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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (78856)	3/1/2003 9:45:56 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

My impression is that much depends on the chairman. It's my impression that academic governance systems, when it comes to tenure decisions vary a great deal. Some systems are like the ones you paint, that the chair of the department is the center of decision making; others its centered in review committees. Many have, as I know you know, many layers beyond the department which can serve in either direction--to reinforce the group think or open it up to challenge. Departments with a good deal of central control in the chair and with one who is politically adept can exercise the kind of control you envision. But that's hardly always the case. My own institution moved, over the course of twenty years, from a system like the one you describe, with an exception or two, to one in which all the department faculty members (tenured and untenured) elected chairs; in which there were inordinately high levels of cooperative governance; and in which there were only two levels of review--department and university--committee of faculty and administrators, former outnumbering latter. There were a significant number of reversals at that level going both ways. A structure like this can be even more group-think than your top down metaphor; but with incoming faculty more likely to have different agendas and having significant amounts of internal clout, it rarely worked that way. At least to the degree its operations were visible. Much of this, as you may know, is, while not exactly secretive, is more in the aura of things than in the verbal messages. I'm not trying to argue that faculties are wellsprings of innovations. Several of us tried. unsuccessfully, to get enough curricular changes put in place in a top down fashion. So I would not argue that. But, simultaneously, a goodly number of changes were percolating up from the trenches that aggragated in to large changes over the course of ten years. Not certain any of this has anything to do with Ken's notions about professionals. But it's interesting, in an abstract kind of way. I'm certain you and I are the only ones who find it so. On your father as an academic. My experience at large, research driven institutions and smaller, more intense teaching focused institutions, suggests those are actually such different places that they are almost of different genres. I think your observations are more likely to apply in the larger, research places.