« Wine Shipping - Lots of Happy Upstate New Yorkers! | Main | A little bracing whiff of incompleteness »

May 16, 2005

A New University of California campus from scratch

I hadn't read anything about this before -- the UC system is starting a new research university and have already spent some $400 million at it. The article is an interesting read -- they're trying to work with divisions instead of departments:

Most radical, perhaps, is UC-Merced's decision to abolish the normal structure of academic departments. "If I had a department of psychology, I would have one that ranked tenth out of 10, and it would be that way for some time," Tomlinson-Keasey said. "That's not good for an institution that's trying to make its mark."

By keeping faculty grouped more loosely in larger categories such as engineering, humanities and natural sciences, the chancellor hopes to encourage cross-discipline collaboration and reduce the usual pattern of academic turf wars.

I'm skeptical about the good results of that effort -- turf wars are endemic to the species, I fear; it just moves them around to not have a structure called "departments." Prof. Burke has an interesting suggestion about non-departmental hiring that gets at a very different way to understand a non-departmental structure than transcending turf wars (that's sort of what it's about - go read it). Dissolving "departments" or "disciplines" is a reform well-worth considering, but it's also worth remembering that disagreement and factions and turf wars will soon enough crystalize around some other center.

Prof. Burke's suggestion revolves not around dissolving disciplines but around hiring people who cross disciplines -- I guess we can hope UC Merced has done that in its hiring, too.

I've experienced a little of the difficulty of advertising for discipline-crossers first hand. My graduate degree is from Emory's Institute of Liberal Arts. We (the students) always wondered how they (the faculty) would ever actually replace someone; everyone in the ILA was so -- umm -- different. You had the professor who had an M.Div., a Ph.D., and wrote mainly about postmodern short fiction. There was the professor who wrote comparatively about 18th and 19th century French travellers -- Custine in Russia and de Tocqueville in America, for instance. Then there's the anthropologist whose initial work was on Tibet but who became a psychoanalyst. I was never particularly privy to the conversations about how they advertised, other than that they still seem to be hiring interesting folks who cross lots of lines cheefully. Some of them are more integrated into disciplinary discussions in other departments on campus than others. Some Emory departments spun off the ILA -- Comp Lit, for instance, was a concentration inside the ILA when I got there and is now a freestanding program.

Now at a university the ILA provided an institutional structure for those who weren't in a department, per se. At a liberal arts college it's more difficult to encourage, review (for tenure and promotion), protect, and eventually replace people who don't have a specific departmental identification. I agree with Prof. Burke that this is the way small liberal arts colleges should go -- not to become bad little universities or be blown by ever whim of student enrollment but to try to find ways to understand their strengths and make them stronger by connecting them. I agree -- but I'm not sure how best to do it.

Posted by CrankyProfessor at May 16, 2005 2:40 PM