I recently met someone who had just moved to Canada from the UK, to take up a decanal position here. He mentioned that, since his move, the two things that had most shocked him were: 1) how little power he has in Canada, compared to the UK; and, 2) just how much bureaucracy there is here. He relayed this to me by explaining the difference in hiring procedures between the two countries, which I reproduce below, in tabular form:
* Indicates a step where a negative vote or decision can send the process back to an earlier stage.
As he was telling me this, I thought about how much of our university decision-making systems seem to have evolved to prevent things from being managed efficiently. This can be defended on grounds of co-management or collegial governance – values that many hold dear, and which have often served the system well. But there’s a cost to it. Multiply that table hundreds of times every year, and across every institution, and you get a sense of how big that cost is.
It also occurred to me: in Canada, I always hear professors arguing that they’re overburdened with committee work, and deans arguing that they have responsibility, but no power with which to make decisions. Moving to a more UK-like system would solve both problems. But, in the end, it’s not clear that professors’ dislike of committee meetings is sufficiently great enough to ever allow that to happen.
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Completely agree! At our institution, we are also management heavy, which also leads to less efficiency–as well as overburdening our already suffering budget. And we’ve got the young and old alike that will die on a hill for policies that were created in 1985 even though they no longer fit our current needs. I’m at a loss to explain it, but my observation as an employee of a central administration unit at my university has shown me that the best and the brightest minds may be studying at our universities, but as non-faculty staff, they often leave because they’re unable to exercise their fresh perspectives and creativity. I have the feeling that amongst faculty members, there can’t be much improvement, knowledgeable as they are about their fields and disciplines, but that doesn’t necessarily make them efficient administrators.