That Joke Isn't Funny Any More

The major shortcoming of the Keiser administration was its utter lack of concern over what the faculty, as a whole, thought or felt. Of course, the faculty had just as little of an idea about what the central administration really does. But then, since the central administration exists primarily to facilitate and guide the faculty in "producing educated persons," I considered them to have have a more pressing need to understand the way we operated, and not the other way around. Such was not the case.

When I got here, the University still had a biennial morale survey. Whether I believed or disbelieved in any particular rant, paean, or simple comment, I was almost always edified, and in time began to submit comments of my own. But the biennial morale survey vanished from sight in 1996 in a welter of rumors and dire predictions of potential libel suits, prompting a suspicion that the central administration was more interested in throttling meaningful faculty input than practicing shared government.

Over the years this suspicion has hardened into certainty, as illustrated by the scathing Diamond/Sell Report presented to the central administration in January 2004. Foremost among the identified shortcomings were indifference toward the Public Affairs Mission and the lack of any meaningful communication between the faculty and the central administration. I was personally informed by one of the then-Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs that remedying these perceptions was the job of... the Director of the Academic Development Center. WTF?

The central administration responded with a series of "Centennial Public Discussions" in early October 2004. Handsome fliers were produced and splattered all over campus, facilitators trained, and tables loaded with Sodexho's finest hors d'oeuvres - and almost nobody showed up. Those who did show up were invited to discuss not the Diamond/Sell Report but about how best to include the Public Affairs Mission into one's teaching. WTF?

It's not that I'm not blaming us. It's nothing short of pathetic that 90% of the faculty couldn't be bothered to spend a couple of hours discussing the future of the institution. Too many of us are indeed that shiftless. But it didn't take a rocket scientist to tell that nothing worthwhile would come out of the Centennial Public Discussions.

Years ago, the University employed an Attendance Counselor named Harry O. Taylor. Mr. Taylor was an imposing figure who sounded and even looked a little bit like James Earl "God" Jones. I once stopped by his office to follow up on a student whom I had sent to see him; turns out that the student had poked his head into Mr. Taylor's office, looked him in the eye, said "My professor told me I had to see you," and got the hell out of there. "I guess he saw me, all right," laughed Mr. Taylor.

I would have expected behavior like that from a teenaged snot who thought he could pass my course without actually attending it. The faculty should have been able to expect better from the central administration. Yet the President's Office tasked Academic Affairs to establish campus dialogue about the Diamond/Sell Report; Academic Affairs passed the job down to the Academic Development Center, which outsourced it to the Communication Department, whose veteran public dialogue mongers tried heroically to start some meaningful conversations, but in vain.

I guess we had our Centennial Public Discussion, all right.