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Why trustees need to be involved
People are asking what went wrong at the University of Delaware, where a doctrinaire residential "curriculum" was recently nixed in the face of harsh national criticism. And while those who follow higher ed can easily summarize the nature of the problem--institutional agendas that violated students' freedom of conscience, association, and expression--it's important to dig deeper, to the how of the problem, if we want to find a viable solution.
University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs offers some crucial insights on this front. In an essay at Minding the Campus, Downs highlights something that tends to be overlooked in discussions about political correctness and academic accountability: "the role of non-faculty members in promoting the politicization of higher education."
Noting that "most of the literature on the ideological politicization of higher education has focused on faculty members," Downs explains how disasters such as the Delaware residential life program are instituted by non-instructional staff who implement their "educational" programs entirely outside the zone of curricular review. At Delaware, for example, the woman who masterminded the program is a residential life administrator unaffiliated with the faculty: Her professional position is not strictly academic--and the work she does is independent of Delaware's academic system. As a consequence, neither the Delaware faculty nor the academic administration is likely to have known about the University's residential program; they would not have been in a position to review it, to oversee it, or to prevent it.
And that's typical. As a rule, Downs explains, faculties have little, if anything, to do with the areas of the university concerned with administering student life. People who are concerned about the manner in which free inquiry and intellectual diversity are threatened on campus need to understand that there are entire segments of the campus that are conducted outside the confines of peer review.
Downs doesn't spell it out, but the implications of his important insight are clear. Top administrators--and the trustees who hire them--need to be keeping a close and watchful eye on all aspects of the institutions in their care. And their obligation to ensure that students' learning experiences are not narrowed or harmed by institutional agendas extends beyond an obligation to ensure a strong, robust curriculum and fair faculty personnel practices. It includes an awareness of what's going on outside the classroom, in residences where students eat, sleep, study, socialize, and, as at Delaware, contend with unconscionable residence-based sensitivity training.
Delaware's faculty was not in a position to ensure the integrity of the University's residential life programming. But the administration and, by extension, the trustees were. They should have been paying more attention.
Posted by acta online on November 15, 2007 at November 15, 2007 05:50 PM
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Comments
I suspect if you did a survey the student life apparat at most institutions, from the dean of students on down, you would find an abnormal number of folk with degrees from those most notorious of professional schools, the teacher training colleges.
I cannot say what the situation is at a large school like the University of Delaware, but at the college I know best, the provost has people in his employ who do work kindred to this residential life official. Those positions were created on his watch and if he does not have a general idea of their activities, he's thicker than I would have guessed.
One might also suspect that the official to whom you make reference crafted the program with an idea about her immediate milieux influenced by her mundane interactions with people. It may not have occurred to her that anyone in the administration (or anyone consequential in the faculty) would have given voice to any objections.
Have you read Charles Sykes The Hollow Men? In our time, the notion of a board of trustees concerned with something other than sports, budgetry, and admissions metrics seems almost an eschatalogical concept.
Posted by: Art Deco at November 17, 2007 09:10 AM
At the state university where I work, this kind of stuff is promoted most heavily by non-instructional staff. Unfortunately, the administration is not suitable to be the guardian, it goes all the way up to the vice-presidential level, and the president, who is a Republican, wholeheartedly approves. The members of the state board of higher education are ignorant, indifferent, supportive, or probably some combination of all three. The legislature has fallen completely into the hands of Democrats, who are not going to do anything about it, probably are more or less like the board members. So, it's going to continue and strengthen.
Posted by: Mike at November 17, 2007 12:10 PM