Task force redesigns faculty governance

The task force's goal, said co-chair John Savage said, was not merely to reduce the size of faculty governance or streamline it. The committee sought to give the faculty a real voice, to make it an effective partner in better University decision-making, and to focus faculty efforts on matters appropriate to the faculty.

by Mark Nickel

It’s an organizational fact of life that Dilbert would recognize. When issues arise, so do new committees – dozens of them, each with its own membership, leadership, meetings, reports and demands on people’s time. When issues change or disappear, the committees press on, proliferate and pile up like cordwood.

It happens to big corporations and small nonprofit groups alike. It even happens to the Brown faculty, which currently has 44 faculty committees that require the time and attention of 237 members – nearly half the faculty.

“We on the FEC sit with the chairs of every faculty committee to review reports before they are presented,” said John Savage, professor of computer science and past chair of the Faculty Executive Committee. “We always take the opportunity to ask, ‘Are you happy with the function of your committee?’ and the message we always get is that faculty have been very discouraged with the way their committees work, with the influence they have, and with the amount of work they require.”

That is about to change. With the encouragement of President Simmons, who observed to the FEC that high-level faculty advice would be a good thing to have, Savage and Nancy Armstrong, professor and chair of English, led a task force on faculty governance.

In a dozen meetings since early May, the task force researched and redesigned faculty governance from the ground up. The new structure, which Savage outlined at the Sept. 3 faculty meeting, replaces the 44 committees with seven new and five continuing committees plus nine new advisory boards and reduces the governance workforce from 237 to between 110 and 115.

The goal, Savage said, was not merely to reduce the size of faculty governance or streamline it. The committee sought to give the faculty a real voice, to make it an effective partner in better University decision-making, and to focus faculty efforts on matters appropriate to the faculty.

“We wanted to give to the faculty responsibility for those things that are primarily faculty issues and we wanted to give the administration responsibility for administrative issues,” Savage said. “Where there was a need for shared governance, we implemented that as well.”

The Advisory Committee on University Planning (ACUP), one of Savage’s “big ticket” items, is a case in point. At other universities, ACUP would be an administrative committee of the provost, with real authority to debate and determine priorities, Savage said. At Brown, it has been an open forum, more conducive to PowerPoint presentations than to real decision-making. Under the proposed governance structure, a University Resources Committee will replace ACUP. The URC will meet in private to allow full and frank discussion and will be chaired by the provost.

“The thinking is that if this really isn’t the provost’s committee – as it was not as ACUP – then the real business of figuring out the budget was not going to be done there, which is what happened,” Armstrong said. “There were two conversations. … The faculty found they were putting their heart and soul into it but weren’t really part of the final decision-making in the sense that they will be now.”

The University Curriculum Committee, another “big ticket” item, will replace the College Curriculum Council and portions of the Graduate Council, giving the faculty a more holistic avenue of contact with curricular issues, its major responsibility.

“We’ve heard from faculty who worry that in a single curriculum committee, undergraduate issues will surely overshadow graduate issues and we’ve heard from an equal number of faculty that graduate issues will overshadow undergraduate,” Armstrong said. “That’s why we set up two subcommittees – one chaired by the dean of the College, the other by the dean of the Graduate School. Every [picayune] decision won’t come before the UCC as it does now with the CCC. We’re not losing anything; we’re trying to preserve the specialized nature of each school’s issues. But finally we will have a forum where the curriculum is considered as a whole thing.”

In areas where responsibilities are shared between administration and the faculty, the proposed governance structure creates advisory boards rather than faculty committees, bringing faculty and administrators to the table as coequals. “Today, we have an affirmative action monitoring committee,” Savage said. That committee has 11 members, and they spend almost all their time examining search materials – interim pools, lists of finalists. It’s an enormously time-consuming activity and it’s not creative.

“It’s understood that if you want to meet diversity needs, you have to be proactive. You’ve got to find people who are available, and you need to find ways to attract them to Brown,” Savage continued. “That function is not assigned to anyone now, but it will be assigned to the Diversity Advisory Board. The so-called policing function – making sure departments are following procedures, that ads are run in the right places – is an administrative duty that will be done by an associate dean of the faculty.”

The task force has also proposed that the Creative Arts Council, an umbrella group designed to encourage the growth and enrichment of the arts on campus, become an independent academic center rather than a creature of the faculty.

“Right now, it’s a prime example of a faculty committee performing an administrative role,” Savage said.

“It raises money, and in every significant way, it’s a de facto center,” Armstrong said. “It should become one, adopt bylaws, and abide by the rules in the administration handbook. It would be able to work much more smoothly with the Development Office that way.”

Armstrong said she and other chairs in the humanities have developed a proposal for a humanities center. That proposal, she said, may be one of the first to seek approval through the Academic Priorities Committee under the new governance structure.

Has there been much reaction to the governance proposals?

“I have to believe that the [task force] is representative of the community here,” Armstrong said. “There’s nothing that has divided us; we’ve worked through to a resolution on every single issue. [Faculty members] may argue for one side or the other, but in the end most of them will see that their interests are represented well in this structure.”

When might the new governance structure be approved and in place?

“Our expectation is that we will have drafted the necessary language for the faculty rules and regulations by the end of this month, assuming there has been adequate discussion,” Savage said.

“We need to know whether this is in the ballpark before we draft it in prose. We’d like to have final faculty approval on Election Day [the November faculty meeting], but we need to feel that it’s been fairly aired by that time,” Armstrong said. “These ideas are clearly drafts. Nobody’s going to try to push the proposal through, but we do think that we need to get on with the business of making these things happen. We’d like most of this to be in place for the second semester.”