Administration Again Considering Contentious Question Of Relationship Between Columbia College And The Faculty Of Arts And Sciences

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15 November, 2021

11:52 AM

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Columbia Daily Spectator BY DIA GILL AND ZACHARY SCHERMELE NOVEMBER 14, 2021 A task force made up of faculty, administrators, trustees, and alumni has been considering an overhaul of the leadership structure of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences since the beginning of the academic year. The committee's work has revived longstanding concerns about the importance and perceived political power of Columbia College while evoking a sense of deja vu from a similar—but failed—effort to reorganize Arts and Sciences almost exactly a decade ago. In an email sent to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Sept. 3, University President Lee Bollinger expressed his intention to fulfill a long-held desire to evaluate the structure of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its relationship with Columbia College. Both times that restructuring has been considered, it has coincided with the leaving of a Columbia College dean. Bollinger's email notes the "long, storied history" of this administrative relationship and its effects on the "governance, culture, and fiscal realities of the Arts & Sciences, [Columbia] College, and, indeed, the entire University." This long and storied history references a 2009 report by the private management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, the resignation of Columbia College's first female and first Black dean Michele Moody-Adams, and the relationship between the outgoing dean James Valentini and Bollinger. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the organizational unit composed of five schools, including Columbia College, has long been plagued by financial insecurity mostly unseen by other schools within the University. The perennial state of underfunding largely comes from the difficulty Arts and Sciences has experienced in covering the ever-increasing "common cost tax," which is imposed upon schools to cover central administration costs. Over the past decade, fundraising for Arts and Sciences has remained stagnant while other schools have seen increases of 4 to 6 percent. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences was established in 1991 as an organizational, governing framework that would unify the administration of the faculty of its original six schools. Cathy Popkin, the recently retired Jesse and George Siegel professor in the humanities, professor of Russian, and a former chair of the Policy and Planning Committee, noted that Arts and Sciences' relative youth means it remains too unfamiliar an entity for alumni to consider donating directly to it. "Alumni feel their loyalty to Columbia College not to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which for many, many alumni until maybe the last 20 years didn't even exist as an entity," Popkin said. "It's a relatively new invention. So alumni donations go to [Columbia] College and [Columbia] College, really, ends up turning that over into Arts and Sciences and it gets funneled through all the general needs and everything." Columbia College has remained at the forefront of the University's humanities-driven mission for centuries. In recent years, it has housed successful fundraising campaigns such as Core to Commencement, which has raised hundreds of millions to support both the college and the broader Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Historically, the school's deans have exhibited exceptionally strong fundraising power as leaders thanks to the strength of the alumni base the school claims—one that dates back to the University's founding. "The Dean of the College has a lot of power, insofar as you think about it—when alumni make donations to the universities it's to a school that they were a part of, not a faculty they were part of," Popkin said. At the same time the President's Task Force is exploring restructuring, an inquiry into potential expansion of the undergraduate population at Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science is underway. While the two processes are separate, some faculty have expressed concern about the two administrative and structural overhauls being considered at the same time. "A lot of faculty are puzzled and dismayed that this is happening at the very same time as a discussion about college expansion," Michael Thaddeus, a professor of mathematics, said. "These are two major decisions. You know each of them might affect the other one. And there are two committees that have been set up that are thinking about these things at once. I think a lot of people also are dismayed that President Bollinger is choosing to tackle these big things very soon before the end of his own term." Questions of restructuring have historically paralleled disagreements over decision making and administrative power between college deans and central administration. In 2011, the University commissioned a report from McKinsey that provided recommendations to improve decision-making and the general operating procedures for Arts and Sciences. While the suggestions came in varying degrees of reorganization, all of them would have transferred power from individual schools' deans to central administrators. Many faculty expressed alarm at what they interpreted as a potential loss of a seat at the table and a degradation of the value of the undergraduate liberal arts education Columbia offers. In the wake of the report, then-Columbia College Dean Michele Moody-Adams abruptly announced in an email to a small group of alumni that she would be leaving her position at the end of that academic year. Her resignation explicitly tied her leaving to recommendations about restructuring Arts and Sciences leadership in a way that she felt would "diminish" her authority over "crucial policy, fund-raising and budgetary matters." "I believe there is today a real threat to the Core," Professor Andrew Delbanco, who served on the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, was quoted telling alumni in Politico. "Not sudden abolition as much as slow attrition." Although none of the reforms as they appeared in the report were implemented, the fallout triggered what amounted to a significant amount of turnover among senior administrators within an academic year. Moody-Adams had only served as dean for two years, and her resignation came just months after then-provost Claude Steele left for Stanford. Just as the most recent investigation into restructuring began in earnest, Bollinger announced Valentini will step down as dean of the college by the end of the academic year. His University-wide email pre-empted Valentini's announcement and didn't shed any light on the exact reason for Valentini's exit. It's unclear whether a search process is underway to appoint a replacement. Over the summer, Bwog uncovered tensions between Valentini, Bollinger, and other senior administrators through an email leak that showed Valentini objecting to Bollinger's proposition to pressure non-tenure-track instructors to teach in person for the fall 2020 semester. "Bollinger was determined to have everything be in person last academic year, and that would've been such a catastrophe," Popkin said. "He's lucky that it didn't happen. I think Valentini has stood up to him many times and been a thorn in his side many times." In his announcement of the task force's upcoming work to faculty in September, Bollinger made sure to note that the reevaluation of Arts and Sciences—an area of administrative organization that he called "highly controversial, even contentious"—would not single out individual administrators or take place without consultation of faculty and the board of trustees. "It will not be a critique of any individuals, especially those who have faithfully served the University in the roles our structure assigns," he wrote. Michael Rosenthal, professor emeritus and former associate dean of Columbia College, said the potential reorganization is ultimately a question of how much authority the dean of the college is allowed to wield over the president and central administrators and how that ultimately affects the quality of an undergraduate education. "There's a dean of the law school, there's a dean of the medical school, there's a dean of the business school, and then there's the dean of the college—but is he or she simply a dean of students? Or is it a dean who has some power to create programs, to weigh in on faculty hiring, to talk about teaching?" he said. "I mean, that's really what a dean should be doing, and I think that's what, I would imagine, the new structure will make almost totally impossible. The dean will do what he or she is told." Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly affiliated Andrew Delbanco, an American studies professor, with the department of political science and with the Policy and Planning Committee, rather than the Task Force on Undergraduate Education. Spectator regrets the error. News Editor Dia Gill can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @_diagill. Senior staff writer Zach Schermele can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ZachSchermele. 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