College begins process of Governance revision

The College has begun the process of reviewing and revising the Governance, the document that defines structure of College operations, from the roles of trustees, administrators, faculty and students to hiring processes and committee charges. The review stems from a strong recommendation made by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education's review as part of the College's reaccreditation process in 2008-2009.

The Board of Trustees created the Governance Revision Steering Committee, which will ultimately make recommendations to the Board after finishing the revision process. The committee is led by Chair of the Board of Trustees William Plapinger '74 and includes three other members of the Board, two student representatives, four faculty members who also sit on the Faculty Policy and Conference Committee (FPCC), President of the College Catharine Bond Hill and Assistant to the President John Feroe, who serves as committee secretary. Though the group has some overarching goals, the committee is still in the very early stages of the process.

The Steering Committee met for the first time in the week preceding October Break. The meeting was very preliminary—described by Vassar Student Association Vice President for Operations Ruby Cramer '12 as "talking about talking about" the document.

Though the committee has not yet recommended any revisions and, in fact, likely will not reach that stage of the of the process until next year, there are several issues identified by the Middle States review and the committee members that review process will address. These include the overwhelming scope and depth of the document and an unwieldy, inefficient committee structure.

In the language of the Middle States review, the Governance provides, "a wealth of detail at risk of obscuring any clear path for getting from one point to the other, for getting any given task accomplished."

According to Associate Professor of English Zoltan Markus, who sits on the committee, "It includes too many things that are not necessarily important for what you would call, perhaps, a constitution of the College."

Currently, the document is broken into several large sections including "Bylaws of the Board of Trustees;" "Principles Underlying Relations of the Trustees, Faculty and Students;" and "Educational Organization of the College," which in itself includes the administration, the faculty, as well as its bylaws, and the committee structure of the College. The Middle States review calls the depth of each section, especially the bylaws of the faculty, into question.

"Actually that is one of the bigger questions we've been asking ourselves: ‘What is the Governance?'" said Vassar Student Association President Mathew Leonard '11. "And the direction we've sort of been heading with that is a bare-bones constitution-esque document that rarely changes…and then beneath that there would be an additional two documents."

The committee is already considering is the creation of three different documents that would split and clarify the kinds of information that are now all included in the Governance. "We called it constitution, policies and procedures and regulations. The policies and procedures will be the College manual for faculty, and the regulations document will be the legal document between the faculty and the College," said Cramer. The purpose of these two documents would be similar to that of both the Faculty Bylaws in the Governance and portions of the Faculty Handbook. "The problem is, right now we all agree that these are the three documents that we ideologically want, but practically separating out the text into those three different documents will be a challenge."

As for students' place in the Governance, both Cramer and Leonard agreed that the description of students' role in shared governance is already fairly clear. "Their documents are cleaner than the faculty documents," said Professor of Psychology and Chair of FPCC Janet Gray, referring to sections pertinent to students, administration and trustees. "The Governance is a mess, and the Faculty Handbook is an even bigger mess."

While the committee has agreed that the creation of three concise documents with clear purposes would be ideal, achieving the goal will be a complicated process. Any choice of one clause over another or revision of language implies an interpretation and is therefore akin to a change in College policy.

Gray noted that faculty representatives on the committee have a responsibility to take policy changes back to their colleagues. "I think one of the things we're trying to be careful about is dissociating changes that may happen in format and structure from any policy changes that may arise in course," she said. "Ultimately the parts that are clearly the educational policy, the organization of the college, the bylaws of the faculty all by Governance go to the faculty for approval."

Communication with constituents is key in maintaining a level of comfort with the revision process because the Governance document outlines each constituency's role in Vassar's shared governance structure. "It is difficult because the faculty on the one hand is worried the outcome of this revision process is going to be an erosion of power," said Markus. "On the other hand when we hear the voices of faculty members that this is problematic, we also hear and see that less and less faculty members are willing to serve on these committees, and not because they don't want to serve the College, but because they see that these committees are not efficient enough."

Gray added that the process should be beneficial. "I really hope that it turns inot a real positive experience for the community," said Gray. She described the process as a "re-commitment" to shared governance.

Middle States deemed the shared governance process, most specifically the committees, almost too inclusive to be effective: "The quantity of committees…and the process required to bring so many people up to speed on so many issues seems to have fostered a frustrating environment in which people spend a great deal of energy pursuing parallel conversations and checking on each other's work," the reviewers reported.

The goal then, for the committee, is for the shared governance to be stronger through the editing process. "I would like everyone to feel that the shared governance process is working more effectively because I think there has been frustration about that," said Hill. "There's an example that the Campus Master Planning Committee got reorganized over the last two years making it smaller, and it seems to be working better because everybody can make it to the meetings. The people who are on it feel invested, and so I just think it works better."

The desire for an efficient committee structure is pertinent to the student voice as well. "What we want to have a hand in is the discussion about how our committee structure looks," said Cramer. "As far as joint committees go, students know just as well as the faculty who are at the table what committees run well and what committees don't, and where there's overlap and where there's not."

In the next meeting of the Governance Revision Steering Committee in December, Gray will lead the committee through a detailed reading of the document, a process that she said will be similar to "a seminar, where we're going to the source." The process of revision relies heavily on not only shared government, but on a shared understanding of the document by the committee. As part of the exercise, Gray and the committee will attempt to label areas of the Governance as appropriate for a Constitution, for the policies and procedures and for regulations. Through this process, the group will prepare for more substantial review of the document in the future.