Faculty Senate was provided with the System Roles and Responsibilities report linked below. Please take the time to carefully read this report. Dean Chip Hunter chaired this group. AG Rud served as faculty representative. Additional members included Laura Griner-Hill (Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Affairs), Theresa Elliot Cheslek (Vice President Human Resource Services), and Sandra Haynes (Chancellor Tri-Cities). Susan Finerty consulted.
Roles and Responsibilities Report
Greg CrouchOne Reply to “Roles and Responsibilities Report”
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July 21, 2020: I request that the Faculty Senate actively engage in a review and discussion of the new “Role and Responsibilities” report (released June 16, 2020, henceforth R&R). I believe this report is incredibly important in charting a course for the WSU system over the next several decades, and may well become relevant in an era of financial distress. I thank the authors of the R&R report for their hard work in preparing it. The authors were a Dean, a Vice Provost, a Chancellor, a faculty representative, and an HRS representative. I will note that I am relatively new (~3 years) to WSU, so there is plenty I do not know or understand about the complexity of the WSU system. Before reading the R&R report, I read Craig Park’s (Nov 2019) white paper that is appended to the R&R report. I recommend other faculty interested in the issue begin with his memo. To me, Parks’ memo clearly and thoughtfully laid out the issues facing the organization of the WSU system. He surveyed Top 25 institutions that had multiple campuses (e.g. UC, UNC, UW, Indiana U, etc), and grouped their management structures into three models: i.e. “director”, “local CEO”, or “local CEO and CAO”. Parks succinctly described the distinguishing features of these models and their pros and cons, including discussions of faculty governance. He noted that WSU’s system grew organically, and currently is an amalgam of administrative structures that does not fit into any of these three models, and suffers for it. He argued that the WSU community needs to decide which of the models it feels is the most appropriate for the future of the university, but did not take himself take a position on which one. I then expected the R&R report to move forward from that very helpful grounding. I expected it to lay out pros and cons, necessary administrative or legislative changes, and budgetary implications. I expected it to make a recommendation for which of the three models WSU should move towards. The university leadership could then make the difficult decisions and move forward, aligning us with the Top 25 institutions we strive to count as our peers. Instead, the R&R report barely references Parks’ memo or the three models common among Top 25 multi-campus systems. It dismisses his analysis in two sentences in the introduction. Instead, it issues a strong recommendation to envision WSU as a “matrix” organization – essentially a fourth model. Although it notes advantages and disadvantages of “matrix” organizations, it does not compare it to any other type of organization structure WSU might pursue. Again noting my short tenure with WSU, it appears to my eyes to be a justification for essentially preserve much of the existing administrative structure of the university. The recommendations are numerous and concrete, but many seem to be about changing WSU culture, convincing the community to embrace the “OneWSU” matrix concept, and having administrators complete “What is Your Why?” exercises. I note two additional elements for faculty to consider: 1) the report strongly recommends distancing the community from thinking about the Pullman campus as the center or “flagship” of the system, and 2) faculty governance, while mentioned frequently in Parks’ paper, seems completely ignored in this report. If acted on without much community discussion, I believe this report might lay the foundation for the structure of the university for decades, which again to my eye seems to largely cement the status quo. This might not seem to matter much for the everyday working lives of faculty. But we are entering a budget crisis, and the report and its recommendations have budget implications. One of the “pros” outlined in Parks’ paper about moving to a “Director” model with a central flagship campus (which Parks’ argued most closely resembles WSU now) would be the streamlining of duplicative administrative functions across campuses. In the spirit of shared governance, I request that Senate actively engage with the Administration on this report and ask questions. For example, the R&R reported seems to have relied heavily on the services of a consultant, Susan Finerty, who is an expert on matrix organizations. She has extensive and impressive experience working with private industry, but has Ms. Finerty ever consulted for a university? Is there another university that uses a “matrix” organizational structure? If so, were any administrators or faculty interviewed at any of those institutions to gauge how successful it has been? I am certainly not a management expert. Do other faculty who study management concur that a “matrix” structure is the best choice? I consulted a retired colleague from the business school at another university. He was somewhat skeptical of matrix forms. He sent me an article from a 1978 critique in Harvard Business Review (Davis and Lawrence “Problems of Matrix Organizations”). Davis and Lawrence colorfully described nine particular pathologies that they felt disproportionately arose in firms that adopted matrix structures: tendencies toward anarchy, power struggles, severe groupitis, collapse during economic crunch, excessive overhead, sinking to lower levels, uncontrolled layering, navel gazing, and decision strangulation. Again, I stress that I am not an expert and this is obviously a dated reference, but this gave me enough pause and skepticism that I would like to hear from colleagues who are experts. Finally, what would the budget ramifications of moving towards a “Director” model be? What administrative roles are currently duplicated across campuses that might be consolidated? Thank you for your service to the faculty and the university to support faculty rights and shared governance.