Dave Hubin: UO has a fully sufficient number of outstanding administrators

7/19/2013: UO is under-administrated? Our academic accreditors, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, require that

2.A.11 The institution employs a sufficient number of qualified administrators who provide effective leadership and management for the institution’s major support and operational functions and work collaboratively across institutional functions and units to foster fulfillment of the institution’s mission and accomplishment of its core theme objectives.

Hubin’s March 2013 accreditation report, submitted one week after Bean resigned and was replaced with Scott Coltrane, said:

The University of Oregon employs a fully sufficient number of outstanding administrators who provide effective leadership in accordance with this standard. 

Hmm. The accreditor’s response to UO’s 2007 self-study report had taken Johnson Hall to task for shared governance and administrative failings:

Commission criteria assume that there will be a commonly understood and uniformly employed set of institutional policies, rules, practices, and procedures that are employed at every level of administration. These policies should foster open communication and goal attainment. However, the Committee is concerned that the University of Oregon does not currently have these operational policies in place and that campus based decision-making procedures appear to be idiosyncratic and not uniformly applied. Therefore, the Committee recommends that the University of Oregon take steps to enhance internal communication and to review its operating policies in regard to Standard 6, Governance and Administration; Standard 4.A, Faculty Selection, Evaluation, Roles, Welfare andDevelopment and Standard 7.C, Financial Management.

That didn’t happen – in fact Tomlin even stopped publishing a faculty handbook. But the Senate did then implement the policy library and constitution, which Hubin points too as being responsive to these problems. And now we’ve got a faculty faculty union that is doing the rest of the grunt work, as volunteers serving under constant sniper fire from Rudnick and Geller, to make up for the failings of Johnson Hall’s outstanding administrators.