Light on the Hill, Volume II
Miller, Russell
1986
FACULTY ORGANIZATION. The number of Arts and Sciences faculty had grown from 195 full-time members in 1965 to 240 a decade later, and the number of faculty committees, both standing and ad hoc, had likewise grown inexorably over the years. It was apparently much easier to create them than to abolish them. A Committee on Educational Policy was established in 1954, and in the same year the functions of the Committee on Administration were delineated to include supervision over admissions, student attendance, assignment of scholarship aid, and the academic calendar. By the time the committee was abolished in 1978, its functions had been reduced to preparing the annual academic calendar. A Committee on Undergraduate Admissions was created in 1960 and, like all other standing committees, was required to make an annual report. One faculty member complained in 1961 "for the record" that they were being barraged with "an overload of information." Many ad hoc committees became standing committees as the need arose. A Committee on Negro Education, created in 1964 as a temporary group, was broadened to become a standing Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity in 1968. One subcommittee of the Committee on Administration became in 1966 a standing Committee on Scheduling and Registration. | |
The number of faculty committees had proliferated to such an extent and so many committee assignments were necessary by the early 1960s, and so little attempt had been made to make an equitable division of faculty service, that the local AAUP chapter recommended in 1962 the creation of an overall coordinating committee. But the provost at first rejected the idea out of hand, claiming that creation of such a committee would be too glaring an example of "Parkinson's Law of Bureaucracy run rampant." In 1962 alone, six new ad hoc committees and subcommittees came into being. Only three additional ad hoc committees were added in 1963, but in 1967 a record was set when seven more came into existence. As of 1985, only one of the sixteen had been abolished; one subcommittee had become yet another standing committee. If some had not quietly faded away, without formal action to abolish them, the Faculty of Arts and | |
163 | Sciences, according to one bewildered new faculty member, would have become "one giant committee incapable of doing much of anything." This would have fulfilled the goal facetiously recommended in 1952 by Myron J. Files, long-time chairman of the Catalogue Committee, that "for psychological reasons there should be more committees, enough so that everyone serves on one." A Committee on Committees was finally created in 1967 to coordinate committee assignments. Its responsibilities were to make recommendations for appointments to the provost and to nominate faculty members for elected committee positions. It recommended personnel for more than twenty standing committees in 1968-69, and decided that no faculty member should serve on more than one committee at a time. This proved to be only a hope and a promise rather than an accomplished fact. So also did a ten-member all-university faculty committee, organized in 1968 at President Hallowell's request. Bernard W. Harleston, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, had become concerned by 1975 that entirely too much of the faculty workload was being siphoned off into committee work and that more time was needed for research. |
As the Arts and Sciences faculty grew in size and complexity over the years, many responsibilities traditionally carried out by that body were assigned to committees or to the administration, or modified; some were even dispensed with completely. The work of a faculty Committee on the Catalogue was transferred to the provost's office in 1952-53, a year after the position was created. Until 1971 all student petitions, whatever their subjects, had to be acted on by the faculty. The list of degree candidates each semester was laboriously read in all faculty meetings until 1961, when lists were distributed in written form prior to formal action. It was not until 1964 that the annual reports of standing committees were duplicated and distributed to the faculty each spring instead of being read (often at great length) by the chairman. One dubious pleasure denied the faculty, beginning in 1969, was to hear the reading of the minutes of one or more preceding meetings. The authority to approve minutes on behalf of the faculty was delegated to the Committee on Administration until its demise. Thereafter, it became a duty of the Educational Policy Committee. | |
One device for broadening the base of both faculty and student input into educational decisions was an amended bylaw in 1967-68 providing for student membership on certain faculty committees, and making all full-time faculty voting members at meetings of the division of Arts and Sciences, regardless of rank. (There were 381 full-time members in 1977.) Previously, the most recent faculty bylaws | |
164 | (adopted in 1954) had limited voting membership to those of professorial rank. |
In order to allow for increased flexibility in leadership at the departmental level, chairmanships were (theoretically) limited, beginning in 1968, to a maximum of five annual appointments, with the option of a five-year renewal. This was to discourage, if not prevent, chairmanships which sometimes exceeded twenty years for a given individual. A proposal considered by the trustee Educational Policy Committee that there should be no appointments to such an office after a faculty member had reached the age of fifty-five was never adopted. The administration then announced that there should be no such appointments after the age of sixty, but this policy was occasionally honored in the breach rather than in the observance. | |
