Final Thoughts as SIS Council Chair

Rather than take up too much time at the Council meeting on Friday May 20th, I decided to post my final thoughts here.


Final Thoughts, SIS Council Chair

I have been associated with SIS Council since its establishment five years ago, the first three as LIS Program Chair and, of course, the last two as Chair. I have found the work on this Committee to be interesting (it provides a unique steady view of School-wide activities), frustrating (it continues to evolve in scope and as a topic for debate, sometimes as if we had no hand in its creation), and satisfying (it enables anyone involved with it to have an important role in the School’s annual planning process and other related tasks). This may be the most important venue for participating in the School's governance.

As I have made clear in the past (although not in a completely satisfying way perhaps), I believe first and foremost that SIS Council is the most important forum for faculty governance and the best mechanism for continued unification of the School. And I am more than convinced that faculty governance is very important, more so than the notion that what is good for me is good for our School. We need to have individual research and scholarly agendas, but I also think that a commitment to a unified School (perhaps where there are no individual programs, all faculty meet together regularly, and faculty supporting specialized curricular tracks work together as needed) is essential to supporting such agendas and encouraging collaborative research and teaching projects.

A perusal of The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education in just the past few days ought to convince us of why we need to work together more effectively and with greater imagination. Dan Berrett (“In for Nasty Weather,” Inside Higher Education, May 16, 2011, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/16/life_for_college_professors_is_no_longer_what_it_once_was) argues that life is getting more challenging for faculty: “While the current state of affairs is, in one sense, a reflection of the wider economic shocks that have hit other workers, many of the problems now surfacing pre-date the financial crisis. The erosion of status, stature, and prospects for a future that much resembles the past has occurred for complicated reasons, experts say, including long-term, systemic, external and ideological ones as well as more recent political and economic developments, and some self-inflicted wounds.” He comments on issues such as the disappearance of tenure, increasing teaching loads, loss of collective bargaining rights, “tempting targets” with copied and heavily edited lectures, economic cuts, a growing reliance on adjuncts, and a bottom-line management confused with accountability.

On the same day as Berrett’s essay appeared, Jack Sripling reported in the Chronicle that the “deteriorating number of tenured positions in higher education is a common source of concern for faculty, but few college presidents seem perturbed by the trend” (Jack Sripling, “Most Presidents Prefer No Tenure for Majority of Faculty,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Most-Presidents-Favor-No/127526/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en). Will we get to have a voice in whether tenure gets to stay in our School? What will the School be like if there are no tenured faculty? The only way we can contend with such matters is if work together more effectively and efficiently. Not only do we have the barriers of the Programs, we have that of the building we work in. William J. Mitchell notes that the Media Lab building "was originally laid out as a collection of carefully tailored zones for particular research and production activities, with meticulously worked out areas and adjacencies. But it did not stay that way for long. Technologies and research agendas rapidly changed, and the researchers repeatedly tore the space apart and reorganized it, eliminated old uses, and took over areas for new uses as short-term necessity demanded. The process was much like that of fragmentation of disk space, and the interior quickly lost any semblance of architectural coherence. Even worse, some fundamental design assumptions became obsolete; the deep, artificially ventilated and lit interior spaces had been designed on the assumption that computers occupied fixed locations and required highly controlled environments, but the emergence of robust, portable, wireless laptops with screens bright enough for use in daylight changed all that. The lesson was that detailed programs of architectural requirements -- based on the immediate needs of the first occupants, and frequently demanded by managers as a justification for building and as a way of checking the architect's work -- do not provide a rational basis for planning a research building that will operate for many decades in a highly dynamic environment" (William j. Mitchell, imaging MIT: Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century [Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007], pp. 106, 108). Think about how little our building has changed in the past quarter-of-a-century, especially in how it has segregated the various programs into their own spaces.

Everywhere we look, we see dangerous trends. Yesterday, I read a call for papers for the journal TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies on the theme of “Out of the Ruins: The University to Come,” noting, “After decades of chronic under-funding and restructuring, public universities have ceded the university’s public role in a democracy and embraced “academic capitalism” as a “moral” obligation. Acting as venture capitalists, they pressure academics to transfer and mobilize knowledge and encourage research partnerships with private interests; acting as real estate developers, they take over neighborhoods with callous disregard for established communities; acting as military contractors, they produce telecommunications software and light armored vehicles for foreign governments; acting as brand managers, they open branch plant campuses around the world and compete for foreign students who can be charged exorbitant fees for access to a ‘first world’ education.” Now, some of you might say, where do I sign up? But my argument is that in times such as these, we need to work on our collective vision, and that such work is not a luxury but a necessity. As the TOPIA CFP continues, “In addition to external influences such as globalization, technoscience, corporatization, mediatization, and higher education policy, internal managerial initiatives, bureaucratization, deprofessionalization, structural complicity between administration and faculty, and intellectual subjectivities must also be analyzed. All of us, no matter what our political position, must take the time to reflect on the broad questions raised by these changes. Is the site of the university worth struggling over or re-imagining? Can the neoliberal university be set against itself? Is it time for reform or exodus? What other practices of knowledge production, interpretations, modes of organization, and assemblages are possible?” Over the past two years we have discussed a variety of such issues in Council, although not always with convincing or reassuring results (and certainly not with the Cultural Studies framework represented in this journal’s call for papers – yet, if we are truly interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary [or want to be] then we could use a little of this perspective sprinkled in for seasoning).

