Churning the account
Note: This was written for a monthly Duke faculty publication that died sometime around 2004. In the old days, faculty used to participate in stuff like this. The idea was that this kind of work was considered a valuable part of being in the campus community. By about 2000, however, such things had fallen out of fashion. People were too busy writing papers and chasing after grants. Virtually no one contributed and no one wanted to edit it. It was still read widely on campus, however.
If I were to write this piece now, I would change my thesis a bit. Nowadays I think that universities don't change frequently. But when they do, they tend to move in a very haphazard way.
Duke Faculty Forum, February 2000
Stuart Rojstaczer
In my twenties, I had saved a little bit of money that I wanted to invest in the stock market even though I knew absolutely nothing about financial markets. My newly found broker (this was well before the internet and brokers were a necessity) selected an initial portfolio of stocks for me to purchase.
Two months came and went. I received a call from my broker. Apparently, my stocks had run their course and it was time to pick a portfolio of new exciting stocks to replace the tired old ones. Roughly two more months came and went before I received another call from her. It was the same story as before. After six months, I looked at my balance sheet and while my stocks had gone up slightly overall (as had the Dow Jones index), my broker had significantly eaten into my bottom line through her commissions.
Brokers have a name for unnecessarily turning over a client's portfolio to increase commissions. It's called churning. I didn't like being churned and once I figured out that I had been misled, quickly dumped my broker.
In universities, churning also takes place. But it has nothing to do with financial investments. And it has nothing to do with overt dishonesty. Instead it consists of well meaning, but essentially worthless, change brought forth by university leadership. In administrative churning, leadership feels a need to come up with and implement changes in university structure - typically in a misguided attempt at image enhancement - even though they are not needed.
To be sure, it also identifies legitimate needs for change that ultimately improve the university. But in implementing frequent change for change sake, leadership creates unnecessary tumult. Faculty, lower echelon administrators and sometimes students spend countless hours spinning their wheels dealing with these changes. Administrative churning is at the heart of an essential paradox within universities. How do administrators and faculty manage to spend so much time in meetings and get so little of substance done?
The most recent case of administrative churning at our university of which I'm aware is the impending merger of Botany and Zoology. It's also one with a long history. Our leadership in its many incarnations has desired Botany and Zoology to merge for well over a decade. The faculty in these departments have resisted these pressures for the same period of time. There have been at least a decade's worth of meetings to discuss this potential merger, and two external reviews focused on the issue of merger (for what it's worth, one external review recommended merger, and the other recommended that the departments stay separate). The end result of faculty resistance has been slight reductions in faculty numbers in these two departments despite burgeoning undergraduate enrollments and resources withheld by our leadership for laboratory improvements.
The conflict between the administration and biology faculty has been one of fashion versus substance. In the eyes of our leadership, having separate Botany and Zoology departments represent the biological sciences is an eyesore. It has an out of date look and feel, akin to having avocado kitchen appliances when white is the color of the decade.
In contrast, faculty haven't been concerned about appearances. Their structure may be an eyesore to our fashion conscious leadership, but it has worked well. Over the past decade and a half that Botany and Zoology presumably have held onto an antiquated structure, the biological sciences have thrived both in terms of undergraduate instruction and research. The biological sciences represent the best of the sciences in Trinity College and these two departments have been leaders in many aspects of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in the biological sciences over the last twenty years. There is no indication that they will work better as a merged unit. If anything, the effort on the part of our leadership to get these departments to merge is now so old that it likely represents an idea that is well out of fashion.
It is ironic that after so many years of working successfully independently, the faculty in the two departments through subtle and not so subtle persuasion have by and large agreed to merge. But it is unclear how such a merger will improve the biological sciences. There will be political tumult to be sure. There will be problems with faculty morale that will hopefully recede over time as faculty members adjust to the change in scenery. At best, this impending merger is simply change for change sake.
The impending merger of Botany and Zoology is not the only case of recent administrative churning. Last year's most notable churning event was the creation of Curriculum 2000. Our leadership found our current undergraduate curriculum lacking. Students are currently allowed to ignore science, math, and foreign language study on the way to earning their degree and they frequently do so. In the 1980s, it was considered fashionable to grant this freedom of choice. In the 1990s (and maybe in the 2000s) it was gauche.
