Effectiveness
In the previous post we discussed how to evaluate governance in general, which can also be used to evaluate shared governance, namely to look at the effectiveness of its processes. In this post we’ll look at the Faculty Senate. As established in 3.1 of the bylaws the Senate is the “primary means by which the Faculty exercise their rights and responsibilities”. So the Faculty Senate is directly responsible for almost all of shared governance. There are only three areas that significant work is delegated to other committees: 1) the Standing Committee on General Education, 2) the Standing Committee on Writing Across the Curriculum, and 3) each schools’ Committee on Courses and Programs. The other Standing Committees have their own areas of expertise, but do not have any authority over those areas.
Faculty Senate Processes
The two main processes related to the Faculty Senate are its process for meetings, and the process for elections. The meeting process is where the work gets done, and the elections process is who is at the meetings.
Faculty Senate meetings
The Faculty Senate meets once a month during the academic year to consider items that are brought before it. The Executive Committee creates an agenda for each meeting and acts in place of the Senate upon urgent matters. This is the process where the work gets done, so we can ask: do we have a process? ( yes ), do we implement that process? ( yes ), is it successful? ( ? ). For the last question opinions differ. There will be a poll to see if there is a consensus. One source of disagreement arises from differing opinions about whether the Senate is addressing all of the things it should.
Capacity
Since the Senate itself is responsible for almost everything itself a natural question is to ask if the current process is sufficient. In my opinion the Faculty Senate does not have the capacity to accomplish all that it should be doing. The Senate does some things well, but is limited in scope to largely curricular and matters of academic affairs. Opinions differ on whether this is the correct scope for the Senate, but as a thought experiment what are the ways we could increase its capacity? Three ideas are 1) frequency, 2) meetings, and 3) delegation. The first is the easiest to say, hardest to do. The Senate could meet more often, on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, the tough part is asking everyone for the additional time. The Senate regularly has 50 - 60 attendees, which brings us to the second idea.
Meetings
The Senate as a group may be too large to be effective ( to say nothing of efficient ). Think back about your last meeting and what was the outcome for the following group sizes:
1 person
< 10 people
10 - 20 people
> 30 people
I bet that for most people, most of the time, that the smaller meetings were more productive than the larger ones. This is not universally true, but the odds typically favor smaller meetings as being better. For me, as the number of people increase meetings change from conversations into presentations. In general, I would prefer to have presentations delivered asynchronously (e.g., via reports / memos) rather than take up blocks of time.
Another way to think about whether a meeting is a conversation or a presentation is to look at the distribution of who is speaking. Productive meetings feature input / perspectives from nearly everyone present. If people are attending but not participating, then that is an indicator that there are structural problems with the group dynamics.
My group dynamic experiences in service work is congruent with my experiences in teaching. There is a different dynamic that occurs based on group size: a small research group, a seminar course, a medium size lecture, and a large lecture all have different types of outcomes. Small groups tend to be more meetings of equals whereas large groups create and perpetuate power differentials. A smaller Senate could increase the productivity / effectiveness by better enabling individual members.
Representation
A challenge of smaller groups is that they may not be representative of all perspectives. This is a trade-off. There are nearly 600 Faculty on our campus, so the question is how many are needed for adequate representation? This ties into the second process associated with the Faculty Senate, the election of Senators and officers. Departments elect Senators for a three year term, and each year the incoming Senate elects officers and Standing Committee chairs. For logistic reasons the Faculty Senate chair is chosen at the beginning of the Spring semester, and the other elections later in the spring.
Across the SUNY comprehensives most senate representatives are chosen based on departments. Some are chosen as at-large from the whole campus, some as at-large based on divisions. There are also some senates that carve out representation for non-departmental constituencies, such as contingent faculty. Our current system is department based. One drawback of a department based approach is that departments have different populations, so some faculty are better represented in the Senate than others ( c.f., the electoral college ).
To me the question of representation comes down to how do we conceptualize the college. Are we a collection of departments that graduate majors or are we a collection of faculty that educate students? (Since I'm asking the question you can probably guess that I'm more in the latter camp.) When I became department chair this is something I had to decide; as department chair is my responsibility to the "department" or is it to the faculty and students of the department. An example of this distinction is that this past Fall we had an unplanned retirement. For the "department" the retirement was a negative and should have been discouraged, from a people perspective though the right choice was to support the faculty member in their choice. I understand the value of departments and think they are a useful organizational tool, but from a personal ethics point of view I value individuals more.
Delegation
A third way to increase capacity is for the Senate to explicitly delegate responsibility and authority to its Standing Committees. The General Education Committee is a good example of how this can work. It has the authority to make some decisions on its own ( i.e., course proposals ) and big changes ( like a new Gen Ed program ) still come before the Senate for discussion and approval.
In addition to delegating authority the Senate can establish more regular expectations and interactions with each of the standing committees. For example, each standing committee could have a standardized yearly report that presents what they accomplished that year, and the Senate could provide direction, feedback about matters that should have more attention. To some extent this exists with the committees frequently giving reports, but because of the group dynamics of the Senate meetings there rarely are any follow-up questions / interactions. The Senate pays little attention to the internal processes of the standing committees. Many of our sister colleges have explicit policy/procedure manuals for their standing committees to provide more structure and regularity for them.
One other aspect of delegation is just coordinating all of the different work that occurs. Often times groups are working on campus and their work gets lost and forgotten because it was not widely shared.
Other indicators
Another indicator regarding the health of shared governance is in whether elections are contested or not. The lack of contested elections, or the ability to fill positions at all, signal that there are structural problems. We should also examine whether we promoting broad participation in shared governance among the faculty. For instance recent bylaws changes introduced term limits for faculty senate officers. Some other colleges extend this to Faculty Senators also to promote broad participation.
comments/questions/suggestions
With the Faculty Senate primarily responsible for shared governance activities, the main question comes down to: is it doing the right things? Are we at level 1 or 2 of process maturity where we are often reacting? or are we at a higher level where we are fully participating in campus governance? If we are not operating at the level we want we can either redefine our goals and expectations, or we can make changes to our processes.
What are your thoughts about how we can do better?