"Seems like the committee is pretty far advanced in its deliberations and in the construction of a draft plan to give to Dr. Sethna. Is my impression of this correct?"
- That's sort of right. We plan to make our recommendation this week on the division of the colleges and on which departments go in which colleges.
That's just the first step, though. The bulk of the actual work comes after we know who goes where. Budgets, staffing, scheduling processes - all the details that we don't think of much but ensure that we get paid, receive our meager travel budgets and operating funds, have staff support, etc. - has to be worked on. We've started gnawing on them, but that stuff will take a lot of time.
"Many faculty are still away; none of us is under contract yet."
- Actually, about 75% of tenured and tenure-track COAS faculty were on contract this summer, so most people have been around.
- We've had pretty good participation so far. We've had open meetings for faculty and for staff in which good questions were raised. We met with the COAS chairs, and twice with the arts chairs.
- Besides, very few people are out of reach of the internet these days. This blog has gotten a good flow of comments, and we've also heard from people by email and face-to-face. We've heard a variety of thoughts on both big issues and implementation details.
This situation makes me uncomfortable, still. There are some 200 of us, right? By my count, on this blog, there have been fewer than fifty responses, some of them not to the discussion of the constitution of the colleges at all -- which is correct and to be expected, but the point is -- not to the constitution of the colleges or this plan. The non-blog responses you're reporting -- I have no idea how many, from what constituencies, or what they've said.
ReplyDeleteThe point is, for me, that the _appearance_ is of minimal participation by a large number of faculty. The _appearance_ is that we're being rushed into something without full and considered participation.
This looks a lot like we're replicating a process to which some people strongly objected earlier this summer: that is, a process that isn't adequately and transparently inclusive.
I also think that a 75% contract rate for summer employees is a little opaque. I taught summer IV and was off campus for all but the last three weeks. One of my colleagues taught earlier and hasn't been on campus since. To have a summer contract is not necessarily to be "present" on campus in the same way it is to be "present" during the regular semester.
I know you and the committee are operating in good faith -- that's not my beef. My thought is that we want to appear in all ways NOT to be replicating a process that has been demoralizing for a lot of faculty. And my thinking is that some of the demoralizing factors in that decision are clustered around being silenced in important decisions made too quickly while people were otherwise distracted or absent. So my thinking is we slow down, let people settle into the semester, and then have a general meeting, virtual or otherwise.
If I remember correctly, in responding to one of the posters who asked about participation, you said there would be plenty of meetings after the semester started. Will those then only be meetings about the details?
Why CAN'T we hold off until after August 12th? Why does it have to be next week? Is there something I'm missing?
Speaking of budgets, be sure you take into account computer rotations for faculty and staff. The funding for this usually comes directly from the dean's office and may not show up as a line item for the individual parts of A&S.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the post above in all but one detail. I regret to say that I no longer am convinced that the committee is acting in good faith, although I like and respect people on it. If it is, why are we not taking a vote on the proposal? Why is anecdotal evidence siphoned through one person being accepted as "the way things are"? Why was there never another meeting after that last A&S meeting? At that time this "propose a plan for dismantling the college" was represented as a "stall everything until we see what happens with Dr. Sethna's job search" plan -- something I hated from the beginning, but it carried, it seemed. Then it simply went into action with no more discussion of the general A&S faculty, no follow-up meeting, nothing. This to me is not operating in good faith or maybe it would be fairer to say that certain people too quickly took on (as far as I am concerned) some kind of idea that they represented us as a whole when they spoke. Sorry, but we can't just shut up all the time in the interest of not offending anyone if we believe that a travesty of shared governance is in the making. And sorry if people don't like me posting the "let's stall things" plan to the blog where people might see it whom you think ought not see it, but it IS what happened. The committee is problematically, to my mind, meeting with some select groups who they then simply represent in their proposal as if because that small group wants it, it's a must, and the committee is using poor evidence to say there's been wide participation. We all know how many people showed up to those open meetings -- some of us were there. If that's wide participation, then we must have a college of about 20. The number of blog entries doesn't say anything about the number of participants. Anonymous could be the same person over and over. It seems to me that everything about this was misrepresented in the A&S meeting we had. I want to get along with people in the college. I don't want Dr. Sethna's plan of divide and conquer to work, but it is working because a very, very small committee is desperately pushing the timing on a proposal to dismantle our college and seems absolutely deaf to any position other than Dr. Sethna's. This does not a committee-representative-of-faculty make!
ReplyDelete