Reflections on Recent College Meetings and Principle-Centered Leadership
(11-26-2004)
(Archive | Logan | PSE Department)
While I worked with Dean Margaret Leinen and with the late Dr. David MacKenzie (when he was Executive Director of the Northeast Association of Experiment Station Directors), I developed a deep appreciation for principle-centered leadership, in the sense of Steven Covey, as an operating paradigm for academic organizations. To me, the term means that decision making follows guidelines that are derived from the entire academic community through open and on-going dialog. Principles thus derived are necessarily based on shared vision and concensus, implying an inherent general agreement and acceptance, key ingredients to organization success. By "principle-centered" I do not mean a set of dictums used for moral judgements, but I nevertheless avoid the use of "unprincipled" as meaning the opposite of "principle-centered" to avoid moral overtones. Principle-centered leadership is firmly committed to a practice of setting forth and using guidelines written to serve the useful purpose of making consistent decisions. Often, principles are derived from strategic planning documents, where they may be articulated directly, or indirectly in statements of Assumptions or Vision and Mission.
A student of principle-centered leadership, I have tried to discern a consistent set of principles at work guiding decisions of the College, or of the University as regards the College, and I am unable to do so. I believe that College administrators owe it to stakeholders of the College to conduct a college-wide strategic planning exercise to at least establish a set of operational principles for the College and its affiliated land grant programs—in the form of vision and mission statements, or elsewhere in the planning document. I am at a loss as to why this exercise has not been conducted to date. Certainly, in the summer of 2001 this administration began with a declaration that decisions about future hires and resource allocations would be based on strategic planning! More recently, the dean addressed an audience in North Carolina and talked about his commitment to the concept of a "shared vision," stating that to him "shared" always came before "vision" because failure to establish a "shared vision"—which clearly implied a vision derived from a concensus process in which the community's visions are given weight equal to the administration's visions—would lead to an organization that inevitably falls short of reaching its full potential. Yet there is no strategic plan, and there is no vision. When I asked the Associate Dean for a copy of the College mission statement, he was totally at a loss as to where such a thing might be. So, either I have somehow missed the essential articulation of shared vision and principles, or the administration has not been practicing what it preaches!
(Note: In February 2005, it was announced that the College would hold a celebration in March to welcome the Department of Biological Sciences into the fold (see below). A highlight of the celebration, it was announced, would be remarks by the Dean outlining his vision for the College, a vision uninformed by an open, participatory planning process. Colleagues in the College of Engineering tell me that a similar ex cathedra pronouncement of a vision statement has come from the Dean of Engineering, again without benefit of faculty input. This one-directional view of "shared" disenfranchises the key group of employees in the organization. This is generally recognized as a major mistake in any organizational culture, but it is particularly damaging in highly sensitive academic cultures, where most of the work depends on an engaged group of faculty "workers". A major influence on academic productivity is the motivation that comes from feelings of being a vital part of a unique community. Top-down, uni-directional declarations of mission and vision can destroy that sense of community, leading to a loss of morale and sense of belonging, and to an eventual decline in productivity and academic cohesiveness. This is clearly happening in both of these Colleges.)
From this perspective, it may be instructive to review the history of college-wide faculty meetings in CELS and its predecessor College of Resource Development, to see how these meetings reflect the climate for the emergence of concensus-derived "shared vision" and mission statements, and to examine operating principles that have been used by the College in the past and any principles behind present decision-making.
The 1984 College Bylaws mandated that the College would conduct two meetings of college faculty each semester. Dean Gerald Donovan held bi-semester meetings in Woodward Hall. Most meetings afforded ample opportunities for comment and decision-making on issues of general concern. There were occasional debates, at times lively. Meetings were participatory, fostering a sense of community; disparate viewpoints were shared and respected, including viewpoints contrary to those of the administration. Formal strategic planning was less in vogue during that time, and formal discussion of vision or mission never occurred.
College meetings were less regular under Deans Robert Miller and Margaret Leinen during the 1990's. An annual spring meeting was largely devoted to an awards ceremony, recognizing teacher, researcher, outreacher, and staff person of the year. Dean Miller gathered his faculty for substantive curricular discussions and to share and formulate responses to university budget cuts, an unfortunately recurrent theme. Dean Miller moved the meetings into the library and offered refreshments to encourage attendance.
