Faculty Seek to Unravel Knotted Bureaucracy

After being a regular researcher at the British Museum for decades, former Columbia English professor David Kastan was unexpectedly turned away one summer.

The reason behind the Kastan’s rejection can be traced back to a decision made in a boardroom over 3000 miles away at Columbia University. In an effort to standardize ID card designations, the University had recently switched Kastan and his colleagues from “officers” to “employees”—a title that didn’t make the cut for admission into the museum’s collection of libraries.

This example of an administrative decision that overlooked potential ill effects for professors is not unique at Columbia. The winding maze of committees and offices of Columbia’s bureaucracy is a common complaint among faculty members, and has historically made professors suspicious of how administrators consider their input and make decisions.

But things could soon change. An official review process—kicked off last spring to remedy this conflict between academic faculty and their administrators—looks to upend this long-standing attitude of cynicism. As the University balances expansion efforts with strained resources, the question of faculty representation becomes more important. If successful, the review will demystify the bureaucracy and enhance the ability of professors to voice their interests through governance committees.

“This has been brewing for a while,” said professor Cathy Popkin, chair of Columbia’s Slavic languages department and an active player in governance. “It’s not so much because there’s antagonism between faculty and administration, or faculty feels it’s being spat on. It’s mostly frustration erupting over structural and cultural constraints.”

As an umbrella structure that oversees six schools, 29 departments, and about 650 professors, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences holds a sixth of the University’s endowment. Charged by University administration with its own budget, curriculum, and hiring responsibilities, FAS occupies a complicated space within the larger university, and its history brims with accounts of attempts to creature structure and streamline University operations.

As governance committees—comprised of members of FAS, experts from outside the University, and Columbia administrators—address this challenge in their review, they confront the binds of the past, a culture of disengagement, and the pressures of a crippled economy.

Too Many Committees, Not Enough Interest

Katharina Volk sits upright in her Hamilton Hall office, a street map of ancient Rome hanging on the wall behind her. After a few months of her leading the Executive Committee of the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences—perhaps the most authoritative body in FAS—Volk’s first impressions are revealing.

“Everything seems totally chaotic here,” she said of the Faculty’s knotted internal structure. She then discussed attempts to consolidate, stressing the need for a “clearer sense of process,” and claiming that professors “have no idea which institutions exist” for airing their feedback.

The need for repairs has disenchanted many faculty members. While some say that professors simply cannot devote sufficient time to governance, others argue that the structures misuse professors’ time.
“It has to do with being in New York. Life is not 100-percent focused on the University,” said David Helfand, chair of the astronomy department.

Economics chair Janet Currie agreed. “I don’t think the faculty are apathetic at all. I think they’re cynical in the way that the administration takes their input,” she said, referring to the slew of committees available to interested professors. “They’d rather spend their time on research if governance is a waste of time.”

With a few exceptions, many chairs—who must attend meetings with FAS administrators—said they lack the knowledge and experience to speak on governance when contacted by Spectator. Interviews suggested a dichotomy between a hyperactive group of 50 or 75 professors, with the rest of the faculty mostly removed from the process.

“It’s a martyr complex, the idea that someone needs to run the place,” said Richard Bulliet, history professor and past director of the Middle East Institute at the School of International and Public Affairs. While many professors complain about governance among colleagues, he said, their “grumbling hasn’t coalesced into a concerted effort to do anything about it.”

An important part of the review is streamlining methods of communication between faculty and bureaucracy. Because faculty members frequently form committees to address administrative needs as they arise, each group runs the risk of overlapping in task and workload. Taken together, these committees weave a vast and complex network, forming hierarchies that produce redundancies.

“The faculty who have been involved for a long time largely agree that our current ... system relegates academic planning to a secondary role rather than a primary role, and leaves the faculty out of decision-making,” Helfand said.

“Historically, Columbia has all these different pieces that don’t have any formal structure for communicating with each other, and that kind of communication becomes necessary now that there’s a unified Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” Popkin said of her experience on faculty governance committees.
As Popkin notes, the conflicts are rooted in history. Peering back at the past, the review could signal a less muddled future for the University now entangled in its own red tape.

A Sudden Reawakening

Recent events—from the economic downturn to Columbia’s plan to build a new campus in Manhattanville—have led to a surge faculty engagement in committees. At last, professors may have the power to reverse the old ways of bureaucratic confusion.

Governance committees have been acting with urgency in the last few months. As professors learn how the Manhattanville expansion and financial crisis will affect them, they now actively pursue this avenue to engage in administrative decisions and they follow the subjects addressed by the review more attentively.

Meanwhile, the office of Nicholas Dirks, Vice President for Arts and Sciences and ex officio member of every governance committee, is aiming to make better use of lines for hearing out faculty anxieties. The Faculty Budget Group, a governance committee assigned to perform routine rundowns of the FAS budget, has started meeting with Dirks more frequently, accessing more information, and relaying the concerns of other committees to him.

