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WHEN I was initially asked to write this paper on how deans look at departmental budgets, I was not a dean. I planned to share knowledge and perspectives I had gleaned during my three years as associate dean for faculty affairs in the University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. But as an updated Gloucester might say, "As flies are to wanton boys, so are we to the gods. They turn us into deans for their sport." I have now metamorphosed into a creature called dean of humanities, arts, and cultural studies at the University of California, Davis. And I discover that speaking of the deanery in the third person is a very different thing from speaking in the first--a difference that leads me to talk at the onset about relations between faculties and administrations at the present time.
Context
Let me begin by discussing the partnership that I believe must exist between deans and chairs if academic institutions are to flourish in the twenty-first century. It's time to get rid of the us-versus-them mentality that for too long has inflamed relations between faculties and administrations. I was distressed to see its flames recently fanned by Stanley Aronowitz and Cary Nelson. Aronowitz, from whose wisdom on labor issues I've frequently benefited, reproduces the tired feud in his 1997 article "The Last Good Job in America," published in Social Text: "The old joke that the relationship between a tenured professor and a dean is the same as that between a dog and a fire hydrant has become one of the anomalies of the waning century. Now the administrators are the cat and the faculty the cat box" (105). Cary Nelson tendentiously entitles his piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, "The War against the Faculty," and he makes this characteristic statement: "The war against the faculty entails identifying and separating all the roles that faculty members perform, eliminating those that inconvenience administrators, and contracting for the others as piecework" (B5).
Most academic administrators, and particularly deans and provosts, are drawn from the faculty ranks. And most of us, I would argue, are not fleeing the faculty. Instead, we jealously guard our faculty status as colleagues, researchers, and teachers. Nor do we develop mass amnesia about our lives as faculty members. As a longtime faculty member, I know how important it is that deans and department chairs consult with and take advantage of the faculty's collective and individual wisdom. Further, there are certain central aspects of the institution that must belong to the faculty: the curriculum, program development and requirements, research standards, faculty hiring, tenure, and promotion. However, as a veteran associate dean and a fledgling dean, I know that our institutions have evolved in ways that make faculty governance of what I'll call general policy--issues of enrollment growth, assessment and accountability, fund-raising objectives, community relations, equity, staff training and management--impracticable, unwieldy, and probably undesirable for both faculty and administrators. Annette Kolodny's recent book Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century addresses the tension directly. She writes:
After only a few months as dean, one realization brought me up short: by joining the middle management of academic administration, I came to know the functioning of a large research university in a way that had never been available to me previously. [. . .] However engaged I was in campus life, as a faculty member I had had only a limited understanding of how any institution functioned, from its budget to its relationships with different political constituencies. What I realized with a shock as dean, in other words, was how abysmally ignorant most faculty--including myself--really are about the workplace in which they function. (13-14)
As the university has become increasingly complex and as hard choices must be made in the face of "thinning support from societal services," administrators like Jonathan Cole, provost of Columbia University, and Donald Kennedy, president emeritus of Stanford University, are calling for a different way of doing business. Cole argues, "It has often been repeated that the university is the faculty. But in the contemporary world of universities, faculty governance must be shared in an effective way with administrative leaders" (10). The decentralized mode that characterizes faculty decision making is not effective, he believes, when hard decisions must be made between and among programs. Consultation with the faculty is essential for administrators who must make those decisions, and once the choices have been made, administrators must report the outcomes so that the community can evaluate the academic and financial consequences. Echoing Cole's point, while writing of those universities that will respond effectively to a new order and, indeed, prosper in the next century, Kennedy concludes with a scenario that contains "distinct response modes":
The first group of institutions will drift into decisions through the familiar model of peripheral control; distributed faculty responses will essentially set the agenda. In a second group, dramatic new coalitions will be formed between unusually effective leaders and their faculties. These institutions will be the first responders [. . .]. (153)
And they will be the ones to flourish into the next century. I agree with Kennedy; maintaining a false dichotomy between the faculty and administration will only hamper our success. If we don't pull together, we will surely pull apart.
