Changes are afoot to streamline communication between Columbia faculty and administration, though it’s still unclear what these changes will involve.
In the spring of 2008, the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences initiated a review of faculty governance to reform what many perceived as the muddled line of communication between faculty and administrators. Announced by then-ECFAS chair Robert Friedman, the review process aimed to assess the current structures of faculty governance within the arts and sciences, and make recommendations for improvement.
According to Nicholas Dirks, Vice President for Arts and Sciences and dean of the faculty, recommendations include the reorganization of FAS’s various committees and amendments to the bylaws that structure these committees.
“It is a proposal to change the way committees engage in business, and this office in particular,” he said in a meeting last December.
While no date for the final report has been announced, faculty members anticipate its release in the near future. “The report should be coming out very soon,” said Amber Miller, associate professor of physics and the current chair of ECFAS.
During a December meeting, Dirks stated that changes would be presented to the Committee on the Core Curriculum regarding the faculty governance report will occur around February and March.
“I would hope a draft would be released within the first half of the semester,” said Wayne Proudfoot, a professor of religion. “If not to everybody, at least to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences so they could begin a reasonable discussion of what’s being presented.”
ECFAS AND THE SELF-STUDY PROJECT
FAS has not undergone a comprehensive review of this magnitude since its founding in 1991. Much of what is being scrutinized now are the committees that have been added over time.
“Over the years, a lot of committees have been added to bring attention to different issues,” said Proudfoot, who has been serving as a member of ECFAS since 2009. “We’re now looking at the spreadsheet of committees to see if the system is adequate and if there needs to be reorganization.”
As a standing committee within the larger FAS, the membership of ECFAS is uniquely democratic. The committee consists of 12 faculty members. Nine members are tenured, with three each from the divisions of humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The remaining three are untenured faculty members. Though initially nominated by a committee, members are ultimately elected to their posts by the faculty.
“As the only elected committee, ECFAS represents the choice of the faculty for who will speak to the central administration,” explained Robert Jervis, political science departmental chair and current ECFAS member.
All other committees within FAS are based on appointment, either from a department or by the vice president in consultation with various groups. Due to its relative impartiality, ECFAS seemed a logical choice by many at the time to spearhead the governance review.
REPORT INHERITED BY THE ACADEMIC REVIEW COMMITTEE
The next piece of the puzzle was to determine who would perform the review and how. It was finally decided that the process would mimic that used by the Academic Review Committee to review departments. In a typical ARC-style review, a department performs a self-study assessing the quality of its own program, and then submits this study to the ARC for its independent review and recommendation.
“When we were looking for a place to review faculty governance, the ARC had many mechanisms already in place,” Jervis said. “We thought, ‘rather than invent the wheel, let’s just use that.’”
The decision was a questionable one for some of the faculty, who wondered whether a process designed to assess individual departments was the right one to gauge an administrative body. FAS oversees 29 departments, the faculties of six schools, including Columbia College, the School of General Studies, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of the Arts, the School of International and Public Affairs, and the School of Continuing Education, as well as numerous institutes and centers.
“Nobody thinks the fit is exact,” Proudfoot said. “But everybody thinks it makes sense.”
According to Jervis, ECFAS carried out its self-study during the 2008 calendar year through extensive consultation with committee members, faculty, administration, and outside experts on faculty governance. Meeting minutes from the Dec. 12, 2008 Arts and Sciences faculty meeting indicate a final report was handed to the ARC in January 2009. “We all hope it’s in the final stages,” Jervis said.
Representatives from ARC would not comment on when the report will be released.
THE VOLUME OF THE FACULTY VOICE
The efforts for governance review came at a divisive time period in Columbia’s history.
Professor Shahid Naeem, chair of the department for ecology, evolution, and environmental biology and former ECFAS member, pointed to events in the fall semester of 2007 that might have triggered a desire among the faculty to have their opinions heard, such as the invitation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to campus, or the change in professor ID card designation from “officers” to “employees.” This modification restricted access to certain library and museum collections outside of Columbia and angered many of the professors involved, she said.
“It is possible there isn’t a governance structure that can handles issues like Ahmadinejad or the hunger strike,” Naeem said. “All these things were going on at the same, and people felt it was time for change.”
Change is exactly what inspired the creation of FAS. As a founding member of the faculty in 1991, Jervis described the “tremendous enthusiasm” that coupled faculty involvement in governance matters in the early 1990s, forcing then-president Michael Sovern out of office, and establishing FAS as a unified body of various faculty members and a forum for interdepartmental communication.
The past two decades have seen a substantial decline in faculty interest and attendance at faculty meetings.
The role of ECFAS has also dwindled with time. Naeem pointed out that because ECFAS only serves in an advisory capacity, the bottom-line decisions remain in the hands of central administration.
“The fact that there are all these committees looks good on paper, but what happens is that none of the committees have the capacity to do anything except advise and it’s up to the administration to take the advice or not,” he said.
Naeem also lamented the format for faculty meetings, which he felt were largely presentational rather than collaborative. “The executive committee [ECFAS] can set the agenda for the faculty meetings and you might think that’s an important thing, but the truth is all the high-level administrators insist that they have to get a chance to address the faculty first,” he said.
In 2007, ECFAS established the Faculty Forum, a procedure by which faculty could assemble to voice their opinions on an issue without the administration being present, if desired. “The structures for calling a faculty forum still exist,” Miller said, but added that time had lapsed since the last one was called.
A TURNING POINT
Many faculty members expressed a desire for a more transparent system of communication in the future, and for some, hope rests with the future of ECFAS.
“To really make the institution work well, you need a more robust faculty governance,” Jervis said, adding that Dirks has been supportive of an ongoing process that Jervis hopes will “reinvigorate” the role of ECFAS in central decision-making.
Anticipating a structure of faculty governance that was “tighter,” Miller said she hoped for a committee restructuring that would generate greater faculty involvement and efficacy. “We have to sit on fewer committees and fewer of them that go nowhere,” she said.
Even so, for the numerous professors not involved in matters of governance, Naeem suggested that faculty apathy remains just as common as faculty involvement.
“My take on faculty governance is that when everything’s working, I think that people really don’t like to or want to be involved in governance. They just want it to work. It would be really nice if we had a wonderfully operating university that didn’t need committees.”
emily.kwong@columbiaspectator.com
Comments
We're looking for comments that are interesting and substantial. If your comments are excessively self-promotional or obnoxious you will be banned from commenting. Consult the comment FAQ and legal terms.