LET'S MAKE THE FACULTY FILL EVEN MORE FORMS.

The secret to remedying dysfunctional academic departments?  More computer scripts and more rubrics.

In an earlier piece, our team described a dashboard that serves as an early-warning system of indicators that can show when an academic unit is on the brink of dysfunction -- or, even worse, already mired in it. We developed that resource, the Academic Unit Diagnostic Tool (AUDiT, primarily with administrators in mind, although entire departments have come to use it over time.

Our project has worked with department-level and more senior university leaders to explore how to use this diagnostic tool to shape strategies for intervention before they become debilitating. In talking with those leaders, we have found that while every department has distinct features, the broad outlines of what constitute healthy departments and dysfunctional ones fall into identifiable patterns.

Wherever you see twee acronyms, you probably are watching people with too much time on their hands.  Too many fractious meetings, and a lot of faculty turnover (even if there are junior faculty failing to make tenure, there's something wrong.)  I'd think, though, that if the college office is receiving a lot of meeting minutes -- this is a reporting requirement at many universities -- or if the same complainants are showing up at the dean's suite with the same grievances, you don't really have to run some new computer diagnostics.

The faculty point of view is rarely homogenous. Sometimes, in fact, the faculty is highly factionalized and can’t come together with a shared sense of what is happening in the department, good or bad -- and those divisions become their own problem, as well as an impediment to change. Administrative intervention to try to broker and bridge those differences can be essential.

It might have come to the pass the columnists decry because of administrative usurpations, or by default of the faculty, but here we are.

Institutional administrators face the challenge of balancing valuable norms of free speech or academic freedom with protecting the reputation of their institution as a haven for such views. Such challenges have provided some of the most contentious controversies in higher education over the past several years. But a key question in those stories is: Where are the faculty voices holding their peers accountable?

Instead what we see is a deep reluctance to speak out. Sometimes that is because of faculty members’ reflexive suspicion of administrators and immediate tendency to default toward defending a faculty colleague, no matter what. Sometimes it is because of notions of union solidarity. Sometimes it is because of loyalties based on identity categories and/or shared political ideologies. Sometimes it is all of the above. As a result, we often see variations on the bystander effect: people unwilling to take a public position even in situations that they know are wrong. Administrators often do not have that luxury.

Once upon a time, the faculty were the stewards of the university, and once upon a time the faculty understood that there were rules of debate, but that debate, rather than forced consensus, was the way things worked.  These days?  I fear that identities and ideologies crowd out serious work, including serious work on what sort of a department its professors want to have.