“We can work together to find new ways to cut costs and increase revenues. We must collectively consider and then enact new measures,” Dirks wrote in a letter to the faculty in December.

The Faculty Budget Group faces startling cuts to the Faculty’s budget. In addition to delayed faculty recruiting, low salary growth, and a plunge in graduate fellowships, “various co-curricular activities” and “valuable, but not essential programs” will require trimming, professor and former ECFAS chair Robert Jervis explained.

Dirks reinforced his resolve in an interview. “Ultimately, the idea is to make people realize that the faculty committees do do important work, and that more people should volunteer to be involved,” he said. “It has to be a broader group.”

The budget has long been under the watchful eyes of the faculty, but the current tension over it is, according to some, unprecedented. “In good times, most people don’t have to care about differential tax rates,” Helfand said.

Despite this renewed interest in nitty-gritty financial details, those familiar with governance committees predict few real changes in the structure of budgetary committees since the review was not created with refinance as its focus.

“The fundamental issue is the radical decentralization of the budget,” Helfand said. “I don’t expect the outcome of the review to be a change of the budget system.

Learning the ABCs of the Arts and Sciences

In the eyes of Columbia’s central administration, the Faculty of Arts and Science is a “unit,” or sector that receives a portion of the University endowment while funding itself mostly off its own income from tuition.

Scattered across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, the academic departments feed into four schools: the School of General Studies, School of Continuing Education, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Columbia College. Additionally, SIPA and the School of the Arts fall under the Faculty’s jurisdiction.

Like in a small country, the central administration then taxes all its units—which include the Faculty, Business School, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and School of Law—to pay for facilities used by the entire University.

In a crippled economic climate, the FAS flow of finances becomes more important. Dirks regulates the FAS budget with the Faculty Budget Group, and chooses how to spend student tuition money. The funds then funnel money to individual schools and departments, with Dirks delegating the finer budget work to deans and department chairs.

But this process is the latest in a history of attempts to streamline FAS budget oversight, after decades of changing the channels of funding distribution. Over the years, budget distribution became more centralized, but not necessarily simpler.

The smorgasbord of committees, faculty critics say, relies on inner-circle jargon and is confusing even for those deeply involved. For example, the governance committee for academic review must contain representatives of SIPA and School of the Arts, and the Faculty Development Committee must always hold six tenured faculty members.

Still, some professors recognize ECFAS’s ability to relay the faculty voice effectively.

“When I was involved in ECFAS, I was quite amazed by how non-parochial its members were,” said Don Hood, psychology professor and former head of FAS.

Though never a member of ECFAS, Currie agreed. “People’s experiences are shaped by the department they’re in, but they do the best job representing the constituency they’re supposed to represent,” she said.

Under Dirks, the Faculty is growing rapidly, so much so that University President Lee Bollinger has publicly commended its progress.

“Nick has grown into this job in a way that makes it possible for Arts and Sciences to assume a kind of role in the University that I and many, many others want to see,” Bollinger told Spectator last May. “It’s extremely important that that office take on a larger role, and I think Nick is steadily moving in that direction.”

The Arts and Sciences, Modified Just Slightly

Although the review’s outcome remains uncertain, some of its subjects could soon be added to FAS’s agenda.

If faculty-administration communication improves, what Volk describes as “byzantine” obstacles might finally come to an end, especially with respect to Columbia University Facilities.

“There is the question of what departments will move to Manhattanville, and if they do move, what will happen to the space that is currently in SIPA,” Currie said of how University-wide matters trickle down quickly to impact individual departments.

Along a common thread of finance, Volk lamented the fact that administrators did not guarantee professors computers until last year. “Sometimes it goes beyond what is acceptable,” she said.

For tangible modifications, ECFAS has considered a model in which a body of professors filters nearly every major decision both on the University and individual school levels. This joins potentially disparate authorities in a singular informed and influential body.

Some professors suggest that the future may bring fewer anecdotes of aggravating inefficiency. For instance, Bulliet recounted a quarrel with the central University administration about intellectual property, in which the administration effectively polled faculty opinion in a representative and expansive manner.

“A number of different views from the faculty were brought together in a good policy statement,” he said. “This is an example of the administration requesting faculty input rather than the faculty listening on matters where the faculty were directly concerned.”

The review could strengthen the power of the faculty to sway University initiatives normally out of their purview, such as the invitation of a speaker like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yet concerns about transparency still encourage skepticism among some faculty. “It’s very rare that chairs go to departments and tell their professors what’s going on,” Popkin said. The solution seems to be somewhat split—while some want to pare down the bureaucracy, others want to tag on more committees, which could potentially complicate things.

As Hood said, “Universities are very good at adding committees and adding to structures, but terrible at removing from committees and removing from structures.”

Alexa Davis and Joy Resmovits contributed to the reporting of this article.

Scott Levi can be reached at scott.levi@columbiaspectator.com.