I went to the 40th annual Messiah Sing-In at Lincoln Center tonight - I'd forgotten how hard Handel is to sing! Even when the words are "his yoke is easy and his burthen is light," the voices are like swimmers doing some busy bobbing stroke in a long swimming pool, each in their own lane. We were in the top back so the expected sense of getting lost in a loud crowd didn't quite happen... But I still like the idea of it all, and the intro reminiscing about the creation of the "sing-in" in the age of the "sit-in," the "teach-in" and the "love-in" was sort of cool.
But the point today at which I was ready to cast off the yoke was this morning, when a process my fellow faculty senators and I had come up with to allow faculty participation in the choice of a new dean seemed to be turning into a nightmare of bitterness and recrimination... Not among us four senators, thank goodness, but we still thought that a meeting we were running this afternoon would be a big scapegoating bonanza with everyone else turning on us. And this just a week after we received a volley of e-mails thanking us for creating a rare moment for faculty participation!
I suppose I should back up a bit. Our university has a reputation for being progressive, but this doesn't mean we're very democratic. At the faculty senate, where representatives of the several divisions meet to discuss issues of common concern, we noticed last month that faculty seemed to have no voice in the selection and reappointment of deans - something some divisions at least had once had. So we passed a resolution demanding a role. For us Lang representatives, the issue was more than theoretical: our dean comes to the end of his term in June, and has indicated informally that he will not be staying on. And yet no public announcement was made, so no decisions about composing a search committee or whatever were made or even discussed. By the time the faculty senate passed its motion in mid-November, it was already too late to hope for a national search, and one member of our faculty had been quietly taking people to lunch and letting on that it seemed he was soon to be appointed interrim dean, and what did we think of it... He would make a good dean, but this was no way for him to be appointed.
So we senators proposed a process (which I borrowed from a similar case at another division a few years ago), where (i) all faculty eligible to vote in faculty meetings would be sent a list of all faculty eligible to be dean in terms of seniority and rank; (ii) faculty could nominate people from this list; (iii) those nominated would have the option of running or withdrawing their names; those interested in standing for election would distribute a vision statement; (iv) there'd be an open meeting for the faculty to consider the needs of the college and the various vision statements [that's today's meeting]; and (v) after an electronic vote, the top three names would be sent to the university president (unranked). We ran this proposed process by the president, the provost, the Lang council of chairs and general faculty meetings, and it was approved by all. Then we had exactly two weeks for the whole process to happen - crazy, but the late start was not our fault - and we acted with amazing speed and integrity, not to mention before anyone else even started thinking about this.
Sooooo the list of eligible candidates went out (about twenty). Thirteen were nominated (including yours truly). And then ... twelve of these (including yours truly) declined the nomination for various reasons, and the thirteenth - our able faculty friend - produced the only vision statement. It was a very good vision statement, but now what were we to do? The process we'd designed hadn't envisaged this outcome, and in a sense had become moot: if our purpose was to construct a list of up to three names of faculty members who were nominated and willing to serve, we had succeeded.
Which left, however, today's meeting. And this morning, as everyone weighed in on what should or should not happen at the meeting, we senators were all ready to give up even this gentle involvement in politics forever! The irony, I suppose, is that things seemed to be getting so wildly out of hand because we didn't really need the meeting for our process, so people thought of a hundred other things a meeting would be good for or, if run the wrong way, would be bad for. All sorts of people weighed in on what our agenda should be, who should be invited, if the dean should be present, if there should be a vote, etc., etc. Meanwhile others were insinuating that we had rigged the whole process in order to arrive at this result, or, to the contrary, that we were incompetent for not having forseen this result. We were giving our colleague too strong a mandate, said some; too weak or ambiguous a one, said others... On and on and on, all through yesterday and into this morning - and remember that there are four of us senators, so everything had to be sent back and forth between us. And it's the last week of classes, and we all had classes today, meetings with students, etc.!
Well anyway, amazingly, we survived. More than that, it was a really good meeting! And now everyone is clapping us on the back again for designing such a good process. What happened was simply this: we had a three-point agenda and said so. The dean came for the first, and explained the demands of the deanship - very interesting. Then the likely next dean took questions on his vision - and convinced the remaining doubters that he's up to the job. Finally, we decided whether or not we still needed a vote of some kind, and passed a resolution recommending our colleague for a three-year term.
In relief, like prisoners who've escaped execution, we senators fled to a bar for a drink and rubbed our eyes. Could the meeting from hell have actually turned out to be an important moment of faculty governance? In one sense we're just where we would presumably have been without the process - same single candidate likely to be the next dean. But in other senses, everything's different. The nomination process showed both that there are many able and that there are few willing to take up the thankless position of acting dean, and today's meeting provided an endorsement of our best bet. And by fashioning a vision statement he's already begun a relationship of accountability to the faculty which we've never had with past deans.
The best thing might actually just have been the drama of it. For today's meeting, for the first time ever (or in a long time), was run by the faculty: we senators sat at a long table, and invited the dean to join us for a report, and then he left the room; then we invited the candidate to join us and he then left the room; finally, we presided over a discussion concerning the faculty's views on the deanship. Isn't that what faculty governance looks like?
What felt best was knowing that we had, in the end, done our job: designing a good democratic process.
In any case: whew. Academic politics can be like a refiner's fire!
