[Alumni-chat] Recent Visit to YS

[Travis Sanford (travissanford at msn.com)]

Seth, toy, deb,

For all the reasons, everyone mentions, the University (and in this sentence at least I mean inclusive of the college) has not succeeded in creating a comprehensive, representative, integrated mission or goal for itself, or defined its ideals and how those ideals permeate the culture of the University. The AUBoT admitted to this at least as far back as their February 2004 meetings when they asked the question: Why are we a University? Thirty years into the deal and the question gets asked and to my knowledge, a good answer has not been forthcoming.

As Adrezj pointed out during the Kentucky Holiday Inn meeting, their is no university in the sense that most exist. There is no integration of culture, there are no reciprocal course offerings, each unit strives to define itself seperately and not get lost within that annoying response when asked what school you went to: "Antioch, isn't that the one with the campuses all over the place." The university does not offer its students the oppoprtunity to go to the other units for a semester say or (to my knowledge) does the univeristy offer its co-op students opportunities within, but outside the college campus. Even in little YSO the univeristy has created an identity schism by physical isolation (and Seth I have spoken to many a McGregor student unhappy that part of their education does not include a daily (or nightly) inspirational look at the historic core.) 

More importantly the university does not really exist as most do because the non-college faculty do not have tenure. This may well work for them and some may stay on as long as a tenured college professor, but at root the faculty has no culture that is united across the U and it has no structure to unify it, represent its interests or form an effective base for advocacy.

This guys, is where the liberal corpratism issue IS most relevant and hardly paranoid. The structure of the university has evolved over the years to a very powerful chancellor whose only check is the chair of the BOT. The university has effectively eliminated all organized units external to the administration. There is no creative tension between faculty and administration and students and staff, it is a streamlined world where the decisions of the chancellor are the end of the argument and, at least the incumbent, the chancellor has no need to consult or discuss, just inform.  This is not the way most universities, especially the most succesful ones (open definition of succes but lets say academic reputation, success of graduates, endowment) say Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, etc etc, operate. In all of these institutions the faculty have significant, organized governance power, that administrators respect or disresepct at their peril. They all have very activist alumni bases
that demand and receive significant consultation. All of them also place their undergraduate colleges at the center of their mission, as the original purveyor of their brand and their quality. Yes their PhD's become a lot more imp;ortant, their law schools and medical schools are very rich and often operate as seperate fiefdoms, but all of them tend to share at least some kind of physical continuity of their campuses, and cross over in the daily life of graduate and undergraduates and the cross fertilization that follows. Antioch University has none of this. Antioch operates more like a cross between a state u with distributed campuses and final say coming from the regents who are political appointees, and a grocery store chain which uses the same loyalty card but maintains seperate identities (that is not a slam, just an analogy).

This poses several questions:

Is the identity and mission crisis and subsuquent financial instability of the college the result of the structure of the university?

or the result of the personalities of the people that operate the university?

or the result of incompatible pedagogic philosophies and agendas?

and are these differences irreconcialable and if so how to move forward.

McGregor is at the center of the firestorm because of its odd history and success. Like everything else it originally was a creature of the college, created by the college faculty as new revenue stream to support the residential aspects of the college. This may have been the original sin as offering a degree with classes seperate from the college structure would of course eventually lead to different identities. When McGregor became very succesful it was determined that the college did not have the resources for it to grow and the university took over. Then the personalities come into play. The evoltuion of seperate McGregor identity and a stark comparison to the college's developed around the incumbent president. Her background and training led her to determine and succesfully argue for seperation not just physically but also intellectually and conceptually. She and others believed the focus group and marketing studies that told them Antioch College was a negative for her base
customers in the Miami Valley. Rather than investing the time and money into revamping the college's infrastructure and image the University chose to chart the course of seperation. This may have been good for the bottom line enrollment of McGregor, but since you can't prove the negative, what would have happened if a new building had been constructed on campus, or, better yet, the money to create a seperate McGregor had gone to revamping existing spaces to benefit both institutions and save the university money in the process? (A buildign used 18 hours a day is a better deal than one used intermittently).

Personally, I love the business community. Morgan's Antioch was founded not on a communitarian ideal but an entrepenurial one. As Moose once asked me, "Have you ever thought about a business major? We need more progressive folks, critical people to go into business to change the way business is done." In retrospect I should have spent a little more time with kathy lapalombara and less with frank adler, but the point is there is nothing wrong per se with corporate (or heavens, even military) investment and support of antioch. Control is wrong, censorship is wrong, overwrought advertising is wrong, but to the extent that such support does not infringe upon academic freedom i fail to see how ANY institution of graduate and post graduate education could survive with out it. The issue, I think, is that the model of corporate management has entered the academic realm and not for the good. There are lots of HBR articles about dynamic leadership and its application across all organizations
and similar articles about what Warren Bennis calls "followership". They way the university is currently managed is an example of failed leadership, in that its is defensive, exclusive, heavy handed and of failed followership as all of the decision making power is vested in a group that has one source of patronage, the Chancellor. No one challenges the Chancellor because the position is invested with so much power criticism is a guarantee of censure. Then it gets personal. Is it the particular approach of this administration which is anethma to the college? Yes, it certainly makes it worse, but the structure, following that old axiom about power, invites exactly the kind of leadership we now have.

Dr Murdoch is not in  and of herself the problem. The money crisis predated her appointment. The governance issues predated her appointment, the decline of sustained college enrollment and ifrastructure predates her appointment. But it is the management of these issues first under Jim Craiglow (and especially Glenn Watts as CFO) and now Dr. Murdoch that has led to a crisis of legitimacy from the perspective of the college and its stakeholders.  While we must work with even with those we dislike ( well I remember arrogant faculty and ignorant students on adcil and my own on again off again radicalism) but at the end of the day we have to have some faith that the other side will respect the final agreement and apply the principles we claim to be so proud of to their governance and management. I for one, do not believe Chancellor Murdoch will do that. There is certainly no evidence that she believes in any other governance model than the one she has adopted: Top down enforcement,
non-responsive to criticism, centralized decision making with out input from stakeholders. This can be a succesful model, but it is certainly not one the alumni of the college will ever respect or trust and it runs directly counter to succesful academic leadership if success is a big endowment, rising enrollment across all units and the trust and respect if not affection of the stakeholders.

Leslie, I long to smell the air in YSO. Everyday I get closer to one of those moments were money and family and clients be damned, I am gettin on a plane. I am glad that you went. I do wish that the experience had a less ambivalent effect on you. But i think your central realization, the importance of place and the history, traditions and ethos of the people that came before, is very, very important. It can serve as the base for the college's rebirth.

I apologize for the rambeling post.

The schism was already there, this crisis did not create it. The push to forge seperate indentities and no common one made the schism and the eventual hosilities inevitable.