| Response: Provost and Dean Neil Weissman |
Name: Neil Weissman, Provost, Professor of History, Dickinson College
Date: Wed Aug 27 2003—15:52
Message:
David Kirp is right. Dickinson has had remarkable success in responding to the challenges that currently face liberal arts colleges. That success is significantly due to the dynamic, even charismatic leadership of Bill Durden. Yet Kirp's article misses a critically important part of the picture—the role of the faculty in Bill's and the College's accomplishments.
Kirp does note that key academic programs propelling Dickinson forward were developed by faculty in the 1990's. These include, for example, our extraordinary program in global education and such innovations as the Clarke Center, interdisciplinary majors in International Business &Management and Biochemistry &Molecular Biology, and the American Mosaic. Kirp fails to mention that faculty were also aware of the increasingly competitive external environment of the 1990s. They, working through our all-College committee structure, scrutinized and debated Dickinson's policies in such critical areas as admissions and fundraising. They proposed, and sometimes were able to implement, change.
Since Bill's arrival, all-College committees and task forces, including especially the group that drafted our Strategic Plan, have served as effective vehicles for institutional advance. They have mobilized the faculty behind change, contributed their own set of new ideas, and helped adjust to setbacks. Last fall, for example, when other colleges and universities were reeling as a consequence of falling endowments, our Planning &Budget Committee quickly found the efficiencies needed to keep the College on course forward. Dickinson did not during the 1990s suffer, as Kirp claims, from "that familiar academic malady, sclerosis by governance through faculty committee." It does not so suffer now.
The success of the Durden administration in reality resulted from the confluence of two dynamic streams - new administrative leadership and forward-looking faculty. Bill demonstrated his adeptness as a leader not in applying what Kirp mistakenly sees as "top-down management." Rather, he effectively identified the real strengths of Dickinson's program and harnessed the energies of the majority of the faculty, who were anxious to be partners in change. The same is also and importantly true for the wider Dickinson community, including trustees, students, alumni, parents and friends.
Without this dimension of the Dickinson story, one really can't explain how Bill -- and all of us -- are "creating a buzz" without "sacrificing the soul" of the College. Administration at Dickinson operates within the context of strong, effective collegial governance, and happily so. Presidents who imagine that the right response to the challenges facing liberal arts colleges is to impose new policies top-down will find themselves creating a "buzz" very different from Dickinson's.
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