Vassar College has nearly 100 committees. There is a committee for the Library, a committee for sustainability, for fellowships, for admissions, two for technology and two for housing—there is even a Committee on Committees. Each of these groups is charged with a certain mission, task and direction within the larger committee structure of the College’s shared governance between students, faculty and administrators.
In recent months, however, members of the College have found Vassar’s committee structure to be bureaucratic and ineffective: They argue that there are redundancies, too many committees, too many meetings and that the map of the committee system itself does not show a clear linear trajectory in which decisions are made, but rather a latticework through which many students find it difficult to navigate.
In particular, students and administrators have looked to the Kick Coke campaign—a three-year effort to ban Coca-Cola products from Vassar’s campus—as an example of inefficiency and redundancy. “Figuring out which committee’s decision it was to make was a primary difficulty and challenge for us from the very, very beginning,” said Kick Coke Spokesperson Reed Dunlea ’09.
In November 2006, Dunlea and Kick Coke started their campaign by meeting with Dining Services—with whom they met about 15 to 20 times after their initial meeting—and moved on to meet with the Office of Finance and Administration one month later. Dunlea met with about 10 more committees before Fall 2008.
Throughout the course of this two-year period, Kick Coke met with President Catharine Bond Hill about seven times. “[Hill] was pretty positive from the first meeting and pretty positive throughout. From the first meeting, she told us that she wanted to see us added to the list of schools that had kicked Coke. The problem was, it was just a matter of how to do it, and she wasn’t exactly sure of that,” said Dunlea.
After some of her first meetings with Kick Coke, Hill sent the campaign to meet with the Campus Investor Responsibility Committee (CIRC)—a group charged with the task of investment—in Spring 2007. CIRC did not respond to Kick Coke’s proposal until a year later.
“We met with CIRC initially, gave them our proposal, and they were supposed to give a recommendation to [Hill],” said Dunlea. Then, a year later, in Spring 2008, they told us that they had inconclusive evidence and could not make a recommendation. It was frustrating because it took them a year, and they never produced any kind of document giving reasons why they came to this conclusion.”
In the meantime, Hill decided that the decision was not CIRC’s to make, and she sent the campaign to meet with the Purchasing Office instead. After meeting with the Purchasing Office and several other Committees—including the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Student Life Committee, the VSA Food Committee and the Committee on Sustainability—Dunlea met with Dean of the College Chris Roellke in Fall 2008 and discussed ways in which a decision regarding the campaign could be made.
“We eventually figured out that our campaign was going to go from the VSA to the Committee on College Life [CCL] to [Hill],” said Dunlea. “That was after two years. And then we realized those were the three steps and that was how it was going to go.”
In Fall 2008, Kick Coke met with the VSA Council, and the VSA passed a resolution in favor of the campaign and sent their decision to CCL, which met twice—once in November and again in December. CCL decided against the campaign and sent their recommendation to Hill, who made the final call against Kick Coke.
“In regard to student issues,” said Roellke, “we finally got it right as a College: We have the issue go through the VSA, VSA makes a judgment on it, and if the judgment is in favor of the initiative, they pass it on to CCL, and CCL either agrees or disagrees, makes a vote on it and makes a recommendation to Hill. That is pretty smooth. I’m proud that we finally got it right.”
Other student-driven campaigns, like the campaign for gender-neutral housing, have also gone through the same three-step process. “The gender-neutral housing issue, like the Kick Coke campaign, went through a very similar process this fall,” said Roellke. “VSA passed a resolution unanimously, and CCL voted unanimously to recommend to the President that this policy be put into effect.”
The problem with that, explained VSA Vice President for Student Life Nate Silver ’10, is that it took two years to figure out. “I think that we learned a lot from Kick Coke, in terms of what is the right mechanism to make decisions,” said Silver. “This year, we did it right. But we have to remember that Kick Coke has existed for three years, and the first two years consisted of them getting bounced back from place to place without anyone really knowing about it.”
For Dunlea, the central problem with Vassar’s committee structure is its lack of transparency. “It is not exactly clear what the power of each committee is. There needs to be a mission statement for each committee and a decision-making statement. It would be really useful if they updated the Web site and put all the information about these committees online. We need to know where to go for what and who has the final call on what issue,” said Dunlea.
VSA President Jimmy Kelly ’09 agreed, saying that there is not a clear track by which students can get a decision made in a timely manner. “Although in theory there should be a linear trajectory of decisions and the decision-making processes that we have, that is not the case. To this day, there’s no clear route. We need to be explicit about it,” said Kelly.
According to Kelly and Roellke, the committee structure will be more effective once students and faculty gain familiarity with college policies, so that they know where to go for each issue they bring up. Roellke is planning to update all committee Web sites to make them more accessible and focused. “One of the things that we can do is to make sure that people are well versed in the governance. We can take advantage of the Web in this regard,” said Roellke. “We need to make sure that we have a transparent Web site, which says, ‘If you have a concern about this, here is where you go; if you have a concern about that, here’s where you go.’”
Vassar’s Web site on committees currently has 25 committees listed, along with information about each committee’s name and its chairs; only three of those 25 committees provide a link to their own separate Web sites, where more information can be found.
