Administration

I feel a little stunned as I am about to create this page, which is chronologically for me the final page for my e-portfolio.

It’s hard to imagine this, but everything I have included so far relates to my role as a faculty member at Prescott College. It seems that I should stop here as that faculty role is what is being evaluated by you through this e-portfolio. And it is enough, right? It is perhaps too much. And yet I have not even begun to address my administrative work, which could easily be a fulltime job without any of the teaching.

Evaluating Administrative Work

This year the Prescott College HR department implemented a new evaluation process through which all non-faculty employees are being evaluated by their supervisor. Paul Burkhardt decided that he wanted to use that system and evaluate each of the members of the ADGP Dean’s Circle. So for most of us in that group, in addition to being responsible for this extensive faculty evaluation process, we also will now have an annual evaluation done of our administrative work.

Paul and our team chose to create a survey through which to gather anonymous input from our peers for use in completing our evaluations. I am very grateful for the opportunities to reflect and learn that were provided by seeing the feedback. More importantly, I am very pleased that the feedback I received in that survey—both positive and negative—is completely consistent with my own self evaluation of my leadership work.  Primarily I learned that I can be even more intentional about how I balance my leadership with my listening—my pushing us toward progress with my ability to hear the needs of the group, and the importance of stating when I am pushing us toward an end goal that the goal is what I am hearing as desired by the faculty. Further I can be clearer about necessary parameters when I delegate projects to others and also be clear with everyone that I will edit and tinker in order to ensure consistent voice in our materials.

Joan Clingan quantitative from peers.pdf

Joan Clingan qualitative from peers.pdf

I want to note that there is only one piece of feedback that came out of the entire survey to which I take exception, and that is the comment presented by a staff member that I plan alone and do not tell the student services offices (SALT) until changes are in process. Because there were 7 members of the ADGP leadership team on SALT, I recently resigned from SALT and sent the following to the chair of that group: 

As you know, I was the first and for a long time only faculty member of SALT and I completely support the work we do. I helped design the SALT shaker and I made SALT central to the new program development process. While I know that staff members of SALT often do not feel that faculty consult with them enough or early enough, and I don’t think I can change anyone’s mind on that, what is true is that as soon as the graduate faculty have any clear sense of something new coming around the pike I have brought it directly to SALT, and I will continue to do this. (And some staff will continue to feel that’s just not soon enough. Oh well.) 

Graduate Program Council

I have been a member since 1993 of the governing body that has had curricular and policy responsibility for first the Master of Arts Program, currently the M.A. and Ph.D. Program, and which will eventually have oversight for all new graduate programs and degrees. Looking at the history of the work of this group over the past nearly 20 years, it is impressive how much positive change has come about, and how successful the group has been at sustaining a culture of engagement and collaboration, trust and clarity, as well as progress and improvement. I don’t take this lightly and I am honored to be able to facilitate this group in our work.

I also believe that I have been blessed with an awesome team. Almost without fail the individuals who have come to work and teach in the graduate programs have had an attitude that engenders and sustains this collaborative trusting culture. This is not to say that we have not had our dissenters and obstructionists, just that there has not been the proper environment within the GPC for them to thrive so they always end up going away.

I have often referred to my job as being one of championing and coordinating the work of the graduate faculty. I believe that I have some very good instinctual leadership skills that have led me to this position over my career. I also think it is important to note that my skills as a facilitator are not by chance. Before I served as the steering director for a seminary in Los Angeles in 1990 I took an in-depth course in facilitation by consensus. In my role as the steering director I learned to facilitate fifty residents of the seminary in decision making on everything from policy to laundry detergent choice. I came to Prescott College with a strong commitment to and good experience in leading, decision making by consensus.

In my years here at the college I have closely observed others in their facilitation roles and have modeled my own style after what I have appreciated most in others; and it goes without saying, I have avoided those things that I find most ineffective in facilitation styles. I have been blessed to have some exceptional role models and I can honestly say that I have learned both what to do and what to avoid from all of them. I am very excited to now have the opportunity to learn from Kristin Woolever because I see her prior professional path as well as her values as being very similar to my own. (Needless to say, I do not in any way aspire to be at an administrative level higher than oversight of the graduate faculty.) I am delighted that Kristin has an interest in improving the academic governance at the College and while I am please to be part of that conversation, I will also say that I am biased in that I see the governance style of the GPC as a model of success at Prescott College.

Faculty Assembly

I was very happy when the decision was made to create a college wide faculty governance system at Prescott College and am honored to be part of the Faculty Assembly Planning Group.  

That said, I have found the process of trying to figure out how and what we govern, without a clear system for how and what we govern, to be a bit challenging. I believe that the entire group has had wonderful intentions and has worked well together to navigate that. And I also believe the greatest strengths and the biggest weaknesses of the varying approaches to academic governance that are used at Prescott College have been observable throughout our short time together.

Let me say once more that I am delighted that Kristin has an interest in improving the academic governance at the College, and while observing my own move from the GPC to the Faculty Assembly my ideas about how our system can be improved have continued to develop.

Strategic Planning 2020 -- Governance

Finally. A chance to examine academic governance at Prescott College and design something from the ground up that will serve us well.

You saw it coming, right? My reflections above on the GPC and the Faculty Assembly told you I have hope for change, right? I am very honored to have been chosen to participate on and chair the new working group to explore governance at Prescott College. I am happy to be part of such an excellent group of Prescott College faculty, administrators, staff, students, and alum who are all committed to learning all we can about the best practices of institutional and academic governance and making our recommendations to our community for what we see as our next best steps.

I don’t know what we will recommend. I have some ideas that I bring to the conversation—things I have shared here with you. But they are simply ideas to place on the table with all of the other ideas. Perhaps at no other time will my ability to balance my leadership/leading efforts with my listening skills be more important.

But the bottom line is that I trust this excellent group to explore all of the best of what we do at Prescott College and recommend ways we can optimize that—things such as shared governance, transparency, inclusion, trust, communication, etc. And I trust us to meticulously critique those things that have not served us well, such as governing cultures that tend toward resistance and even obstruction, or our tendency to have a group work on a project and make a recommendation that then gets vetoed by an individual or administrative group. And finally I expect us to painstakingly examine governance models, ideals, and practices outside of Prescott College to see what we have missed over the years and bring some fresh and effective ideas to our table.

I don’t know what we will find or what we will recommend, but I trust the process and look forward to having a functional academic governance structure at Prescott College in the near future.