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The Springtime of our Discontent
Were last semester's debates on the future of the arts and sciences a turning point?

The Academic Exchange Talk a bit about your involvement in the events of last spring.

Professor Judith Miller I had two different roles. One was as a member of the college’s Executive Committee, to help try to keep the discussion transparent, inclusive, and democratic. We also sought to try to involve the faculty in the whole decision-making process. The other was as an individual faculty member, as one of a group of faculty who were trying to generate discussion of these issues. I agreed with the Klehr resolution that the administration should not have simply created this structure without meaningful consultation of the faculty. I thought, however, that the merger was probably a good move. It would allow us to look at teaching and research, graduate and undergraduate programs in a much more complementary fashion. I e-mailed a few colleagues and found that many others wanted to be a part of this discussion. Eventually, that resulted in the amendment proposing to separate the critique of the process leading to the new structure from the critique of the structure itself, and the open letter drafted by Laurie Patton and a broad group of colleagues.

AE What were your impressions of the process engendered by the resolution?

JM The meeting in which we voted on it was called about 5:15. Many people needed to get home to take care of kids and had come specifically to vote. Thus, the meeting didn’t really have much substantive discussion of the merger. Nonetheless, the Klehr Resolution won in the final vote by a substantial majority. Many people e-mailed me to say they actually didn’t support the Klehr Resolution. But by late in the afternoon, when it was clear that the amendment separating process from substance had not passed, they wanted a way to express their frustration with the administration having acted unilaterally. They had come to the meeting to discuss the substance of the merger, and no opening had occurred.

AE Why do you think that discussion was so important?

JM It seems that there is a broad range of faculty members who were hired in the late eighties and early nineties—some of them senior faculty coming with endowed chairs and prestigious titles and many junior faculty. We had come to be part of this bright, shining new university. And then when we came, suddenly it seemed that the university’s orientation was changing right underneath our feet. We had come to be involved in graduate program development and research. We saw them as being complementary with the undergraduate and teaching missions. But it seemed that increasingly over the last ten years, a number of decisions, whether from the college office or from upper levels of the administration, appeared to put undergraduate education and teaching front and center, while articulating these as essentially mutually exclusive from graduate and research profiles. I think that deep ambivalences developed among the faculty as research and graduate programs rose in the late eighties and early nineties. A number of people may have felt uncomfortable with the general direction the university was going. I felt as if the college had too hallowed a place in the university’s collective imagination. But there wasn’t any way to articulate those concerns because the college’s position was to look after the undergraduate program.

I’ve heard people say very poignantly, angrily, frustratedly, that the university to which they had been recruited, sometimes turning down other job offers, was just not the institution they found once they got here. And the Klehr Resolution, because it talked about how the merger would diminish the college, in a certain way crystallized the nature of the problem for many faculty.

Perhaps this needs to be debated in a more open forum. And perhaps there will be a means for discussing the kinds of frustrations one hears frequently—frustrations with campus discourse, with how teaching and research, as well as graduate and undergraduate missions, are often articulated as polar opposites and as mutually exclusive.

AE What do you think is the next step in moving the faculty toward this discussion?

JM I feel very strongly that the planning discussion has to be faculty-led, although having real involvement from the administration is absolutely fundamental. My preference would be for it to be led by elected faculty, an ad hoc committee that has been elected specifically for this purpose. One of the formats that’s been proposed is that each of the divisions—the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences—discuss what kinds of structures would suit their needs most and then bring that all forward and merge it into a single plan. I think that we need to start by having open discussions that cross those boundaries. Humanists don’t necessarily know what the concerns of scientists are and vice versa. It would be very fruitful to have cross-disciplinary discussion from the outset.