Thank you, The Post, for reporting on our Ohio University dean evaluation procedure. In doing so you are practicing and exercising those beautiful freedom of speech and freedom of the press First Amendment rights that are so much the soul of a democracy. Unfortunately, the exercise of these rights is unhealthily weak in our culture these days across the media spectrum as we wallow and drown in public relations (PR) stuff.
As OU goes through its somewhat alienating bureaucratic dean evaluation game with all its little problems like low participation rates, missing evaluations, fear of having this public university's public information published and assorted other little difficulties, I am moved to comment on a dean evaluation procedure that once upon a time was a significant part of the OU faculty handbook.
As an older-timer and one who in the early to mid-1970s was a member of the Faculty Senate and the Senate Executive Committee, I wish to call attention to an earlier, lovely, exhilarating, democratic OU dean evaluation procedure called voting in which the vote was equipped with some teeth.
The early to mid-1970s faculty handbooks contained the following words. I have taken this excerpt from the 1973 handbook, page 35, section VII, paragraph E G
by the Dean of Faculties after consultation with the faculty or lastly
by a written request to the Dean of Faculties of a majority of the Group I faculty of the college.
I think that Dean of Faculties was equivalent to our provost position today.
This very simple democratic voting dean evaluation procedure meant that if the faculty in a college voted to remove the dean, the president, provost and others in the hierarchy were obliged to carry out the faculty's decision. In fact, in my first eight or nine years at OU, starting in 1967, I believe that one or two deans were removed with this healthy democratic procedure.
The details on how the administration in charge at that time managed to persuade the faculty senate and the faculty to give up this treasure in the late 1970s are clouded in obscurity and perhaps entailed a bit of intrigue. I think that it happened in a complex relationship to an actual dean removal that was in process around that time.
Perhaps the faculty, faculty senate and possibly the OU student body might wish to contemplate returning to this exhilarating democratic dean evaluation procedure called the vote.
Chuck Overby is an engineering professor emeritus.
P.S. When I called OU's Office of Institutional Research to get information on the 2008 dean evaluation participation rates by college, I was surprised to learn that I would have to seek this information through OU's legal office with a legalistic request for it. My goodness, it seems to me that participation rate information for this procedure in this public university is public information. There is nothing personal or private here. The requested data arrived a few days after my call to the Legal Affairs office.
Finally, if there are some other older-timers out there who know something about what went on when OU's democratic vote dean evaluation procedure disappeared, I am doing some writing and would much appreciate having you share your insight with me. I was on a sabbatical leave working in the U.S. Congress when we lost the vote.
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