ethical considerations and maybe not in the purview of the committee. But I know when I've been told I don't matter, and this is what I hear from this post. I guess I should be glad to see the transparency, anyway; precious little of that anywhere else.
I could not agree more with the post above. Well said.
ReplyDeleteThank you for communicating such a clear description of how faculty are being treated. That a committee of faculty members don't believe they have a responsibility to represent faculty members just shows how easily divided we can become. What a shame.
ReplyDeleteWow. I guess we can all stop wasting our time thinking we matter.
ReplyDeleteI too am shocked at the committee's or Will's (?) response, as in their/his definition of the committee. Like the others who have posted before me, I want to say thanks to the first person who responded to this post. If you, committee members, do not represent the views of the faculty and staff of A&S, why are you soliciting them? Did Dr. Sethna not say in the Open Meeting that it was his decision that the college be broken up but beyond that that shared governance would reign? Did you, Will, not respond to all-faculty messages by several concerned about the fact that not every department would have a voice at the table on your little committee-of-6 proposal by saying that you guys would represent us? I have the evidence in e-mail. You are now saying you do NOT represent us. I'm afraid that the comparison made in the A&S meeting to Vichy France is no longer a joke. If this is the committee's and not just Will's response, then I say shame on the current president of the UWG Chapter of the AAUP for participating in this committee. This will damage the chapter and years of good work done in trying to build it.
ReplyDeleteSlapping away commentary with the excuse given under "third" in the statement of the committee's function (as in, it is not our job to consider....) is like saying that if you are an executioner, it is not your job to consider when the person you're killing ought to be killed or not. It is the refusal of personal, ethical responsibility in the name of obeying authority. It is not acceptable argumentation in my world.
Finally, I am shocked at the arrogance of the statement above in general, about the role of the committee and about the level of self-importance it implies: "It must be OUR vision." Again, I will point you Will, as chair of this committee, back to your e-mail in which you claimed that it was not important to have representation on the committee from all departments because the committee would fairly and equitably represent all of us. What a terrible, terrible sequel to Dr. Kieh's year of transparent, fair, warm, and principled leadership! I am so very, very, very sad.
I guess it's good to know that the committee had no intention of representing faculty, despite earlier claims that it would be able to represent faculty fairly despite its small size. Okay: even if the university itself is not a democracy, even if Dr. Sethna has more unilaterally abusable power than I would want to have, the structure allows for a democratic process -- if we are democratically minded -- that would allow us to forget that the structure itself is mostly absolutist. The same goes for the committee, which as I recall, was somewhat self-appointed, but had the intention of representing faculty. Even if its tasking were to take it out of some sort of democratic, representative space, it could still act more democratically, if it were democratically minded. However, it seems to see itself as courtiers that must constantly predict what the monarch wants and placate him before he can even express his wishes. You've also expressed this pretty directly many times, that the committee can't actually come up with an independent recommendation, but must go back and forth in back rooms to come up with a recommendation that it then claims as it own, but is actually the image of what it thinks the monarch wants.
ReplyDeleteWhatever the role of the Task Force, I don't think that there is any question that the president does not care about our views. I actually don't believe he is capable of caring about our opinions, because such is his sense of singular wisdom, and such is his often-demonstrated inability to hear and comprehend opposing voices, that in effect he is completely deaf to any but his own ideas and interests. Unfortunately, as this summer has painfully taught us all, the president of a Georgia university has an obscene amount of power and can cause destruction and chaos at his whim.
ReplyDeleteIf there is a silver lining to all of this, it is the anger and disgust that is being expressed on this blog and that I have heard from faculty around campus. The president has clearly won this battle, but I'm not at all sure that he has won the war. And I have a feeling that deep down he is not sure about that either.
I'll stick my neck out a bit, dissent from the comments above, and thank the committee for its otherwise thankless work.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the anger expressed above would be more properly directed towards the actual source of disenfranchisement, rather than toward a committee whose purpose, as has been clear from the outset, is narrowly confined to the administrative tasks of splitting COAS. The committee has acted admirably in soliciting faculty input through various channels and incorporating that input into its recommendations and other communications, especially given the exceptionally difficult time, space, and political constraints under which it has been operating.
Should more planning and forethought have gone into the decision to split COAS in the first place, particularly regarding budgetary concerns? Absolutely. Did Dean Kieh's excellent service deserve better consideration than was given? Without question. Once the decision had been made to remove him, should he have been treated equally with his peers regarding traditional Dean's severance packages? Undeniably so. Do we have legitimate grounds for concern about the substance and style of the administration's leadership? I believe we do. Yet these questions are of a different order than questions of where we all will sit and how we will get paid, questions that would not have answers without this committee's work. As I ponder how best to respond to the former questions, I'm thankful to this committee for its work in crafting workable, if imperfect, proposals to address the latter.
I am glad to hear a different view/voice. For a while it was beginning to sound like the Faculty is becoming the party of “No!”
ReplyDeleteHow silly to make a soundb-bite political statement to thoughtful, caring posts. I am referring to the strange comment above that the "Faculty is becoming the party of 'No!'" How sad that someone must take an important discussion and reduce it to the petty politics I thought the blog was here to avoid.
ReplyDeleteAs for the issue of the important, thankless work of the committee--I don't think you'll find anyone who disagrees with that sentiment.I wonder, however, why the members of this committee believe they shouldn't question the tasks they are doing? Why should they follow blindly the wishes of the President? As faculty members, it seems to me their responsibility is to represent their colleagues, especially when they reassured us that they would. When did they stop being faculty? I also thought education was about questioning. UWG is still an educational institution, isn't it?