In response to this change in fashion, our leadership created (with language so hyperbolic and full of self-importance that it crossed the line into self-parody) a new elaborate and ultimately unworkable new curriculum. After countless meetings between faculty and administrators and (most importantly) the promise of many new millions of dollars for academic departments, our new curriculum was approved.
Implementation of Curriculum 2000 is still underway, but there is every indication that what is taking place is administrative churning rather than anything of substance. Faculty spent countless hours filling out forms to get their existing classes approved for Curriculum 2000. Lower echelon administrators, like medieval rabbinical scholars trying to create law from the bible, tried to tack on some meaning to the Curriculum 2000 document. In the process, they rejected Curriculum 2000 designations for roughly one half of the existing classes in the undergraduate catalog. Faculty responded by ignoring the rejections and by complaining.
In the end, our leadership caved in and 95% of existing classes were approved for Curriculum 2000. Little has changed from the old curriculum except that students must now take foreign language and science in order to graduate, a change that could have been implemented without the hyperbole and bombast of Curriculum 2000. The untold hours spent by administrators and faculty implementing and dealing with the bureaucracy of Curriculum 2000 are best forgotten. The hours to be spent by undergraduate advisors and future students trying to negotiate through the Byzantine rules of Curriculum 2000 are, of course, yet to be counted. Whether Curriculum 2000 proves to have the fashion endurance of the "little black dress" or ends up as ephemeral as the Nehru jacket is still unknown.
Going back a little further, administrative churning was in full display in the transfer of Geology faculty (including myself) into the School of the Environment. Except for a time in the 1980s and early 1990s, the discipline of geology has always been considered unfashionable by Duke leadership. The reasons for this are unclear. Perhaps it's because many of us go outdoors and muck around with the earth, which is admittedly not a rarefied activity. But whatever the reasons, geology, because it lacked style and panache in the eyes of the Duke leadership, was barely supported as a discipline for most of Duke's history. Like an embarrassing uncle who sells moonshine in western Carolina, it was hardly ever mentioned and its faculty were hidden on unfashionable East Campus.
In the eighties, however, fashion fortuitously shined on Geology and it was given new faculty and laboratory space on trendy West Campus. Perhaps the change came about because one of the principal leaders of that era spoke with pride about an uncle from western Carolina who sold moonshine. Mucking around with the earth seemed to him to be a noble endeavor. Whatever it's origins, Geology's days in the sunshine proved to be short lived. By the mid-1900s, Geology was once again in the fashion dog house. It needed to be hidden once again. A decision was made to move Geology out of Arts and Sciences and into the new school. Somehow this move was expected to improve the fortunes of both geology and the School of the Environment.
The merger took place more than three years ago and now that the dust has settled, it's clear that there is little that can be pointed to that can be considered an improvement for anyone. The two groups of faculty, the faculty formerly from Geology and those originally in the School, keep to themselves and maintain separate research and teaching programs. The revenue that provides former Geology faculty their salary comes directly from Trinity College, their former home. Geology as a discipline is a little more hidden on campus since it no longer has full departmental status. But the advantage of hiding a group of a dozen capable faculty is at best obtuse. In the end, all of the meetings, the countless discussions, the tumult, and the precipitous (and thankfully mostly temporary) drop in faculty morale associated with this move were not balanced by anything of positive value. It was pure churning or change for change sake.
What future administrative churning will take place in this university is anyone's guess. Presumably, faculty governing bodies should approve only the good ideas proposed by our leadership (even I have to admit that our leadership does come up with good ideas every now and then) and reject or significantly modify the bad ones. But lately, these entities - such as the Arts and Sciences Council and the Academic Council - have been extremely porous filters and have approved administrative churning almost routinely
In one sense, there is little to be lost by approving such changes. They make our leadership feel better about their role in this university. It's almost a patronizing thing to do to for faculty to approve symbolic changes in fashion that our leadership invents that have little real substantive impact on the university as a whole. It appeases our leadership and there is value in appeasement. But appeasement does have its price. The common end products of administrative churning are local political nightmares for faculty, associate deans, lower echelon administrators, and students that can last for years.