Content
Now to be concrete with suggestions. Here are some ways in which to think about your department funding that will enable you to build coalitions with your dean and provost. Many of these skills come more readily to science and social science chairs, who develop them early in the process of grant application and administration when the chairs are forced to think collaboratively. When resources are plentiful, such skills may not have a decisive impact. When resources are scarce, as they have been for several years now, such skills are instrumental in a dean's deciding which chairs procure more adequate, or at least less inadequate, budgets in a process that the dean's budget analyst at the University of Florida recently characterized as "equitable deprivation." Here's a ten-step checklist.
1. Keep Count
The new coin of the realm is student credit hours or, in the current lingo, SCHs. These may be tracked in a number of different ways, but probably benchmarks for your department exist in some administrator's office, and someone is keeping track of enrollments in your courses and comparing them with enrollments in other courses across the campus. A responsive chair will also be watching enrollments in basic-writing courses, lower-division, upper-division, and, if appropriate, graduate courses. If they are rising, the chair will have a good argument for increased resources. What kind of resources will depend on where the increases occur. If SCHs are falling, a responsive chair will take the initiative of discussing the issue with the dean and not wait to be invited, either to explain a temporary aberration or to propose strategies to turn the numbers around.
The "A" words--accountability and assessment--are the buzzwords of the current era: for students, university administrators, governing boards, state legislators, alumni, and consumer magazines. If departments do not take the initiative and define their own performance measures, in the current jargon, the measures will be imposed from without. In addition to SCHs, chairs will be asked to justify resource requests in the light of numbers of majors and minors and--increasingly, for those who have graduate programs--in terms of students' time-to-degree, completion rates, and placement figures.
2. Reorganize
Many, perhaps most, institutions fund temporary positions--lecturers, adjuncts, and teaching assistants--out of monies available from unfilled tenure-track faculty lines. Some universities are required to keep a certain percentage of such lines (say ten percent) unfilled, precisely to provide flexibility in meeting staffing needs. Although there are sound budgetary reasons for not filling all your lines, there are also compelling reasons for not expending a large number of tenure-track lines on temporary instructors. Chairs should examine the dollar commitment in their departments to lecturers and adjuncts to determine if some of the temporary and part-time positions can be converted to tenure-track faculty lines. Compared with other departments, English and language departments tend to use a high percentage of temporary faculty members; most of those, as you know, teach basic composition and beginning language courses.
There are moral reasons to make this conversion, of which the job market for our PhDs is the most pressing right now. There are also strong institutional arguments. Most deans can authorize exchanges of temporary for permanent faculty, usually at a two to one ratio. You can see the difficulties immediately. Temporary faculty members will teach an average of six to nine courses a year; ladder faculty members, as few as four. But an imaginative chair will explore the options such conversions might open up as a route to increasing the numbers in the tenure-track faculty.
One note. Adjunct faculty members and lecturers may be a huge drain on a dean's budget because salary increases (at least for adjuncts and sometimes both) come out of the dean's discretionary funds instead of the general salary pool. Thus your conversions to regular lines may net monetary gains for your grateful dean.
Chairs should be wary of moving composition wholesale from the English department at this moment. Departments that made the move earlier were able to establish their continuing budgets under more prosperous circumstances. Departments choosing that course now might find their budgets for TA support and faculty lines drastically cut as their SCHs plummet.
3. Manage and Capitalize
Many chairs come to their positions with little administrative experience and, given the academic ethos in which we've all developed, are likely to see themselves as the principal representatives of faculty interests and departmental custodians rather than as managers and entrepreneurs. Kolodny speaks eloquently to this dilemma. She writes, "In accepting the deanship, I had tried to model a management style based on cooperation, consultation, and team-building. It was a mode of shared community. [. . .] But in my dealings with the central administration, it was a mode I practiced at my peril. When I went to [. . .] represent the College of Humanities, I became territorial, entrepreneurial, even selfish" (20).
Deans tend to take the measure of departments from their chairs and, in times of scarce resources, interpret a chair's entrepreneurial spirit as a measure of the department's own ambitions for itself, especially because, as Kolodny points out, deans themselves have been forced to become entrepreneurs on behalf of their divisions or colleges. At a minimum, use every resource you've currently been given to the institution's maximal advantage. Or at least be prepared to represent your capitalization on resources in those terms.
