A Mid-Semester Report: What I See after Three Months on the Job

It may be far too early for me to venture any valid observations on the state of the college, the faculty, or anything else from the standpoint of being Provost but I’m going to do it anyway. That’s one of the advantages of being an interim. There’s a certain freedom to sin boldly. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You decide to cut short my tenure in the office and I get to go back to my students and my research!

So here are five things – five fairly big things -- that I see from my perch after three and half months on the job as needing to be addressed by us in the months and years ahead. Doing something about each of them is now on my priority list for the next 20 months.

  1. I’ll start with the easy one -- We need to figure out some type of system of full professor review. The mutual mentoring program is not operating and we need something more robust anyway. Being accountable to one another post-promotion to full professor is not a matter of interference or lack of trust. It’s a matter of appropriate assessment, encouragement, and course correction when that’s necessary. Such reviews would not be contract reviews; they’re for the purpose of keeping faculty headed in the right directions.
  2. We need to develop more extensive and effective ways of supporting our faculty of color. In recent years, we have made some good strides in our recruitment efforts of faculty of color and we’ve been fortunate to persuade a number of those candidates to join us. But now we need to match those recruitment efforts with efforts to sustain and support those faculty of color, particularly those who are pre-tenure. All of our pre-tenure faculty feel a certain amount of vulnerability in their positions. That is only natural. But such feelings of vulnerability are compounded by being a faculty person of color, as well as for some of them, being a woman. Our community, and specifically our faculty community, needs to be more alert to those realities and more intentional about how we offer support.
  3. We need to figure out what we want our chief academic officer to do and to be. How do want to define the CAO position at Westmont, both philosophically and pragmatically? How do want this person spending her or his time? I raise these questions because I think our current model is not sustainable. One symptom of the problem is that in my current role, I presently serve on 18 committees, task forces or ad hoc groups. And that work is only a portion of what I am to be attending to in the role. We need to reflect on crafting an academic administrative structure that is appropriate to the size and scope of the work. This point then leads into a fourth observation.
  4. We need to think about how best to re-structure our committees and the relative distribution of administrative work across the faculty. We have of course been discussing these matters in recent years and continue that work in Faculty Council currently, particularly in relation to a plan to re-structure Academic Senate. Beyond that, we need to keep looking at other committees and the larger question of whether our current very flat administrative structure that has more than 25 department heads and directors reporting directly to the provost is sensible. There are surely many other models of how to organize the layers of faculty governance out there in the world of private higher education. It’s time we took a look at some other possibilities.
  5. Finally, we need to begin to discuss the viability of the economic model that has governed Westmont and lots of other private colleges for decades. This is a conversation that extends far beyond faculty but faculty need to a part of it. The model I’m talking about is the one that assumes that we can in perpetuity cover our increasing costs by continually increasing the costs we charge to students. There are good reasons to think that we are fast approaching the tipping point on the adequacy of that assumption. In other words, the affordability issue is a very real problem for us and not just for this season of recession. Enrolling 1200 students of the caliber we want who can figure out a way to afford to be here is getting tougher all the time. That means that we need to make the case for what we offer at Westmont more compelling than ever. It also means that we need to figure out ways to contain our costs, including the costs of faculty compensation. These are serious and significant challenges, ones we ignore at our peril.

So, that’s my snapshot of what I see this far into the job. I’ll count on your help to either correct my vision or aid me in the effort to address these important issues.

One final word – next Wednesday, Bill Wright and I head for Istanbul, Turkey to rendezvous with Europe Semester and explore that city’s possibilities as a future site for a Westmont study abroad semester. That means I will miss next Thursday’s forum. What I have planned for that day is for four of us to share some words of thanksgiving. Each year we tend to bypass that holiday in our academic calendar and I thought it would be good for us to devote some time to offering words of gratitude. Since I can’t be there to share in that time, let me take a moment now to express my gratitude for all of you. On this November 13th day, of all days, I am deeply grateful for this loving and grace-filled community.