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Presidents don’t consult faculty

3/7/2011: From Doug Lederman and Scott Jaschik at Insidehighered.com. Apparently this is a trend:

Other signs are also apparent in the survey results of a growing distance between faculty members and presidents. Asked which groups of campus constituents have been most helpful in confronting the economic challenges of the last two years, and which groups the presidents expected to be most effective in providing help in the next two years, faculty didn’t fare well.

The presidents have been most pleased with and plan to rely on senior administrators, followed by trustees, deans and department heads — and only then faculty leaders, as seen in Table 11. …

Particularly at large universities, Thelin says, there is an entire new layer of administration (the central administration) that didn’t use to be so clearly on top of the various colleges and research centers. “I think many presidents are rather isolated from the faculty, and I wonder how many of them are really comfortable with the faculty,” he says. “The worlds are so removed,” he says, that faculty members can’t be surprised that they aren’t around the table when a president is making key decisions. …

Nelson says that faculty members have a responsibility to look critically at all academic programs and help administrations improve them, and make difficult decisions. “But faculty members cannot be of much help when the shared governance door is shut in their faces, or when full information about campus finances is withheld,” he says.

Still, I think it’s remarkable that Presidents Frohnmayer and Lariviere changed *graduation day* without consulting the faculty – or the students, or the parents.

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