But capitalizing on resources depends first on managing them, and this is complicated by appropriate traditions of faculty governance, traditions predicated on the faculty's having a balanced sense of its rights and its responsibilities. Both Cole and Kennedy found among their faculties in general an increasing preoccupation with their rights and a diminishing sense of their responsibilities to the institutions. In part, Kennedy notes, this shift stems from the institution's own increasing involvement in faculty members' private lives through "a complex panoply of benefits: retirement programs with multiple investment vehicles, health insurance plans, tuition benefits for children, and housing." The result, he claims, is a "growing sense of both dependency and entitlement" (143). However, there are other factors as well. Mary Burgan commented to me a few years ago that our tendency to free assistant professors from service responsibilities during their tenure-earning years, particularly at universities, can create a pattern of disengagement from the business of running the department and college that's difficult to break. Others remark on the pernicious effect of hiring "stars," who have few teaching and service responsibilities in the institution, or the deleterious result of stressing only research productivity. Kennedy concludes:
Clearly, these changes in professorial commitment and attitude form an important dimension of the university's capacity for change. Much of the power to make the needed choices resides, as we have seen, in the faculty. But if the faculty's commitment to the institution (as opposed to the discipline, or to the self) is diminished--or if the professoriat simply likes things as they are--then they are obviously less likely to change. (147)
This contentment with the status quo or disengagement from the institution may be expressed in a number of ways, but as chair you will find they are likely to have an impact on course offerings, schedules of classes, and general availability of faculty. A dean with whom I recently spoke professed himself amazed that chairs allow faculties to dictate what their budgets will be used for and what they want to teach, instead of considering the needs of students or the institution. In this regard, you may find your attempts to secure additional resources met by questions about why your faculty is unwilling to teach those composition courses that they themselves have required of students or why you are offering fewer seats in critical required courses for students and additional seats in courses that historically have drawn only a few enrollees. Or you may be asked why so many courses are clustered on Tuesday and Thursday or Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday from ten to twelve, making student access difficult. Or why composition must be taught in small classes. "It's what and when the faculty wants to teach" or "that's the way it's always been done" are not good answers and will certainly instill reservations in a dean's mind about how well you are managing the resources already in your hands.
4. Innovate
If you want new resources, develop new courses and programs that address needs opened up by the changing intellectual landscape and that promise to attract students. Think in interdisciplinary terms; develop coalitions. Robert Weisbuch, now director of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and a former English department chair from the University of Michigan, recounts a telling pattern in a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Recalling a brief stint as graduate dean at the University of Michigan, he notes that he developed a characteristic response to disciplinary requests. If a science chair was coming to see him, he locked his safe or prepared to write large checks for compelling and expensive new projects. If a humanities chair had made an appointment, he reached for a tissue. He provides a comparable scenario from a president of a major research university, who told Weisbuch that "when he offered his faculty members funds for new proposals, he received more than fifty ideas from scientists, thirty from social scientists, and nothing from humanists except requests to put more money into existing programs." Weisbuch continues, "That's the problem. We sometimes confuse selling our disciplines with selling out, and wholesale distrust of our own institutions inspires neither us to ask nor the institution to give. Beyond that, we are not problem solvers. An engineer takes a problem and fixes it. A humanist takes a problem and celebrates its complexity. That is fine until we ourselves are the problem" (B4).
Develop new arguments for resources based on new developments in your discipline. Few arguments are less persuasive than "we were promised," "we used to have," "we should have." And if there are management issues you need to address in your own department, begin there before asking the dean for more resources.
Finally, on budgetary matters, a chair will certainly want to consult the faculty, but chairs should have sufficient flexibility to respond to opportunities to invest, my fifth point.
5. Invest
Deans respond positively to chairs who come in with proposals for matching funds: for example, half from the department, half from the dean. They figure that if the department is ready to put its money into the proposal, it's probably a good investment. This cost-sharing approach can be used effectively to secure equipment--faculty computers, upgraded phone lines, photocopying machines--and enrichment funds for outside speakers or travel.
