[Alumni-chat] Facilities Committee

[Sistersara at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/10/2007 12:02:26 A.M. Central Standard Time,  
j_mhayes at hotmail.com writes:

Thanks  for the detailed and compelling history, I appreciate the 
considerable  efforts. One immaterial adjustment to it might be the parameter years of  
Adcil's becoming "advisory" to the President. I was on Adcil for the entire  
year 90-91 (co-oped on campus), and we were clearly advisory to Al when I came  
on board. While my memory is  fuzzy about that time, Al wasn't heavy  handed 
about it, "guiding" the discussion if you will, but critical decisions  were 
his at that point. 



John, as my examples indicate, the time frame I would examine for  
establishing a time frame for the years when AdCil morphed from a key decision  maker in 
Antioch's Governance set-up, into the advisory role you participated in  at 
the beginning of the 90's, would be the time-frame, 1960 - 1976.  I use  76 as 
an end point because that is when the University was created, and I am  fairly 
sure that the University BoT never saw AdCil as a "real" governing agent  of 
itself, with any significant decision making power that it had any sort of  
real or moral requirement to follow.  By 1976 if the University BoT, or the  
former College BoT had any significant governing discourse with AdCil, it was  
pretty much through the agent of the College President, which was decidedly not  
the plan or practice several decades earlier, when there was a fairly classic 
 three cell division of functions, and a balance of powers.  If you look at  
the schema I discussed yesterday, we initially had two "cells", students and  
faculty, who were represented by elected representatives.  It was  
intentionally unbalanced, Faculty had six seats, Students Three, and  Administration, one 
non-voting representative, but with specific chartered  responsibilities to 
AdCil.  Students who were by far more numerous, played  the key role in 
electing both Faculty and Student representatives, but the  nominating process was 
somewhat weighted in favor of each cell processing the  slates of who was 
running.  I am not sure exactly when it was ended,  perhaps the mid 50's, but at one 
time we also had a weighted electorate, in that  upper class votes counted 
more than for instance freshman votes.  (I  suppose I remember this because in 
the 1970's I did some work for Don Fraser  when he chaired the McGovern-Fraser 
Commission that proposed the modernizing  rule changes for the Democratic 
Party, and one big issue that got lots of debate  was the use of some weighted 
electorates in party structures in order to achieve  more diverse representation. 
 I remembered while trying to edit for  distribution some of the position 
papers, thinking about the irony that I first  encountered a good argument pro 
and con for weighted or non-weighted electorates  during my Freshman Year at 
Antioch, and realized it could be quite  passionate.  Then, in 1971-72 I was 
working to "force" under-represented  groups in the Democratic Constituency,  to 
understand they had to put  their position on governance issues, (and weighting 
was part of it) in a fifty  word or less paragraph, with the possibility of 
putting other materials in  position papers that would be circulated, but maybe 
not read, as we sought to  establish equity for women in the party process, 
and make certain that by the  rules, African Americans and other racial or 
cultural minorities, could never  again be denied representation.  In other words 
you never really knew the  utility of just sitting there and taking in a good 
old fashioned AdCil debate --  at some time in life that argument can have 
great usefulness.  But for the  life of me I can't remember precisely why some 
folk wanted a weighted electorate  at Antioch for AdCil.  I don't remember who 
was making the case that they  were under-represented or empowered in the 50's. 
 Anyhow, that is a side  issue here, but just an example of what you could 
learn by following passionate  governance debates as an undergraduate.  
 
Anyhow, I don't think it was precisely the rules that ended up  
dis-empowering AdCil in the scheme of things, essentially taking away its  position as a 
creation of and responsible to the BoT, I think it was more a  functional 
problem.  The Consensus approach to resolving differences worked  well as long as 
Antiochians were in a relatively small sized face to face  community, but once 
the external campuses needed a voice in decisions, either  through the Faculty 
reps, or the Student reps, the system broke down, because  realisticly, the 
external units were not part of the face to face community that  could put 
"keeping the community together" as a constant and higher goal than  winning on the 
sequence of issues that arose.  We have never really solved  that problem -- 
witness the task that I am sure will come up soon -- how to  divide powers and 
responsibilities between and among BoT's governing the  College and other 
Campuses, and what was being called last weekend at the  agreement announcement, 
the University Board of Governors.  For me, I hope  we keep it fairly simple 
-- you do not necessarily solve problems and move the  purpose of an 
organization forward by making things extra complex.   Complexity weighs in favor not of 
under or unrepresented groups or ideas,  instead it favors those who know how 
to play complex games by complex  rules.  (Witness the US Senate).  
 
In other words, in part I ascribe the change in AdCil's place in things to  a 
realistic comprehension that the old AdCil formula worked quite well in a  
small sized and face to face community, but it became dysfunctional once the  
structure and culture of the governed community changed.  This dysfunction  was 
not dealt with by actually addressing the problem, instead AdCil was moved  
into the realm of irrelevancy by creating social distance between the actual  
decision makers (the University BoT) and the governed community.  When you  see 
new "rules" that make it illegal for communication to take place between the  
governed community and the governors -- you know you have enforced 
dysfunctional  systems.  So we still have to weed our way out of long standing  problems. 
 



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