Central Heating

Robert Hutchins – the President of the University of Chicago – once described the modern university as “a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central heating system.”

I was reminded of this remark when Peter Mitchell – the second President of Stockton – quoted it in an interview just before he left Stockton to take up a position in Massachusetts.

The remark summarizes a fact about American higher education: not much connects departments in colleges and universities. Many, of course, give lip-service to how wonderfully linked they are but the truth is that there is very little holding them together.

When the Deans first began to think about how the College might be organized it was a revelation that all of us had had bad experiences in traditional departments. For example, we found them restrictive, fiercely competitive, wasteful, frequently divided into factions and dominated by senior faculty or, more likely, a martinet of a chairman.

We saw traditional departments and power-grabbing chairmen as having the most severe, unhealthy and debilitating power over junior faculty and we wanted no part of this traditional arrangement.

I think that, among the Deans, I was the only one who had been a Chairman so we tended not to see the academic world from that perspective. Having been Chairman at a small Midwestern college, I can state that being in that office is no picnic either. I once tried to fire a poorly trained teacher who had been a member of the English Department for many years. I had evidence that he was awful in the classroom but was unassailable because of his long service to the college. I gave him a poor evaluation and informed him that I intended to replace him (he did not have tenure). Immediately, faculty throughout  the college strongly defended him. Within a few weeks, the faculty member claimed that I had ruined his marriage and had caused him to seek psychological counseling. The administration of the college rejected my recommendation citing his long service to the college. I have to admit that I had been warned by the Academic Dean that the college would support him. He returned to the classroom to continue “teaching” and I was denied tenure.

My point is that the early Deans – and the Academic VP – did not view departments and chairmen favorably. We all had had bad experiences and were seeking other power arrangements.

The solution that we examined and, ultimately, adopted was to create strong Divisional structures with no departments and elected co-ordinators to organize and serve the programs. Academic Working Paper 7 – finalized by November of 1970 – summarizes this arrangement. Faculty were assigned to programs (what I have called “a federation of faculty”) which are independent of administrative control. Faculty could be – and were – assigned to more than one program. Alan Lacy, for example, was based in the Philosophy Program but was also a member of Environmental Studies, Methods of Inquiry and Urban Studies. Indeed, most faculty were members of at least one program other than the one they were hired in.

A modest indication of the increasing conservatism of the College is the abandonment of the concept of multiple program memberships. We are the lesser for the shift.

The central focus, then, of a faculty member’s academic life was – and is – the Program. This is a traditional, long-held attachment. The co-ordinator, however, does not have the two department chairperson’s sources of power: hiring/firing and budget. These, originally, were shifted upwards to the Dean.

This arrangement is considerably different even today from large university departments. These departments operate without the control or oversight of a Dean except in extraordinary circumstances. The department might request a position from a Dean and, if granted, they would hire faculty (many times without the Dean or VP for Academic Affairs ever meeting the candidate; at Stockton candidates are seen by the Dean of the hiring Division, and the Dean of General Studies – until recently they were seen by the Academic VP), assign courses and other responsibilities with no further participation of the university administration above the Chairperson. If that person proved to be unsatisfactory, the process is reversed but is still contained within the Department. Again, at Stockton, the process of firing someone involves the Program, the Divisional Dean, a College-wide committee and the VP for Academic Affairs.

The administration at Stockton periodically suggests the adoption of the Department model but, so far, the faculty has resisted these overtures. Not all co-ordinators follow the earlier model; some act like Chairpersons in large part because their faculty want it that way. Most, however, are without real power and the programs keep them as they were -- powerless.

Strangely, programs at Stockton are not much more connected than the quote from Robert Hutchins observes. Multiple program membership offered a means of true interdisciplinary connections but, with its abandonment and without the necessary acculturation of new faculty to the old ways, programs exist in splendid isolation.

We have lost much.