Aside from the lack of transparency and accessibility, Kelly and Silver have also expressed concerns that the committee structure is not actually representative of the ideals of shared governance purported by the administrators of the College.
“Students have a seat in a lot of different settings, but in most of them, they don’t have suffrage,” said Kelly. “Though they’re briefed on the issues and they’re asked for their opinions, they’re not frequently asked for their active support through a vote. That’s a problem because the shared governance breaks down when there is a single decider and a number of other groups that are just providing input,” he said.
Kelly explained that in certain areas of the College—like the VSA—students are capable of making important decisions, but in every other capacity, students are only advisors.
“Maybe that is the way it should be. If so, we should not trumpet that we believe in these values of shared governance. In my own opinion, shared governance means that the governing of the College should take place through the joint effort of all parties, and we’re only achieving that cosmetically right now—we’re not achieving it in practice,” said Kelly.
The VSA is starting the Spring 2009 semester with the committee structure among its highest priorities. “Having been forced with an unfortunate financial climate,” said Silver, “fixing the committee structure isn’t necessarily everyone’s top priority. So the VSA is trying to seize an opportunity and make real strides by trying to do the work that no one else is going to do right now. Basically, it’s about streamlining.”
In the coming weeks, the VSA will put forward some proposals that will suggest different schemes that would, according to Kelly, make the committee structure “more inclusive and more official, more clear, more accessible and transparent to all bodies of the College.”
VSA plans to help minimize the number and length of meetings, to make them less like information sessions and more purpose-driven, to go through the College’s governance to see what can be clarified, to identify and possibly eliminate committees that are not working well or do not have coherent charge, and to clarify the charge and relationships of the committees that do and will continue to exist.
The VSA is currently mapping out a clear hierarchy or delineation of committees to try to clarify which committees report to which committees and to determine who will ultimately make final decisions regarding campus issues. In this regard, the VSA must decide whether or not to make smaller committees irrelevant by telling students to ignore them and report directly to VSA—a decision that could undermine and essentially eliminate many small committees by making them insignificant.
“I don’t know what the best answer is,” said Kelly. “We’re going to get tied up in bureaucracy quickly if we say that you need to travel through six committees to reach a decision. That doesn’t seem to me like an efficient use of time. At the same time, then, why do we have all these other committees—can we circumvent all these committees by telling students to go straight to VSA?”
On the side of faculty and administrators, it is less clear as to whether or not actual work is being done to improve the committee structure. Roellke explained that the Committee on Committees, chaired by Associate Professor of Biology Nancy Pokrywka, is mainly responsible for reforming the system.
“The Committee on Committees is being [asked to] think carefully about the proliferation of committees, about which ones can go away and about which ones can be made into task forces and have a finite period of time. They are looking at the whole host of committees, trying to garner faculty and student feedback on which ones seem to be redundant, and see if they can’t be made more efficient. It’s their job to make sure that the committee structure is working well,” said Roellke.
The Committee on Committees has indeed been charged with the task of looking critically at the committee structure. Section 16, part D, of the official College governance reads as follows: "The committee on committees shall be charged with responsibility for periodic review of the faculty committee structure and shall bring to the faculty recommendations as the need arises."
In an e-mailed statement to The Miscellany News, however, Pokrywka explained that the Committee on Committees was less concerned with the nature or problems of the committee structure than with the tasks of assigning faculty to existing committees. In fact, it seems that the Committee on Committees is doing little work at all to alter Vassar’s committee structure.
“I know almost nothing about Kick Coke or how it was handled, and the Committee on Committees really only deals with filling vacant committee spots for faculty,” wrote Pokrywka. “We have no input at all on administrator or student membership on committees. We also do not have any extra information, beyond that in the governance, regarding what individual committees actually do.”
In another area of the College, however, Professor of English and Chair of the Committee on Assessment Robert DeMaria is revising the final drafts of a 500-page self-evaluation of the College for the Middle States Commission, a group that visits Vassar every 10 years in order to assess whether or not the College can be reaccredited.
In addition to making a visit every 10 years, Middle States writes a response to a periodic review report—an additional, shorter, self-evaluation—that the College must write every five years. “In response to our periodic review report,” said DeMaria. “Middle States observed that there’s some uneasiness and difficulty on campus about the amount of time it takes to have the kind of shared governance that we have.”
In response to Middle States’ concern, DeMaria and the rest of the Committee on Assessment has “begun thinking about which committees work and which don’t. We’ve found that the committees that work are ones with focused agendas and specific timeframes for producing recommendations, whereas committees with broader responsibilities and ongoing duties tend to be less effective and more frustrating.”
“We’re not unaware of these things,” said DeMaria. “We have made some changes. The Committee on Curricular Policies has trouble getting down to important issues that it is charged with talking about—like the curriculum. There’s been some attempt to shift some of its more mundane business out and leave more time for more substantive discussions, but success has been so-so.”
It seems that though much is being planned and thought about, little has been accomplished at this point in the year, but, as DeMaria explained, the College is not “unaware of these things.” Silver, too, reminds students that they can be glad that the problem of Vassar’s committee structure is not one unacknowledged or ignored. “Our committee structure is broken,” said Silver. “And fixing that is an ongoing process, but it is one that everyone recognizes.”
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