April 6, 2000
E-mail a Response
The Faculty
Opinion
he faculty could learn a lot from their students.
All this ruckus that the Faculty Senate is trying to churn up, and the administration pretending not to hear them. Isn't it obvious? They're not hearing you because you're not being "loud" enough.
When the administration doesn't listen to us students, we don't just get sit around writing resolutions: that's exactly what they want us to do! Instead, we get mad in a loud way! We take over buildings. We blockade streets. We march all over the Arts quad with signs and megaphones and fists in the air. Why do faculty miss the brilliance of these tactics? Have they simply lost their youthful idealism?
Of course not. It's just that the faculty are actually civilized, and they respect the administration enough to attempt communication through open dialogue instead of screaming and yelling. Unfortunately, this valiant approach consistently proves futile, as the administration doesn't seem particularly interested in listening.
To illustrate this we will locate the perfect example... eCornell, the proposal to provide Cornell courses to the online universe through a for-profit corporation. It was proposed to the Faculty Senate in early February. They felt that since it was an academic matter and since it could eventually have some effect on them, they might be good people to consult on the matter. Or maybe they at least wanted the administration to pretend that the professors were part of the decision process.
So they wrote up a resolution, passed it by a narrow margin of 65-1, and sent it to the Board of Trustees. The Board responded, "Well, I appreciate that you want me to wait and consult you before I do anything, but I think I'm going to just go ahead and enact this one without you guys." In other words, their almost unanimous resolution was directly ignored.
It sends a strange message. My whole time here I've been watching activists holding crazy rallies, and the administration responding with pleas for open dialogue through the appropriate channels. Yet here, our faculty did their part: they played by the rules, operating through the Faculty Senate that was set up "to give them a voice." They passed a resolution with the word "Whereas" in all the right places, complete with proper punctuation. And in the end, all the time our eternally-busy professors spent trying to communicate with Rawlings might as well have been spent on improving Cornell's reputation for teaching.
Now this is not a column about eCornell. It should be universally recognized that this brave new policy could lead to capitalists like Philip Morris usurping the University for their own evil wishes, just as well as it could land the University billions of dollars to spread its message of pure good. The issue is just that: whether it is good or bad, the faculty should have been consulted on eCornell before this mechanism was swung into gear, if nothing else than to avoid the slap in the face that it was.
It would be great if this was simply an isolated incidence that we could all put behind us after some make-up love. But sadly enough, this type of blatant disregard for faculty opinion has reared its ugly head time and time again throughout the Rawlings administration.
The same effect transpired around the promotion of Dean Carolyn A. "Biddy" Martin to provost. Let us examine what occurred for democracy. First, Rawlings did reach out to the administration by writing them all a letter asking for comments on who should be the provost. All of those comments, representing the faculty populous, were channeled into Rawlings' office. But what happened next - how the faculty's recommendations were used, etc, is a mystery. All that we know is out popped the name of the next provost.
I have since learned that it is standard etiquette for the president to provide a structural mechanism for faculty involvement in the decision, like an advisory committee or something. Since this was an important issue (the provost is in many ways the President's right-hand man), the bizarre lack of any such committee beleaguered many. Particularly upsetting was the fact that the Cornell News Service, arguably a simple device for administrative propaganda, reported Martin's nomination like it had widespread faculty support. A lot of faculty thus felt not only estranged, but taken advantage of. Furthermore, if the faculty had a problem with the nomination, they couldn't really talk to anyone about it. By cutting out the president's usual channels of information from below, Rawlings may have made this incredibly important decision while completely misinformed. While it's not as extreme as say, the Bay of Pigs, such strategies of leadership have more than once proven disastrous.
So in erecting eCornell and assigning the new Provost, the administration in more than one case made the faculty feel truly unacknowledged. Similar sources of recent irritability amongst the professors include the termination of the Division of Biological Sciences, and the re-design of the Computer Science department that is now underway. I have personal affiliation with both of these problems, having hailed from each department at the time of its upheaval, and hearing the disgruntled mumblings of upset professors first-hand. But in both matters it is questionable whether faculty opinion was adequately consulted.
Again, the specific instances of faculty belittlement, and how they evolved, are not important. What is important is that there are a lot of pissed off professors out there. Apart from the moral dilemmas about faculty rights, this raises some practical problems. First of all, most of the items from which the faculty now feels divorced are absolutely dependent upon them for support. eCornell will not prosper in a climate of faculty bitterness. Provost Martin will find it difficult to work against faculty that resent her.
In the words of one professor, "What we're best at is raising awkward obstacles to clever ideas." Professors pride themselves on being some of the most ingenious and least quiescent people in the face of a challenge. It seems as if every effort should be made to appease them, or at least not to antagonize them.
And in all cases, the rancor looks bad to outsiders, from naive students like me, to prospective faculty and students, U.S. News, or whoever happens to have their ear to the ground. This style of doing business may be ingrained in the personalities of the current administration. Without the rules of common courtesy employed by previous administrations, the problems are perhaps best regulated through structural mechanisms applied to support our University's strained fabric.
Of course, the personalities will soon be changing. Randel's July move to the University of Chicago will usher in a less authoritarian climate, under the guidance of Biddy Martin herself. With any luck, the non-inclusive means by which she ascends to her new position will not preclude her embracing the faculty and striving to rectify this problem for which our current administration is now notorious.
In general, we enjoy a faculty that are used to receiving the attention they deserve. Some of the nation's brightest minds voluntarily fill their classrooms to hear them lecture. The news media grabs for sound bites of their expert opinions, hungry to blast them all over the airwaves. Their books are often best-sellers, enjoyed by Oprah and millions more.
Naturally, now that they're being ignored and mad about it, I'd love to see certain unnamed profs pointing rifles out the windows of Willard Straight, or playing bongos on the steps of Goldwin Smith. I'd love to watch the entire computer science department walking in circles on the crosswalk to obstruct the queue of traffic.
But until that day, the best approach seems to remain open dialogue, and towards this end, the faculty is playing their part in spades. We can only hope that the administration will attempt to meet them halfway.
Nathan Wilson is a graduate student in the College of Engineering. The North Façade appears every Monday.
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