[The post that follows below was originally written for 100 Days @ Western: The Alternative Listening Tour and posted there 4 June, 2015.]
What might university self-governance look like?
In theory this question has a simple answer: university self-governance should look like my institution, Western University. Western possesses all of the mechanisms for self-government and faculty engagement that we have long come to expect at institutions of higher education. It has a university Senate, and a Board of Governors with at least a small handful of members elected from within the ranks of the professoriate and the student body. It has faculty councils and procedures for department and committee meetings that look fairly democratic. And in UWOFA it has a strong and very effective faculty union.
So why, with all of these mechanisms and tools for self-governance in place, does the question with which I have opened this piece seem in practice so difficult to answer? That difficulty resides in the perception, and perhaps at least the partial reality, that those mechanisms and tools are no longer functioning in quite the way that they should. Senate has been widely viewed until quite recently as an echo chamber packed with administrators, a Quietist rubber stamp for administrative decisions. The Board of Governors appears woefully out of touch with the university over which it has a great deal of authority, while faculty councils and department meetings sometimes seem to have devolved into increasingly futile and frustrating exercises featuring “reports” rather than true consultations. And around, above, and beneath it all, there is the pervasive bureaucracy, a technocratic collection of hand-picked committees and quietly powerful administrators who together function as the invisible hand that is really at the controls.
Many of these perceptions are undoubtedly simplistic and unfair, and the recent and very noisy awakening of our Senate to action would seem to indicate that there is yet hope for all of these mechanisms. It also needs to be admitted frankly that if these councils and senates and committees aren’t functioning well it is at least in part because there has been little will among the Governed themselves to put them to full and proper use. Consultations only succeed when the consulted have something to say, and democracy is, after all, built on one hand upon an understanding of what is at stake, and on the other upon a willingness to engage actively with the process. Such engagement has been, perhaps, not much in evidence until quite recently, and it is true, I think, that the vast majority of us have been content to let the rulers rule for some time.
The recent crisis in governance at Western sparked by the revelations about President Chakma’s excessive compensation last year seem to have dramatically changed this state of affairs. In truth, discontent has been quietly building for some time, and a number of incoming Senators (myself included) ran and were elected on an explicitly activist and reform-minded platform before the details of the President’s compensation package were even public. Events however, have overtaken us. While the newly constituted Senate does not meet until September, President Chakma’s 100 Days of Listening have presented a new and potentially productive avenue of approach for reform.
The question remained: how best might we articulate our concerns and ideas in this new context? What, then, should university self-governance look like, when the very structures upon which it is founded have apparently become atrophied and untrustworthy?
One form that it might take is that of a grassroots movement, a group of colleagues working together to compile and communicate the concerns, ideas, and perspectives of a larger constituency of faculty and graduate students seeking a means to make its voice heard. The Arts & Humanities Working Group on Western Renewal is just such a collective. What follows is my own personal perspective on the function and nature of this group.
The Working Group was not “struck” or “called” by anyone. It has no official standing in the university. It belongs in no organizational tree or chart, and answers to no one but the very broad community that it seeks to serve. It was not constituted: rather, it just sort of happened when Dr. Kelly Olson of Classics volunteered to gather together the comments and suggestions of faculty from Arts & Humanities for presentation to President Chakma. It soon became clear that compiling, collating, and organizing this input was going to be a fairly time-consuming and onerous task, and so others volunteered to help. And so a Working Group was born.
The Working Group is currently comprised of 15 members, with representation from every department in the Faculty. The majority of members, all volunteers, are full-time faculty, but there is a graduate student representative, and an open invitation exists to anyone serving in any capacity within Arts & Humanities to join. It seeks input and feedback from tenured and probationary faculty, contract faculty, and students. It has consulted with chairs and the Dean of the Arts & Humanities (and, in fact, the membership of the group includes one department chair and an associate dean), but its purpose is to communicate the perspective of the broader community directly to the President, rather than through the usual chain of administrative command. No one has a veto, and no one has a louder voice than anyone else.
The “Terms of Reference” for the group, such as they are, were not established at the group’s inception in any formal sense: they developed organically as we began the complicated task of making sense of the input we had received from so many varied and diverse sources. They might be summarized as follows:
- To gather, collate, and organize the suggestions, comments, ideas, and concerns of the faculty and graduate students of Arts & Humanities
- To organize this information into “Working Papers” covering five broad (and sometimes overlapping) areas of concern: Governance, Teaching, Interdisciplinary Concerns, Research, and The Place of the Arts & Humanities in the University
- To consult with members of other faculties across campus in order to benefit from their perspectives on these issues, and, where possible, coordinate a response with them
- To communicate to the faculty and graduate students of Arts & Humanities these Working Papers, soliciting feedback from our constituency prior to their presentation
- To meet with President Chakma five times, presenting and elaborating upon the points enumerated in each of these five areas of concern
- To communicate with the faculty and grad students of Arts & Humanities the results of each of these meetings, and any other feedback that we may receive regarding them
- The Working Group is an “open” group, and any faculty member (regardless of status) or graduate student is welcome to attend meetings (generally weekly), join, or assist in any way they see fit
- The Working Group is subdivided into subgroups that have been assigned direct responsibility for each of the five Working Papers, but all members will be consulted about and have input into the final form of these papers.
- There is no set termination date for this group, but it is anticipated that many of its functions will eventually be assumed by the Senate representatives for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities
The aim of the group is not to present to the President a “wish list” of probably unrealistic items that faculty and grads feel they want or need, but rather to identify particularly pressing issues in the five main thematic areas and suggest some possible solutions to these. We are aiming for the achievable, rather than the Utopic, and have constrained ourselves to those areas over which the President and his senior administrators have direct control. Thus, we do not address governance structures laid out in the official UWO Act, as changing these would involve the complicated and potentially perilous decision to take that Act back to the provincial government for amendment. Similarly, there is no point in addressing issues covered by the Collective Agreement, as this is clearly beyond our, and the administration’s, purview.
We take it as our function to represent the perspective of faculty and graduate students within Arts & Humanities, but we have sought not to be parochial in our concerns. The group believes that the many disciplines and fields of study that are taught and researched at Western are the stronger for the existence of that diversity. We will not play the politics of “us versus them” nor will we be complicit in the “divide-and-conquer” style of administration that has too often been in evidence at Western.
Most importantly, however, the Working Group has aimed for openness and transparency. Unsurprisingly therefore the entire process has been rather gloriously messy. Drafts of our Working Papers appear on my blog when they are made, and have additionally been circulated, in somewhat more finished form, to our constituency through email. Faculty and graduate students have responded by sending us feedback through a variety of both public and private channels. (The input of contract faculty and graduate students has been anonymized before compilation to ensure that they feel safe and comfortable about contributing). Most often the feedback we have received has been helpful, positive, and forward-looking, but we have also been at the receiving end of criticism, some of it very public indeed. And that’s fine: it may well prove to be the fact the most important thing that we have achieved is providing a channel for the many diverse, engaged, and passionate voices to speak up about how they feel about our university.
Speaking personally, I can attest to the exhilarating effect of this sort of collaborative and communal effort. Being a part of the Working Group has involved a great deal more labour and time than I ever imagined it would, but it has also entailed working closely with some absolutely fantastic colleagues. And most importantly, it has provided an unlooked for opportunity to participate in a real flowering of voices and ideas about the future of Western and of postsecondary education in general
And perhaps, after all, it has given me some sense of what university self-governance might look like.
Debates in the Senate of Lilliput West 