Dean Leinen continued the annual awards tradition. But Leinen was also Dean of Oceanography and Vice Provost for Marine and Environment, and she introduced a full new agenda, refocusing and renaming the College, and launching the Coastal Institute and Environmental Biotechnology initiatives. Under Dean Leinen, meetings were highly participatory and theme-driven. Dean Leinen's devotion to principle-centered leadership was patent. Considerable effort was spent, for example, on grass-roots involvement to derive an encompassing mission statement for the new College of the Environment and Life Sciences. Similarly, on another occasion a meeting of 50 university-wide biologists was called to outline and endorse the Environmental Biotechnology Initiative, which was based on a clearly articulated set of concepts and goals for the initiative, a set derived from faculty during meetings facilitated but not dominated by administration. At these meetings, the air was open and low key, and issues were resolved decisively and without fanfare. All viewpoints were welcome. The Environmental Biotechnology Initiative, for example, was endorsed through a series of discussions leading to consensus, but the culminating meeting at which faculty endorsed the concept was conducted without a formal vote or even a session-ending cheer.
Except for annual awards ceremonies—institutionalized through standing awards committees—there were essentially no College meetings of substance following Leinen's departure in 2000. Other than the awards meeting, the 18 months under interim Dean William Wright (through June 2001) saw no other college gatherings. (The annual Coastal Fellows poster exhibition showcases student projects to College and University administrators, and typically is cause for a large gathering of college faculty, but this was never a forum for college-wide discussion).
Although the current administration began with an announcement that decision-making would be based on strategic planning, there have yet to be any general college meetings in this regard. After departments submitted individual plans by December 2001, no further mention has been made of college-wide planning, and there have been no college-wide meetings to discuss strategic planning, vision, or mission.
In 2003, the Department of Community Planning was informed of plans for its elimination. The basis for this was not prefaced by any reference to principles or to a shared vision of the college or an interpretation of its mission. The Department asked to leave and requested a College meeting to approve its departure. After both the Faculty Senate Executive Committee and the President instructed the College that it must agree to this, a meeting was scheduled. The meeting agenda relegated the Community Planning resolution to "New Business," the last of seven items on the agenda. However, because the resolution had been passed by the College's Curricular Affairs Committee, a standing committee of the college which reports early on the agenda, the Curriculum Committee report and the Community Planning resolution were properly discussed second on the agenda. The resolution generated no discussion of reasons for the requested departure, and no talk of tradition, mission, or other factors that might have been expected in the face of such an extraordinary request. Only two questions came from the floor: One asked whether the Department would be allowed to retain its space in Rodman Hall, and the other asked whether it would be allowed to retain its 1.5 graduate assistantships or operating budget, and it was agreed that these details would be left to university administration. The motion passed, without further comment, unanimously.
The remainder of the November 2003 meeting included a report by the Associate Dean, who indicated that nearly 30% of the external grants over the previous 10 years had been awarded in the last 3 years of that period. Although the presentation revealed a $3 million (30%) decline in external funding over the first two years of the new administration, there were no questions asked and no explanations or discussion, curious in light of the administrative goal of doubling external grants by 2005. A report on finances indicated that federal and institutional funds had remained flat (adjusted for inflation) for several years and that the total budget was ~$24 million, but there were no materials on cost of administration, which had doubled its space and numbers in Woodward Hall in its first two years. The meeting ended with the assignment of three members of the college Executive Committee and the Associate Dean to a committee charged with updating the College's 1984 bylaws.
The second meeting of the College took place in April 2004. Its purpose was to hear the report of the Bylaws committee. The committee returned a minimized version of the 1984 bylaws that eliminated standing committees on research and outreach, dropped mention of the Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension, and eliminated both the College parliamentarian and even reference to Sturges' Rules. The latter deletion was defended on the grounds that parliamentary maneuvering was an unnecessary source of annoying delay by faculty that could be done away with if we abandoned bylaws reference to rules of parliamentary procedure and eliminated the position of college parliamentarian. The meeting ended as faculty voted to adopt the new bylaws, in effect significantly suppressing shared governance while leaving the conduct of future meetings not in the hands of Sturges but rather to the discretion of the administration.
