Just How Broken is Collegial Governance at the University of Alberta? Part I: Cutting of “Academic Leaders”

Last year, members of the University of Alberta’s community were repeatedly stunned by the attempted railroading of the University community and the University’s senior academic governance body, the General Faculties Council (GFC), that occurred as the new president, Bill Flanagan, pursued the first stage of his restructuring of the University in the face of the Kenney government’s savage cuts to the University’s budget—cuts Flanagan has consistently characterized as an “opportunity.” Across the Fall of 2020, there was much consternation at GFC about the undemocratic, and in some cases, anti-democratic, nature of the rules according to which the statutory body of GFC is currently governed. The problem of these rules was obvious as attempts were made to secure something that resembled sufficient time for GFC members to do their due diligence in regard to the restructuring proposals. The recklessly truncated process of deliberations at GFC concluded at GFC’s meeting of 7 December 2020, at which GFC, while it agreed to bundle some Faculties into Colleges, refused to create new senior administrators in the form of “Executive Deans” or “College Deans.” That refusal resulted in an unusual counter-proposition, passed by GFC, that reflected the will of the University community. (Full details here.)

Just four days later, members of GFC and the University community were stunned again when the president appeared before the Board of Governors claiming a conflict of interest in order to recuse himself from the Board’s meeting of 11 December 2020. Though he had not told GFC this, Flanagan told the Board that he could not support GFC’s recommend that the new “Colleges” be run by a “collegial Council of Deans.”

In Winter 2021, GFC attempted to respond to the various collegial governance difficulties of the Fall and the problem of the President’s choice before the Board, by passing a set of recommendations that were intended to help set academic governance at the University on a sounder path, one in which confidence in the president might be restored. There has been delayed and insufficient action on those recommendations. As a result, matters are just as bad as they were last year, if not worse. This blog post is the first in a series raising concerns about the continued undermining of collegial governance at the University of Alberta.

Part I: Provost’s “Final Report of Academic Leadership Task Group”

The draft agenda for GFC’s meeting next Monday (29 November 2021) was released earlier this evening. On that draft agenda GFC is being allotted a mere half-an-hour to discuss the almost 50-page report from the Provost setting out options for the next stage of restructuring, in which one-quarter of the positions characterized as that of “Academic Leaders” are intended to be cut. Over the last year and a half, the University has cut well over a thousand non-academic staff positions. In this case, it’s not jobs that are being cut. The proposition, instead, is to cut 25% of the positions through which faculty participate in the collegial governance of the university in ways that support academic excellence.

The report offers various sets of numbers (“data”!) according to which it attempts to justify the removal of positions through which faculty support the undergraduate and graduate programs of their departments along with faculty research. (The full report is here.)

The “Governance Executive Summary” does not even make clear how the propositions in the report might result in decisions that will lead to the “streamlining” of “academic leader” positions that it calls for. The crucial section is blank:

At the outset the “Governance Executive Summary” claims that the report simply aims to “share information.”

Hmmm. Picture quizzical emoticon here.

So information is simply being shared with the University’s senior academic governance body? Who exactly is going to be taking these decisions? And how?

But it gets worse! The “group” that developed the sort-of recommendations for decisions to be taken somewhere, by someone, who-knows-who? Take a look at its composition.

Collegial governance is governance of the University by the faculty. The report aims to achieve the so-called “redeployment” of “one of the university’s most critical resources,” “our professors,” by removing professors from some “academic leader” positions. If that is at all a viable proposition, or viable on any of the terms that the group has been discussing, there should have been at least six rank-and-file faculty members at the table to discuss the propositions and determine their viability.

How many were there?

Not one.

Perhaps the composition has been wrongly reported?

If it has not, it appears that the Provost convened a working group to discuss possible changes to the structure of the University which will have a direct impact on the role that faculty currently play in the running of the University without thinking it necessary to have rank-and-file faculty members participating in the conversation. And now it appears that the members of the University’s senior academic governance body—which does include faculty members, though in considerably lower numbers relative to administration than at other universities in Canada—is to be given a mere half-an-hour to discuss the group’s final report.

Does that sound right to you?

And if I’m reading the report correctly, the proposed cutting of “academic leader” positions is not to involve the cutting of the positions of any Dean or Vice Provost or similar. It is simply to involve, it seems, the cutting of the “academic leader” positions where the work tends most to focus in one way or another on supporting our students—for the very modest cost of course release rather than the serious expense of hefty senior administration salaries.