There is another reason for why we need to work together on a unified vision and how we govern ourselves. There are indicators we are not particularly healthy, no matter how well each of us individually believes he or she is doing. In just one week, I observed a Commencement where a very small portion of faculty participated, prompting graduating students and their families to wonder where we were; the funeral of a dear colleague, where the faculty was also light in their attendance; and a simple online survey about communication requested by a consultant where most failed to complete it (at least without multiple requests). Now all of us will say I am just too busy, and many are very busy. For me, the most telling indictment of this notion comes in Sherry’s funeral where we learned things about her none of us knew, suggesting to me, at least, that we do not know each other very well (and this harms us in many ways). Is it any wonder, then, that we struggle to bring the School together? And I include myself in this (especially since I sit in an office across the hall from her old office). I function as a humanist, one who wants to be left alone in the archives making discoveries in the most serendipitous and unscientific fashion, examining and touching materials that probably will never be digitized (as Nancy Lusignan Schultz just wrote about in her essay, “Serendipity in the Archive,” The Chronicle Review, 20 May 2011, B16-17). I am not saying this to chastise anyone, although I am sure some will see it this way; I am stating this to criticize myself for having failed to operate even at the most basic level of human interaction. I know we can do better (as can I).

If you have been following the blog “Creating a Pitt iSchool Vision,” you will understand that we have many visions, but that there is some encouragement to be taken in that a quarter of us have posted something about what we think (with even some commenting on each other’s posts). If you paid attention to the recent elections to SIS Council, you also understand that we are split evenly down the middle about whether we want to bother with a unified School. Now if you think I am just some kind of true believer in the iSchool concept and a vision that moves us past curricular tracks, programs, and laments about the loss of departments, then you haven’t read my The Demise of the Library School: Personal Reflections on Professional Education in the Modern Corporate University (Duluth, MN: Library Juice, 2010). In that book, I worry about what we might lose or have lost already in the transition from the L to the LIS to the I-School. We need to figure out a way to capitalize on our diversity of knowledge, expertise, and perspectives. We have a long way to go, especially as we dwell in caves scattered through our building (my cave has gargoyles, paintings, and a lot of those stone age information sources -- books). I like it, but I need to come out every then and again.

We have work to do.

In that vein, I have only three recommendations to offer to the next class of SIS Council, and the recommendations have nothing to do with the substance of what Council deliberates (the Dean has offered us a good list of topics to be considered in addition to the normal budgeting and planning work). I want to address the process (although in this process you will see my own sense of the School’s vision). Donald Norman, in his latest book, writes, “Just as the owner of a cluttered desk sees order in its structure, we will see order and reason in complexity once we come to understand the underlying principles” (Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011], p. 4). I think we have work to do on figuring out the principles guiding us.

First, I urge Council to be more aggressive in taking the lead in faculty governance. Except for the budgeting and planning responsibility, Council has waited for matters to trickle up to it. I believe Council needs to be more energetic in proposing back to the faculty new programs, new directions, collaborative projects, and other actions strengthening and uniting our School. At times, it needs to make a decision or offer a recommendation to the Dean and report what it has done back to the various academic programs. My reason for suggesting this is simple -- Council is the group who generally considers issues from a School-wide perspective (whereas the various programs do not).

Second, I recommend Council meet with the faculty as part of the three All Faculty meetings, normally held each academic year, in order to discuss matters arising and concerns and issues related to the direction of the School. This should strengthen considerably the issue of communication, a topic that emerges every few days or so (or at least it seems). The logistics of this can be worked out in short order. Council can bring everyone up-to-date about what it is deliberating, and the faculty can provide commentary on these topics as well as raise other issues.

Third, and finally, I recommend Council hold one meeting in which all staff members are invited to discuss topics of concern to them (perhaps the same should be done with the SIS students as well). Such meetings can improve the knowledge of Council about the overall health of the School, as well as foster a better sense of openness in the governance of the School. And, besides this, the staff members often possess many insights about important issues facing the School.

You are probably disappointed in the simplicity of these recommendations (although they might require some SIS bylaws tinkering). You also may be wondering why I didn’t implement these during my two-year stint as Council Chair. Honestly, I thought we would naturally evolve to this operational mode, but I did not count on the resistance to a unified School with a stronger vision to support such collaborative work and communication. I believe this is essential to our future, and I leave it in the good hands of the new Chair and Council. Best wishes. It has been fun.

Richard J. Cox