Advisment to the faculty?

The DE reported the other day on a change in the works to shift some advising responsibilities from academic advisors to faculty.  The Provost quickly enough shot down the story in an email sent to deans (and pasted below). The story has arisen thanks to a report on campus advising by an outside consultant (embedded below).  This report is highly critical--critical of what it termed a "chaos model" of campus advising, with a particular weakness in advising for pre-major students. The report (which I've just skimmed) does briefly discuss the advisory role of faculty, but only as a very secondary matter, as something warranting further study.  Money quote:  "This report does not focus on the role of faculty advisors or the potential for further development of faculty advising at SIU" (p. 11).

So unless there are internal plans afoot that I'm not privy to, I don't think there's any real problem here from a faculty perspective. And while the report was critical of advising on campus, it was careful not to be critical of advisors, who are by and large doing all they can in what the report characterizes as very poor conditions. Advisors have to spend far too much of their time negotiating paperwork and arbitrary and unclear campus requirements and policies.

What is a university?

Lost in SIUC’s year-long logorrhea about budgets, furlough days, and various administrative restructurings has been any serious discussion of what a university is, fundamentally and essentially. Lots of chatter about “economic engines,” graduation rates, enrollment, and retention, but nary a peep about what this place actually does, what a university—as opposed to a college or community college—is for. The result of this lacuna is the blithe assumption that we all know what a university is and that we’re just discussing different ways to attain the same ends. As usual, such sanguine ecumenism is sorely misguided: the changes advocated by the current administration at SIUC actively and fundamentally change what universities do. They change what research is and they change what teaching is. They change your job, not just how you get compensated for your job.

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So what is a university? Universities make and evaluate knowledge (research and scholarship) and transmit this knowledge and its values to students (teaching). Period. That’s it. No elaborate dragon of ambiguity to be slain. But that does mean that knowledge is the principle of value, not utility, feasibility, or popularity. And thus, valuing has a substantive content and does not reduce to a merely equanimous weighing of pros and cons. Learning means not just knowing, but also evaluating from the standpoint of this knowledge—and solely from this standpoint.

Wednesday's News

Too much news, too little time.  

• Jyotsna Kapur's letter in the DE: Cheng's promotion of doublethink.
• DE: Faculty work conditions linked to student success. 
• DE: University 101 made mandatory (I here find myself somewhat troubled by the same thoughts expressed by Geology Professor Ken Anderson in the story: see my post Who's Afraid of University College?)
• Southern: Cheng at the faculty senate. (Worth more comment than I can give it here: those in attendance are hereby encouraged to provide commentary.)
• Southern: Mortenson attacks low higher ed funding as "intergenerational cop-out".
• NY Times: Survey finds small increase in faculty pay.

Who's Afraid of University College?

To step aside, briefly, from my obsession with FA-administration negotiations, I thought I'd address another potentially contentious issue: the Chancellor's implementation of the new University College model.  My initial reaction to this was rather ho-hum.  I don't really care who the director of admissions reports to, frankly; I didn't think that any rearrangements of the administrative flow-chart were likely to result in vast improvements in enrollment, but, hey, if it helps, great.  Some have raised the possibility that a University College could be a sort of Trojan Horse, to be staffed by new faculty, presumably non tenure-track faculty.  But as far as I'm aware there's no evidence of any such plan.  


Yet I'm coming to see that the whole University College experiment may impact our educational mission in ways I hadn't expected, as I've recently become aware of some of the possible ripple effects of the new first year course.