While students were busy sipping eggnog and passing the pumpkin pie over winter break, a consultant to the Ohio University Board of Trustees was working to undermine the already limited involvement of students, faculty and staff in university government. Bob Woodbury, a consultant from the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, suggested at the December meeting of the board's presidential evaluation committee that the process for evaluating the president should be modified to reduce constituent involvement. According to Woodbury, the annual presidential evaluation process will be more efficient if President McDavis is able to submit a self-evaluation to the board for discussion between board members and the president himself, the details of which would not be disclosed to the university community or its representatives. Woodbury suggests that constituent bodies such as Student Senate should only have input in the president's evaluation every four years.
Woodbury's suggestion to limit constituent involvement comes on the heels of requests made by several constituent bodies ' including Student Senate and Graduate Student Senate, with a similar request pending in Faculty Senate ' for more involvement in the president's evaluation and for a more open evaluation process. Crazy, right? The Board of Trustees wouldn't possibly limit constituent involvement now, right? Tell it to the presidential evaluation committee, which endorsed Woodbury's recommendation earlier this month. It is ludicrous for the board even to consider a policy that would roll back rather than expand the involvement of those most significantly impacted by the president's decisions. Is the Board of Trustees really expecting that the university community will just sit back and accept an evaluation process in which the president and those who have hired him are the only ones to evaluate his administration?
Consider what the Board of Trustees might not hear if students, faculty and staff are deprived of their role in the evaluation process. Would McDavis have included, for example, last year's student discontent with athletics budget cuts, the closing of the Oasis, or free speech zones in his self-evaluation? Would he explain to the board why the community has voiced opposition to the elimination of union jobs on campus this year? Could he be trusted to tell the board how frustrated many faculty members are with his administration's budget priorities? The answer to all of these questions may be yes, but it could just as easily be no. That's the problem. To allow the administration to evaluate itself is to play a game of roulette with the evaluation process. President McDavis could be honest about constituent concerns or he could be a cheerleader for his own policies. We can't know for sure which path he would choose, but we can look at other examples of government self-evaluation and see that governments which evaluate themselves are prone to dishonesty and corruption.
As the presidential evaluation committee was considering Woodbury's proposal, it was also faced with a recommendation by Graduate Student Senate, echoed by the Student Senate, which called upon the board to accept documentation from the constituent bodies and to disclose the details of the presidential evaluation process. These competing proposals could not be more different. Woodbury's proposal would turn the university's government into an autocracy in which there is no mechanism to hold the administration accountable, while the Graduate Student Senate proposal would move the university's government toward more accountability for administrators and greater democratic involvement for constituent bodies. When it votes on a new evaluation policy in February, the Board of Trustees should finally listen to the message that the university community has been sending and opt for more democracy and accountability, not less.
Nate Nelson is a sophomore political science major and a member of Students for a Democratic Society. Send him an e-mail at nn318806@ohiou.edu.
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