The Future of The Academy, the
Faculty, and the Soul of Humanity
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by Dennis Gilbert
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The following is the text of Dennis Gilbert's presentation
for the Jan. 17 Copia Lecture.
I would like to begin by commenting on the pleasure it is to
be here with you.
First, it is satisfying to participate in practical visioning
on a topic worthy of our attention. When I agreed to participate
in this lecture series a year ago, I thought of a number of things that
would be worthwhile to discuss and to prepare for. However, it
wasn’t until my hike up the length of Oregon this summer that I had a clear
intuition that my thinking on this topic could be brought into a form
worthy of your concentration tonight. During that hike, I read poet
Phillip Levine’s 2002 book of essays, “So Ask”, and for that reason mainly,
I will draw upon it several times tonight, and also from elements of more
mainstream popular culture.
Fundamental questions are before us, independently of our will,
about the future, institutions of higher education (collectively, The
Academy), the faculty, and humanity and its soul. We may wish
these questions were not before us, as Frodo says, in The Lord of the
Rings: “I wish the ring had never come to me… I wish none of this
had happened.” To which Gandalf replies: “So do all who live to see
such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to
decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Some of you
will recognize this point made by Marx in the “The 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte”: “People make their own history, but they do not make it just
as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from
the past.” It is a good reminder that these challenges are circumstance
placed before us, and along with them, resources, including each other.
Second, this church venue is satisfying for me based on the
topic and my own family history. My immediate ancestors had some
strong relations to churches. On my mother’s side, both her parents
were Methodist ministers, her mother being one of the first ordained
women ministers in the German Methodist Church. My mother played
the church organ since she was seven, and felt the “born into” responsibility
of being the ministers’ child. Both her parents were intellectuals
outside The Academy; both had a sense of global community and one or both
traveled and lived in Africa, Asia, and Europe as well as the US.
My grandmother on my father’s side was an active Protestant evangelical,
the widow of a railroad engineer from her late forties on.
continued
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Interview
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Bob Barber photo by David Shellabarger
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On
Jan. 29 Bill Griffiths interviewed Bob Barber, one of the
faculty representatives on the Governance Task Force.
What is the status of the Goverernance
Task Force?
The March Board meeting (March 10) is the time the President
and the Board have decided that the Board needs to receive the College's
proposal. The intention of the Task Force is to have a draft by the second
week of February. The idea is to create a window of 3 or 4 weeks before
the March Board meeting when the whole staff can talk about the proposal.
Actually if there are 4 weeks then 3 of those weeks would be the open
discussion period. The group needs a week to rework according to whatever
comes out of the discussion. So there is envisioned a discussion period
and then some revisions before the final item goes to the Board.
It sounds like Mary is just going to pick up whatever
comes out of this and hand it off to the Board.
The Board has made it clear they expect the president to work with
the staff to come up with a proposal for governance. The Board outlined
some initial parameters and directed her to work within those. So as the
one resposnible to report back to the board, and the one ultimately responsible
to the board for the decisions made by the governancne system, the president
is taking an extremely active role in the Task Force, making clear the
way she believes things should be. So some of the report is going to reflect
her thinking very directly.
To some extent that's the model
of the councils that is being envisioned. The idea is that the manager
or senior authority in the administration be a part of the process and
able to influence its decisions. Mary is, I imagine, envisioning that the
report that is written will be ready to go to the Board because she has
made sure it's ready. I say that because I think it's very clear that she
is the one the Board is expecting to produce a system.
Mary's goal is that there be a proposal
that she is in line with. In these final weeks we'll see
continued
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Faculty Council Discusses
Governance
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by Bill Griffiths
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Bob Barber handed out a Governance update together with a draft of the charter for the Learning Council, a
new council being proposed by The Governance Task Force.
The Learning council is intended to provide a means for faculty, students,
classified staff and administration to work together around planning support
for instruction and learning.
Questions that arose during the discussion included:What are
the lines of demarcation between the Learning Council and the chief
instructional officer? How are the various councils related? What does
the organization chart look like? What happens when the decisions of
the councils are overridden? Is the faculty simply being given the opportunity
to do the hard work while the decisions are made elsewhere? What would
happen if the faculty really wanted X and management really wanted Y?
How do the unit plans fit into this structure? How will the old systems
be replaced by the new? Is this a system that will really work?
continued
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Columns
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Faculty Professional Developement Opportunity
by Jerry Ross
Fulbright Representative
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The Fulbright Scholar Programs 2004-2005
“Traditional” Fulbright grants are
typically for two months to an academic year. The awards are
for:
- Scholars with international
reputations
- Recent PhD’s who show great
potential
- Community College Faculty
- Academic Administrators and
Independent Scholars
- Artists, Lawyers, journalists,
research scientists, and other professionals
continued
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Editorial
by Bill
Griffiths
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I attended
the January 17 Copia Lecture to hear Dennis Gilbert discuss the Future
of the Academy (see his article in this issue). I know Dennis is always
thoughtful and well read so I expected to get an interesting perspective.
I wasnt disappointed. Dennis went right to the heart of what education
is about. continued
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Past Issues
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10-20-2003
11-12-2003
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