6. Generate
You signal your willingness to invest significantly in your department by initiating and embracing fund-raising efforts. In these times of scarce resources, deans help those who help themselves. And nothing is more wonderful for a chair than landing a large bequest that is independent of a dean's control and that provides continuing resources for department graduate fellowships, undergraduate scholarships, and a host of other perennial needs. The ADE has sponsored sessions on how to begin and continue fund-raising; I recommend those papers from earlier years, now published in the ADE Bulletin online archives. The basic message is, "People give money to organizations with which they have a relationship. The first step in fund-raising is developing that relationship" (Christ 17). Even if your development office limits the kinds of direct marketing you can do, you can still begin to cultivate relationships with an eye to the future.
And look for other opportunities to generate revenue that can enhance your programs, whether through summer elder hostels (which can also set the stage for effective fund-raising efforts) or distance education.
7. Connect
Under pressure from our legislators and the public at large, universities are being asked to work creatively with educators in K-12. Developing programs that bring public school teachers to campus or take faculty members to the schools enhances the visibility of our work and the public's understanding of the importance of the humanities. There are numerous opportunities for you as resourceful chairs to build new cooperative alliances that will benefit students in your majors, give your programs visibility, and, therefore, single out your department for additional resources.
8. Set Priorities
Deans do not have the resources to meet every need you identify. Be prepared to present your requests and then to establish clear priorities among your needs. I have heard many deans tell chairs, "I can't do everything on this list. What are your two or three most important items?" Chairs who equivocate, often out of a sense of responsibility to all aspects of the program, usually get nothing. Those who identify and single out one or two items usually get their funding.
Also, in institutions where salary merit monies vary from year to year, your dean may ask you to identify key faculty members for additional salary increases. This is often a difficult process for chairs who have numerous faculty members whose salaries are compressed or even inverted. Again, failure to single out one or two of your faculty members will culminate in your receiving nothing. Chairs should, without an invitation, initiate this discussion of special increases for certain faculty members at annual program reviews and, again, after receipt of annual salary packages. Deans rarely distribute all their money at the outset if the process gives them some autonomy over allocations, and it is best to be on the radar screen as early as possible.
9. Reclaim, Rethink, Redesign, and Reassign
If faculty members reclaim the entire curriculum for themselves, including composition, then adjunct positions might turn into tenure-track positions. Stay abreast of your curriculum. If faculty members won't teach a course or students won't take one, redesign it. It isn't sufficient to argue that the best program for your undergraduates is exactly what you're offering. If that's so, why aren't they beating down your doors to get in? It isn't sufficient to say students are philistines; they are in our colleges and universities to be educated by us. If we haven't been able to convince them that what we are teaching is what they will need for the long years ahead, then we aren't doing a very good job.
Finally, of course:
10. Protect and Preserve
In the midst of the changes demanded of you and your faculty, hold fast to what is valuable and endures. The ideas of a core and core disciplines remain indispensable as upper-level administrators look at ways to pare away the less necessary and less urgent. Be aware, then, that the shape of English studies is changing--like an ever-evolving seascape--but hold fast to what remains essential and foundational, to what keeps teaching and research in our disciplines at the heart of a liberal education. This is the big project: preserving the role and logic of the humanities in higher education as institutions and disciplines undergo the changes that will keep them vital in the twenty-first century.
The author is Professor of English and Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. This paper was presented at the 1999 ADE Summer Seminar West, hosted by Montana State University, Bozeman, and the University of Montana in Polson, Montana.
Aronowitz, Stanley. "The Last Good Job in America." Social Text 51 (1997): 93-108.
Christ, Carol. "Challenges of the Millennium." ADE Bulletin 121 (1998): 16-18. [Show Article]
Cole, Jonathan. "Dilemmas of Choice Facing Research Universities." Daedalus 122.4 (1993): 1-36.
Kennedy, Donald. "Making Choices in the Research University." Daedalus 122.4 (1993): 127-56.
Kolodny, Annette. Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.
Nelson, Cary. "The War against the Faculty." Chronicle of Higher Education 16 Apr. 1999: B4-5.
Weisbuch, Robert. "Six Proposals to Revive the Humanities." Chronicle of Higher Education 26 Mar. 1999: B4-5.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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