Over the many years in which I have blogged about university life it has never been my practice to provide links to websites or to other bloggers, but I shall make an exception this week for Nick Falvo’s recent piece on university governance, and more specifically on the challenges faced by Boards of Governors. You can find it here.
While there is no shortage of opinion on this topic, far too many writers have vested interests in some particular position, which they seek to promote, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes shamelessly. If Mr. Falvo has a vested interest, I can’t find it. His views seem spot on, summing up the situation both accurately and succinctly. I recommend it highly.
University governance is also a topic close to my own heart, and one which I have been pondering for a very long time. On June 30th this year I will have completed 35 years as a full-time academic, and 22 of those have been spent in some administrative capacity, as a chair, a director, or a dean, at three quite different universities. In addition, I have been elected twice to a University Senate (University of Victoria) and once to a Board of Governors (Queen’s), in both instances representing faculty members, and I am currently in my ninth year of an ex officio appointment to Carleton’s Senate. I should also mention that, in another life, I was a student representative on a Carleton department board in the very first year of what was then called the New University Government (NUG) … now CASG. So, there are not too many aspects of this subject that I have not experienced at first hand, and I shall put forward some of my thoughts in a series of musings, beginning this week.
The question of how universities are managed, or to put it more bluntly, where authority resides, is as old as the institution of the university, and presumably will forever be a “work in progress”. And rightly so. Times change, and universities must adapt accordingly, although certain principles must remain paramount. The current model employed by most if not all universities in Canada is to have two parallel governance streams. On academic matters, the Senate is supreme; and on administrative matters, the Board. And to ensure some sort of dialogue or communication between the two, most Senates have seats reserved for members of the Board, and vice versa, ensuring some overlap.
The thinking here is that academic matters (programs, curriculum, regulations governing degrees, and so on) are best left to those who must deal with them on a regular basis, namely faculty and students, and in most instances a majority of the voting members belong to these two groups. At Carleton, for example, there are 40 seats for faculty members, and 13 for student members, with specific allocations of seats to the various Faculties, including Arts and Social Sciences, reflecting their comparative sizes.
While Senate is the highest authority on academic matters, its work is shaped by, and indeed depends on, a sub-structure that includes unit-level Boards, Faculty Boards, and a plethora of Senate committees. All curriculum proposals must begin at the unit level, and then work their way upwards, whether it is adding a new course, introducing a prerequisite, or simply changing a Calendar description. This usually works well to ensure that no program or other matter of an “academic” nature can be imposed unilaterally on an unwilling professoriate. New ideas require a champion, and then must acquire support and build a consensus at various levels before they come to the Senate for final approval. Indeed, I can recall a university president who was personally very keen to introduce a program in sports management, but the idea died because no unit or Faculty was willing to support the notion and move it forward. And in my view, that is precisely how it should be. The imposition of academic programming from the top down is a sure-fire recipe for disaster.
Whether or not a Senate works effectively depends on a lot of factors, and these include the “culture” of the particular institution and the “chemistry” of the particular group of senators. At the University of Victoria, for example, we used to have some very fierce debates, which meant that the meetings were never dull. Indeed, on occasion they resembled the kind of raucous partisanship we associate with Question Period in the House of Commons. And it probably helped that the Senate met on Wednesday evening at 7:30, allowing certain members a couple of hours to “prepare” beforehand in the Faculty Club bar. By contrast, Carleton’s Senate meets at 2:00 on Friday afternoon, and gripping debates are rather rare. Whether that is a function of the day and time, or simply the fact that the system works … in the sense that controversial maters are ironed out at a lower level … is not for me to speculate. Our Senate is sedate, well managed, and certainly efficient, but I shall confess that there are times when I miss the passionate rhetoric of a good verbal dust up. And a bit of humour now and then would certainly not be amiss, although our Provost certainly tries his best in that regard.
If there is one place where the Carleton Senate can perhaps be found wanting, it is in its composition. For example, some directors of Schools have ex officio membership of Senate, and some do not … and all the “’Schools” in FASS are in the latter category. When I asked about this anomaly some years ago, I was told that it was because some “Schools” have independent Faculty Boards, for reasons now lost in the mists of history, and consequently the director needs to be present to represent that Board’s interests. But then the question must be posed, why do some Schools continue to have separate Faculty Boards and some do not? On the face of things, it seems to me that current practice is discriminatory, and needs to be addressed.
And another issue which requires reconsideration is the absence of any voice at Senate for our part-time faculty members. “Contract Instructors”, as they are called at Carleton, currently teach something like 25% of our credit courses, and probably a much higher percentage of actual students, given that they are responsible for delivering many of the large first-year classes. They certainly have an inherent interest in the deliberations of Senate, and many also have considerable expertise in the issues being considered. I am willing to believe that when Carleton’s Senate was established, most Contract Instructors held full-time employment in government or industry, and consequently had little time or inclination for participation in university governance. But those days are long gone!
[to be continued]