I Can Have Both

What prompts people to volunteer for committees which have nothing to offer except for tedium and yet another golden opportunity to make 901 South National look good, free of charge?

I never wanted to have both. Heaven knows I'm not paid enough even to consider it as an option.

You Just Haven't Earned It Yet

I barely recognize the Honors College any longer. When I taught my first Honors sections back in the late 1980s, they were smaller (about 60% of the normal class size) and the students expected to be worked harder. Not only expected it, enjoyed it. Being an Honors student was a big deal and so was being a member of the Honors Faculty. Not all applications were accepted, and not all of those accepted stayed accepted. I myself felt honored when I got to teach an Honors section.

But things changed. One common way for a college or university to make itself look good is to trumpet its Honors program. The bigger the better, even if there's not enough brains to go around. Not so much the kids, although over the years there did seem to be a few more marginal students than before. No, there was a shortage of "stations," as the then-dean used to put it. First, the number of "stations" was increased by adding extra students to each section. By and by, additional Honors sections were added as individual departments felt able to do so. I am told that the Honors College reimbursed departments for offering Honors sections, although the exact nature of the arrangement still escapes me. Over the years, I must have brought a fair amount of money into my department that way. Whatever. I was still just genuinely honored by the chance to teach in the Honors College.

I honestly can't say just when I stopped being pleased to teach in the Honors College. Even though additional Honors sections had been added, the number of "stations" in each section crept upward. In his unending quest to grow the program by adding more and more "stations," the then-dean of Honors College insensibly exercised less and less scrutiny over the faculty providing these "stations." Quantity counted more than quality.

The situation has not improved with time, as a quick glance at the Honors College's official list of outstanding faculty demonstrates. Most of these people are in fact outstanding teachers and scholars. Some are decidedly not. The official list includes adjunct faculty, retired faculty, and even one full-time member who boasts an Ed.D. from Nova Southeastern University. Absent from the list is last year's dean of the College of Arts and Letters, despite a teaching load which consists exclusively of one Honors section per semester. But absent from the list are several long-time Honors Faculty members who have won various University awards for teaching and/or research, but no longer teach in the Honors College. Not what I would call true excellence.

I don't question the administration's sincere intention to "upgrade" the Honors College. The proverbial rising tide lifts all boats, et cetera. The time, trouble, and money expended in renovating Scholars House, instituting three endowed chairs, and founding a new Honors academic journal all demonstrate good intentions. Yet to me, at least, these initiatives address only tangential concerns. The Honors College already has more students than it can effectively handle with the resources - Honors sections and qualified Honors Faculty - it currently has. Until the Administration addresses this very real need - an outside review would be an excellent start - I am concerned that its efforts will amount to little more than window dressing.

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.