The third meeting of the College was held in November 2004. The meeting began on a positive note as supporters of the successful biotechnolgy building bond were thanked. The Associate Dean explained that the next step in the building process would be to finish architectural work and to start construction, the whole edifice to be ready for occupation in 3 years. There was no discussion of occupation, despite college-wide curiosity about who would be assigned the new spaces, or the basis for such assignments. It was then moved to accept the Department of Biological Sciences into the College. Two days earlier, the College of Arts and Sciences had voted (28-7-14) to allow the department to leave. The motion was introduced with three stipulations, including a call for application of uniform priniciples for resource allocations among all departments in the college, and calls for reviews of course and curricular congruencies, compatibilities with the mission of the College, elimination of duplications, and creation of cross-listings. Faculty expressed shock and anger over the stipulations, which they indicated were inappropriate and unfriendly (an interesting contrast to the concerns over resources associated with the departure of Community Planning). The Bioscience chair said that his department would reconsider its application for admission if the stipulations passed. Terms of "the deal" promised to BioScience were questioned. These were alleged to include a promise of full retention of the 29 teaching assistantships by the department (several times the number of assistantships in CELS departments), access to AES funds, and a promise of additional support for teaching in the form of new assignments of CELS faculty to teach Bioscience courses. (The Bioscience chair may have further aggravated the situation by claiming that no Bioscience faculty member was forced to teach any course they did not want to teach.) The offering of CELS faculty to teach had been widely rumored, and was allegedly repeated in the College Executive Council meeting the previous week: in the context of responding to an indication by the Bioscience chair that 70% of the classroom contacts experienced by bioscience students were with per course instructors (i.e., the 29 graduate assistants), the Associate Dean had indicated CELS would be able to help the department by using its "excess teaching capacity." Rumors of promises that CELS faculty would be used to alleviate teaching burdens in Bioscience had been circulating for over a year, in part fed by remarks by the Bioscience Chair to CELS faculty who were told that the department looked forward to having CELS faculty teaching introductory courses after the merger. The Bioscience chair and the Associate Dean denied that there had been any "deal." The Dean then rose to explain that in fact the terms of the deal were essentially those that had been alleged, and that the terms were necessary to accomplish what "you have been trying to do for over 15 years." The Associate Dean then declared that no CELS faculty would be used to teach Bioscience courses, and that what he had meant was that there existed excess capacity in under-enrolled courses taught by CELS faculty that could be perhaps filled by Bioscience students. A substitute motion to welcome the department on a fair and equal footing was then passed unanimously.
(Was there a price for questioning the terms of "the deal" and for calling for fair and equitable resource distribution and elimination of course overlaps? Within a week of the meeting, the Department of Fisheries and Animal Sciences was informed that an approved requisition to replace an old vehicle had been rescinded, and that a faculty search had been terminated. Although these actions were justified as responses to an anticipated FY06 budget, the department nevertheless met in emergency session in a panic. In its previous meeting, Dr. Rice had been praised as being the best chair the department had seen in 25 years. In the emergency meeting, faculty openly discussed their perception that the department was being punished for Dr. Rice's leadership in calling for simple terms on the approval of the bioscience department move (the equivalent of a "pre-nuptial" agreement). Based on the stated belief that the department would continue to be punished if Dr. Rice remained as chair, Dr. Rice resigned in disgust. There was clearly a departmental cost in lost colleagiality and internal good will, the impact of which remains to be seen. On the other hand, Dr. Rice remains highly respected across campus, active in key roles in strategic planning for the campus, and in a key leadership role in the Faculty Senate; The experience has left him noticeably more serene, albeit understandably somewhat less interested in the future wellbeing of his departmental colleagues. More importantly, it has left him free to speak his mind without the dull weight of chairmanship responsibilities.)
What is becoming most apparent in CELS is that faculty and administration are jointly not adequately conscientious about the importance of basing key decisions on openly-derived sets of principles.
In 1992, the Life and Environmental Sciences Task Force, organized by Provost Gitlitz and chaired by Graduate School Dean Morrison, explored structural and organizational relationships among the biological and environmental sciences. At that time, it was concluded that the dominant organizational principle at URI was that the College of Arts and Sciences was responsible for general education of undergraduates, including education in the natural science fields of biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. The distinctions were adamantly defended, most strongly within the Zoology Department, where it was stated that the differences in philosophy and outlook between biologists in Arts and Sciences and those in Resource Development were analogous to the differences between "portrait painters" and "house painters." The discussions at that time actively engaged faculty in face to face debates and in open forums sponsored by the Task Force. The intense rancor and strong residual ill will that resulted from this exercise essentially stifled all interest in the issue among most faculty until the present time.
