Eric Anctil (2008), quotes the Kellogg Commission on the importance of open communication in the viability of the future of higher education institutions: “Strong institutional identification—reinforced by clear and decisive leadership, effective external relations, and a rich campus community—extends beyond the organization and positively affects larger communities of influence. Further, strong institutional identification extends the organization beyond being a near inscrutable entity governed by its own mysterious sense of self.” (Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Institutions 1999 p.200). Critical to this openness is a larger two way dialogue with its community. This should reinforce the college’s Academic Plan which in turn should be the essence of what is communicated in the marketing plan (Anctil 2008).
Likewise, the Open University must also have a system of Open Governance—in other words the governance bodies and administration work together in a positive trustful relationship which is aimed towards meeting the goals of the institution and the needs of its learners. Each should work towards establishing systems which are designed to support and further efforts as opposed to approval systems. A body which has only approval function is simply an obstruction. Likewise a system which works inversely from faculty expertise is also destructive. Governance and administration share the responsibility of helping individual faculty to thrive. When systems are designed in opposition and to establish a culture of “checks and balances,” both governance and administration implement and negotiate structures and practices which create obstacles to ‘impede’ the opposition; however, in doing so, they also create obstacles for themselves.
As Ronald Ehrenberg (2000) notes, shared governance as we currently practice it not only slows down the development and evolution of the college (the antithesis of agility), but the delays end up costing the institution revenue. Unfortunately, at the end of the line, it is the students who end up paying in the form of higher tuition. Thus, our practice of shared governance actually hurts students when a system of open governance would actually result in a benefit to students. Imagine a program which requires multiple layers of approval. A faculty design committee works on its own. It then walks it through the process, each body getting larger in scope. Suddenly, it gets to one level where a substantive change needs to be made. As it is substantive, it must now return to the beginning of the process which results in missing the target for a given academic year. A delay which pushes the launching of the program off by a year takes away one year of revenues which the institution could use to relieve budgetary pressures to help keep tuition lower (say nothing of endangering a curriculum and faculty work in making it a year older). As most institutions also use enrollments to determine faculty lines, it actually has the effect of limiting the hiring of new faculty. In an open governance system, each level would contribute to better the program through its specific function (which could be run synchronously). Imagine the same program if there were a development committee which could help shape the curriculum at the starting point; a resource committee which helped to develop the business model for the programs; a staffing committee which could help forecast the needs; etc. Now imagine that these committees were collaborative and respected one another so that they could fit their work together through a design committee as opposed to a development team having to create the entirety and walk it through the process. Rather than a hierarchical cone of approval, where the input voice gets larger, invert the practice to a pyramid where multiple individuals have a voice at the outset with the process getting narrower as it moves forward.
One of the major ways that illustrates this is the processes used on many campuses for new programs. The ideal system would be a pyramid where, as the program moves through the system, the expertise becomes more focused and the group becomes smaller. The mundane and process issues should be handled early on establishing the framework within which the academic system can be developed. In most instances, however, the system is shaped like a cone wherein the idea moves up into areas with less and less knowledge of the academics and discipline, but with more voices and possible sources of objection. Since the system moves away from expertise, it becomes clear that it is strictly an approval, or sometimes territorial, process as opposed to a support process to help the faculty who are developing the program.
There is also a great (and wonderful) opportunity to be had in modifying the shape and nature of the university, and that is in the opportunity to reshape knowledge itself. That reshaping can occur both in the definition and recognition of disciplines as well as in the means of conveyance, method, etc. As Roland Barthes (1986) notes: “the institution directly determines the nature of human knowledge, imposing its mode of division and of classification, just as language, by its ‘obligatory rubrics’ (and not only its exclusions), compels us to think in a certain way.” While we may think there is a certain stability; it can also be assumed that those who held the trivium and quadrivium dear felt the same.
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