It is unclear whether there was an administrative interest in reorganization during the time since 1992. That is, it is unclear what was meant in referring to merging with biological sciences as "something you have been trying to do for 15 years." Certainly, there is no reason to believe that the Dean of Arts and Sciences saw any particular advantage to the departure of a major department that had been provided with a generous endowment of operating funds, assistantships, and space. If there were discussions of the issue, they were quiet until May 2003, when the Provost, citing fears a divided biology faculty as a threat to a proposed biotechnology building, ordered a review of the position of biological sciences within the University. {The bond was approved by both the legislature and the voters without a word of discussion of this particular issue.} It is difficult to discern a useful principle in the Provost's mandate, one adequate to guide future structural realignments in University organization (to move a department out of fear that someone outside of the University might not understand or agree with our organization is not a management strategy based on principle).
No one has articulated a set of principles behind the drive to move biological sciences to CELS. Platitudes about removing institutional barriers to collaboration, etc., have never been backed by evidence that such natural intellectual affinities or barriers exist (were any incidents cited?), and there is considerable skepticism about whether the new merger will now precipitate a wealth of new collaborations. On the other hand, the division of CELS faculty among several buildings has had a notable detrimental effect on interactions among faculty, yet presumably the new building will include homes for some members of existing departments, but not others; is there a principle here?
If the organizational principle is no longer that a core of natural sciences exist in the College of Arts and Sciences that is to be responsible for general education, then nothing prevents similar exodus of the remaining natural sciences from Arts and Sciences. The suggestion that restructuring was based on an expectation of new working relations suggests that the principle could be that we organize according to perceptions of working relations, existing or imagined. This at least underlies insistence that the Departments of Marine Affairs and Resource Economics should remain part of a proposed College of Science because of established working relations with other units of the College (further examination of this proposition is warranted but beyond the present scope). This is a highly subjective and self-serving perspective, however, with little to recommend it as a basis for structural organization.
It is hard to visualize a viable organizational structure that is based on intangible and ephemeral relations. Rather, if the "general education home" principle is being abandoned (without the appropriate University-wide discussion, for this is a decision that affects the institution broadly), one must presume that it would be replaced by some other discernable principle, perhaps one based on natural intellectual affinities among academic units. Were this the active principle, why has the Provost not insisted on a college of natural sciences (including CELS departments NRS, FAVS, PLS, and GEO, plus Arts and Science departments BioScience, Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics (and possibly Computer Science and Statistics, which could also be viewed as engineering units), a college of social sciences (including CELS departments MAR, ENRE, and FSN, Arts and Sciences Departments Psychology and Sociology), and most of HHS), and a college of arts and letters?
Will a similar lack of principle-based organization eventually undermine the new biotechnology building? That is, is lack of principle-centered management undermining the existence of current academic units that are engaged in applied organismal or ecosystem-oriented programs, and if so, how will this affect the competitive position of biotechnology faculty for external funds (the current diversity and integration of approaches to biological, ecological, and marine studies is one of the University's strengths)? The biotechnology building was promoted to the legislature and the public as a economic development investment. Still, the mission and vision for the building remains remarkably vague, as there has been no effort to hear or otherwise engage in a discussion leading to a "shared vision" of the purposes of this building (public claims for the value of the building as an economic development investment do not constitute a principle-centered shared vision). Is it to become a new home for a new cohort of faculty engaged in biopharmaceutical or biomedical research? What would then differentiate the building from Brown's more ambitious ($93,000,000) life sciences building (under construction currently) or genomics facility (a $23,000,000 renovation that is underway currently)? How will centers for commercialization be promoted and are they compatible with academic research in a public institution? What will attract large companies to enter the building or to engage in collaborations, overcoming fears of risk to proprietary commercial product development? Is the building a center for nursery industries or biotech start-ups, and if so, how will the University manage its dealings with the private sector? What justifies inclusion of an entire unit of non-biotechnologists in the building, as distinct from other departments engaged in applied biology (e.g., Animal Science, Plant Science, Natural Resources Science), or is there an anticipated advantage to fracturing these departments, providing new-building homes for some faculty but not for most? Failure to make "cogent arguments" for the building nearly prevented it from making the bond list in July. Only a last minute intervention by President Carothers and Vice President Weygand, who pleaded with the House Speaker to have the item added to the bond list, saved the building from oblivion in 2004. The administration will not identify potential occupants to the building (other than the entire biological science department, none of whom are engaged in commercializing biotechnology at present), and has yet to articulate principles upon which such assignments are to be made. If the building is to open in 3 years with capacity to support 35 faculty, then at least a dozen and possibly as many as 30 new faculty positions and at least as many permanent staff positions will have to be budgeted for and filled. To date, however, the University has indicated (in its EPSCOR proposal) that it intends only two senior level biotechnology hires and one junior level bioinformatics hire over the next 3 years, barely offsetting the two faculty in CMB who reach retirement age shortly (Brown plans for 6 senior and 4 junior faculty, with a $100,000,000 overall increase in its life sciences budget over the next 10 years). If the University intends to make good on its promise to the public to provide an economic return on the bond investment, it must now also put forward the case for funding for the 35 faculty and the many permanent staff that it will take to deliver on that promise (for an estimated cost of upwards of half the current College and Experiment Station budgets). The only thing that is clear at this point is that paying for the cost of running this building will not be realistically done by expecting newly hired faculty (or yet-to-be identified corporate in-house collaborators) to shoulder the permanent costs of annual operations, as well as the cost of a dedicated staff of technicians necessary to conduct competitive research and to support state of the art technologies in the classroom.
(The Rhode Island EPSCOR proposal to the National Science Foundation was rejected for the second time this year. Did lack of a clear strategic plan for the biotechnology building weaken reviewer faith in the proposal's objectives? Thus far, nothing has been written that distinguishes URI's biotechnology effort from every other state's biotechnology effort (except, unfortunately, its relatively small size and lack of a future promise of new funds to operate programs). Political propaganda will need to give way to concrete plans before the public can truly support this or any similar request for a sustained investment.)
The November 2004 college meeting suggested that the College lacks principles for resource allocations, particularly graduate assistantships. In 1992, the Graduate Council established that there was no university-wide correlation between any measure of productivity (external grants, publications, credit hours, or numbers of majors) and either operating budgets or graduate assistantship allocations, adjusted to per capita faculty. Numbers of graduate assistantships in departments in 1982 were near perfect predictors of numbers in those same departments in 1992. That they would nearly perfectly predict the current allocation is a testable hypothesis (I predict a similar near-perfect relation), yet what is the basis for this allocation and by what principles can resources be related to raw productivity or to any other stated goals of the institution? The concern expressed in the BioScience merger debate in CELS against the stipulation that resources should be allocated according to a principle of fairness or equity (seemingly reasonable and innocuous terms for a prenuptual agreement) reflected a legacy of some faculty (in Arts and Sciences) having extraordinarily privileged levels of institutional resources while others in like departments (in Resource Development or CELS—with equal teaching, research and outreach productivity) have lived entire careers with a tiny fraction of the resources available to their wealthier collegues. The administration quip that the numbers of graduate assistantships allocated to former Arts and Sciences departments now in CELS (GEO, MAR, CMB) has not changed substantially from what they were nine years ago (when the departments first arrived) suggests that inequities can be preserved not only between colleges (maintained by the statistically undefensible argument—there being no correlation between resources and productivity—that priorities are related to teaching general education, etc.), but now can also be perpetuated with a college, so long as resource allocation is not tied to principle, mission, or any rational democratically derived formula, and so long as administration is unwilling or unable to address or act on the issue. (Here is a point at which questions of equity suggest questions of fairness, and where "principle-less" management takes on the moral connotations of "unprincipled".) Although the Council of Deans, in response to the Board of Governors, established a set of principles for allocation of university graduate assistantships in 1995 (including a standard that 1/3rd of assistantships would be to support research), there has been no follow-up to study whether these principles are being followed. The matter should be revisited from outside of the University, with oversight by the Commissioner, the Board, or the legislature.
Within the past three years there have been three hours devoted to meetings of the college. During those three hours, the faculty and administration of CELS have managed to accomplish the truly remarkable. They have demonstrated that they are willing to dismiss colleagues and an entire academic unit without discussion of reasons why (but with the pettiest of concerns about possible lost resources), and without regard to tradition, constituents, students, or faculty. They have voted to abandon structures intended to facilitate and protect shared governance, including the formal underpinnings of the English Parliamentary system, because they were overly inconvenienced by those who use those structures, or overly burdened by the processes of participation. And they have demonstrated an acceptance of government without principle, and without concern for fairness or equity as a basis for resource allocation. All of these accomplishments are signs of an internal dynamic that calls into question the long term viability of the organization.
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